predecessors had been gunned down in broad daylight, Monica de Greiff was adamantine. “I am determined that the integrity of our justice system survives this crisis.”^[45] The New York Times lauded “her competence and cool courage,”^[46] and Drug Czar William Bennett put it more eloquently: “Grace under pressure, poise under fire.” Then de Grieff got a phone call from the Extraditables.  They proved to be even more eloquent: “Remember, you are a mother.  We can kill your son.” As her veins turned to ice, she was given a detailed description of the boy’s minute-by-minute movements for the previous day.^[47]  With a glance at her 3-year-old, she decided she’d had enough. On September 21 she resigned her post, requested asylum in the U.S., and vanished with her family into a phalanx of Federal agents.^[48]  Her antagonists celebrated by bombing the Bogota offices of all nine Colombian political parties.^[49]

De Greiff’s resignation was the first resounding crack in Colombian resolve.  And the average citizen, hunkered down behind bolted doors, understood Monica’s fear all too clearly.  Why should Colombia be forced to pay this horrible price, when it was the insatiable demand of the gringos that fueled this trade?  One surviving presidential candidate—still carrying three bullets in his body from an earlier hit—was openly calling for dialogue with the traffickers.^[50]  Said Senator Ernesto Samper, “Let’s not turn Colombia into the Vietnam of the war on drugs.”^[51]

At 7:30 on the morning of December 6, with the streets in downtown Bogota full of people heading for work, a truck loaded with half a ton of dynamite blew the front off the secret police headquarters and heavily damaged two square miles of the city.  The concussion shattered windows across from the U.S. Embassy seven miles away. Sixty people were killed outright and nearly a thousand wounded. President Barco, who now rarely ventured outside the walls of his Spanish colonial palace, urged his troops doggedly onward.  “We will not allow ourselves to fall to the bloody tyranny of the narco-terrorists.”  His constituents, on the other hand, were not so sure.  By now Escobar had made