of outrage from Washington, Gaviria made the traffickers an offer they couldn’t refuse: turn yourselves in and you’ll be tried in Colombia—not the United States.  This move effectively terminated the extradition treaty.

The Bush administration was stunned.  In Colombia they were dancing in the streets. After a decade of rush-hour explosions and mind-numbing horror, they had had enough. The three Ochoa brothers—Escobar’s surviving partners in Medellin & Compania—surrendered almost immediately, but Escobar held out for a better deal, bullying the government for another six months. Once again, the Gaviria administration caved in.  They were so desperate to get El Patron behind bars they simply agreed to all his demands. When he surrendered on June 19, 1991, he was flown to Envigado, south of Medellin, where a special prison had been built to his specifications. After the press got a look at this “jail,” they realized it was not Escobar who had surrendered, but the government. Surrounded by barbed wire, high voltage, and military patrols at the end of a winding mountain road, the comfortable ranchita above the Rio Cauca was clearly designed not to keep Escobar in but to keep his enemies out. Don Pablo had been allowed to surrender with his entourage intact, and they proceeded to set up shop here with the full protection of the Colombian Government. His cell was a three-room suite with an office larger than the warden’s.  There was a soccer field, a disco, and a bar where the guards served drinks to the hit men and their prostitutes at weekly parties. The media dubbed it “Club Medellin.”^[55]

The growing fury in the U.S. was echoed in Europe and in Colombia as well.  The headline in El Espectador said it all: “terror won.”^[56] The government’s creeping embarrassment was amplified by Escobar’s outrageous behaviour in prison. He and his pals, it turned out, had not abandoned the drug trade. They had simply relocated their operation to this mountain redoubt.  When word got out that Don Pablo had some former employees rounded up and brought to the prison so they could be