Pablo Escobar Gaviria and the Medellín Cartel saw El Espectador as their No. 1 enemy. Cano had taken a strong stance against drugs and was a staunch supporter of the extradition of Colombian traffickers. He felt that Colombian institutions were not strong enough to try and convict powerful drug lords.

Escobar and his accomplices held victory parties in Medellín, home to the cartel, and Leticia, a city on the Colombia-Ecuador border. Leticia was a major thoroughfare for coca paste from Peru and Bolivia.

The murder investigation took nine years. Escobar’s battery of lawyers managed to keep the case from being transfe rred to a special faceless justice system. This legal maneuve ring permitted Escobar access to the identities of the judges. Some judges were forced to take payoffs , and others were killed after they rejected payoffs. One judge went into exile; another had her father murdered when she ignored warnings to quit the investigation, and a third, a magistrate of Bogotá’s Superior Court , was assassinat-ed moments after signing an arrest warrant against Escobar.

For the newspaper, the murder was only the beginning of a treacherous campaign by Escobar and his men. Because the daily continued its provocative and incisive reporting on drug traffickers, death threats against its reporters and chief editors continued. Cano’s two sons, Juan Guillermo and Fernando, who shared the newspaper’s top editorial positions, received a number of threats and left the country for extended periods during the three years following the murder. Four other reporters also were forced to leave the country, after receiving death threats. Distribution of the newspaper in Medellín and other areas was sabotaged. And the Medellín office was closed down after the circulation director and office manager were killed. Between 1989 and 1990, the newspaper was delive red in Medellín under military escort . Circulation in that city plummeted as distributors were warned by Escobar’s men against carrying the newspaper. The worst blows came in 1989 when Héctor Giraldo Galvez, the Cano family lawyer who was overseeing the Guillermo Cano mu rder investigation , was murdered. That same year, Escobar delivered what he thought was the last shot against the newspaper — he bombed its installations.

The judicial proceedings, which began in 1991, finally concluded in a common court on August 22, 1995. Four people were convicted of aggravated homicide. Three were sentenced to jail terms. The fourth accused accomplice, Luis Carlos Molina Yepes, a shadowy businessman and former confident of Escobar who handled the bank account used to pay Cano's killers, remained at large until his capture on February 18, 1997. Two drug traffickers who were the leading intellectual authors – Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar – were killed in 1989 and 1993, respectively. Others like Evaristo Porrás are serving a prison sentence for illicit enrichment.

The 1995 court decision was appealed by the defense. And on July 30, 1996, in a surprise decision, Bogotá's Superior Tribunal revoked the sentences and declared that the three accused were innocent. The court upheld the conviction against Molina Yepes.

THE CRIME

The murder of Guillermo Cano came as Escobar’s anger at the Colombian establishment was ready to explode. By 1986, "The Godfather," as Cano derisively called the drug kingpin in his columns, had amassed a fortune and had become the most powerful drug trafficker in the world. His Medellín Cartel was responsible for 70 percent of all cocaine imported by the United States and Europe; his earnings were staggering. He had developed a cult following in Medellín, where he built homes and soccer fields for poor people. But his rule was threatened by the extradition treaty Colombia had with the United States.

Escobar saw public opinion as an important tool to end the treaty. Thus, he spent large sums of money to portray the treaty as a violation of Colombia’s national sover-eignty. As the cartel continued a campaign to eliminate the extradition treaty, Cano delivered blows that countered the traffickers’ position. Week after week, his columns criticized those who wanted to do away with the treaty. His views were supported with articles by El Espectador’s investigative reporters, showing how vulnerable Colombia’s judicial system was to pressure from the traffickers.

Some colleagues saw Cano as obsessed with the drug trade. But in hindsight his reporters and other journalists now agree that he was a prophet who saw the beginning of an encroaching drug trade and the danger it posed for Colombian democracy. "He had an amazing sense of what is news," says Luis de Castro, El Espectador’s judicial editor, who worked with Cano for several years. Reporters still remember his jokes and his photographic memory.

LUIS GABRIEL CANO

Guillermo’s older brother who took the helm of the paper after his death, says his brother never talked about the threats. "Guillermo kept up his fight against drug traffickers no matter what," he says.

Luis Gabriel’s white hair and calm demeanor remind staff members of their slain boss. "Guillermo felt if we didn’t stop them, the drug gangs would want to run the government, which is what we are facing now," he said in his spacious office. That office, semi-destroyed during the 1989 bombing, reflects much of the history of the newspaper, which was first published in 1887.

Cano began his war against drug gangs in the early 1980s. His first journalistic coup against Escobar’s reign was a 1983 story describing the drug lord’s first drug-related arrest. Then an unknown car thief, Escobar was detained in 1976 for concealing cocaine in the tires of a stolen car. This incident is remembered fondly by the newspaper staff as an illustration of their old boss’ shrewdness and journalistic instinct. Cano remembered Escobar’s face when he saw the drug lord at the 1983 congressional installation ceremonies. "I’ve seen that face somewhere," he told one of his editors. He personally dug around the newspaper’s library looking for the picture. He reprinted the story and picture on El Espectador’s front page. It cut short Escobar’s ambition to enter congress and turned Cano into one of his worst enemies.

By 1986, El Espectador had taken the lead among Colombian media in the attacks against the drug cartels. The newspaper dissected, exposed and investigated drug trafficking and its tentacles into Colombia’s society. Cano, 61, lashed out daily against the drug kingpins in the editorial and news pages and in his column called "Libreta de Apuntes" (or notebook). He won Colombia’s 1986 National Journalism Award with his columns against drug trafficking and in favor of the extradition treaty. On Dec. 16, 1986, he was interviewed by an official of the Circle of Journalists of Bogotá on the dangers of journalism. "The problem with our business is that one never knows when one won’t return home one night," he said.

The next day — Wednesday, Dec. 17, 1986 — Cano was killed.

That day, Cano left the newspaper just after 7 p.m. He got into his red Subaru station wagon, parked in the newspaper lot. As he pulled onto Avenida del Espectador, a main thorough fare in front of the newspaper offices, the pre-Christmas traffic was oppressive. Smoke-spewing diesel buses were bumper to bumper with passenger cars. Cano entered the avenue going south, and moved on to the left lane, where he was to make a U-turn onto the other lane going north. As Cano’s car slowed down to turn, one of two young men waiting in a motorcycle illegally parked on the highway’s median, sidled up on foot to the idling Subaru. As he approached, the young man opened a black case, pulling out a small machine gun, a MAC-10, police said later. It was the Medellín Cartel hit man’s favorite weapon. He pumped eight shots into Cano’s chest. Trying to escape, a mortally wounded Cano pressed the accelerator, the car darting directly across traffic, toward a light post where he crashed. Witnesses told police that the thugs escaped in a motorcycle with a distinctive license plate: FAX 84.

Nobody doubted Cano’s death had been ordered by drug traffickers. The list of dead was already long: More than 50 judges, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Supreme Court Magistrate Hernando Baquero Borda and Anti-Narcotics Police Chief Jaime Ramírez Gómez. All those victims had been government officials who made key judicial decision against the Medellín Cartel on extradition and legal cases.

Drug traffickers also had killed several provincial reporters for writing specific stories about drug operations. But Cano’s murder opened a much larger wound in Colombia’s democracy. His murder was a chilling message for Colombian society:Attack us, and we will retaliate. It would be the prelude to the assassinations of three presidential candidates and other journalists targeted by the Medellín Cartel.

The day after the killing, a funeral procession led by President Virgilio Barco, and attended by thousands of handkerchief - waving Colombians, accompanied Cano’s body to the Jardines del Recuerdo cemetery, on the outskirts of Bogotá. The Circle of Journalists of Bogotá asked the news media not to publish or transmit that day, the first time a news blackout was held in memory of a murdered journalist. His death would be front-page news in every Colombian daily as well as leading foreign newspapers .

Responding to the murder, President Barco issued a "state of siege." He also re-introduced a law requiring a special permit for motorcycle owners and banning the sale of powerful motorcycles. It was a tacit acceptance that the motorcycle had become a deadly tool used by drug traffickers to murder Colombians.

While most of Colombia was in mourning, Cano’s murder brought euphoria to Medellín, the cartel’s unofficial center. Police reported celebrations in the comunas , or poor neighborhoods, where the cartel’s hit men lived. The big bosses were also in a good mood. Informants later told police the gathering in Escobar’s home in the luxurious El Monaco building, was to celebrate the Cano murder and was attended by top Medellín Cartel members. Another party was held in Leticia, a border city about 400 miles south of Bogotá , where Evaristo Porrás and his cronies we re also in a festive mood. Porrás reigned over the principal port of entry for cocaine smuggling from Peru and Bolivia .

Following the assassination of Cano and other violence in 1986, Colombians seemed to want to forget there was an encroaching drug trade. Thus, 1987 and 1988 were difficult years for El Espectador, which continued a head-on confrontation with the drugtraffickers. The newspaper’s investigative unit remained active, but death threats against its employees multiplied. In the three years following Cano’s murder, four reporters were forced into exile. Advertising dropped as traffickers frightened companies against putting ads in the paper.

The destabilizing campaign culminated in the 1989 bombing of the newspaper offices. The 300 pounds of dynamite went off early Saturday morning on Sept. 3, 1989. It was shortly after 6:30 a.m. and before the Saturday staff arrived. The blast tore off the building’s roof, destroyed the main entrance and seriously damaged the production facilities. The bomb had been concealed in a truck parked minutes earlier a few feet from the newspaper’s front entrance. That same day, six armed men entered a exclusive, private island in the Rosariorea of Cartagena and burned down the Cano family summer home.

THE INVESTIGATION

The war launched by the Medellín Cartel and Escobar against Colombia loomed large over the Cano murder investigation. Eventually investigators found out that the crime had been ordered by Escobar; Porrás, the drug lord who ruled over Leticia, and Rodríguez Gacha, also a leader in the Medellín Cartel. It was carried out by Los Priscos, Escobar’s favorite gang of killers and implicated in every major murder and bombing ordered by Escobar between 1984 and 1990. The gang was dismantled in 1990.

The material authors eventually charged with the crime were María Ofelia Saldarriaga, the mother of the hit man; Pablo Enrique Zamora, the driver of the motorcycle; Castor Emilio Montoya Pelaez, the middleman who hired the killers; Carlos Martínez, who sold the motorcycle; Raul Mejía and Molina Yepes. An investigation showed later that Raul Mejía was a deceased man whose name had been used illegally by the killers. All the others except Molina Yepes and Montoya served sentences in Medellín and Bogotá Although Colombian authorities said they could not find Molina Yepes, several sources suspected he had bribed his way through the judicial system, until he was finally captured by the police on February 18, 1997 in a Bogotá restaurant. Montoya was never jailed because the authorities could not locate him within the legal time frame.

Escobar held great influence over the investigation because Cano was assassinated two years before Colombia instituted the faceless justice system, which protected the identities of judges, witnesses and court investigators. When the government tried to transfer the Cano investigation to that system, Escobar used his team of expensive lawyers to keep it in the usual justice system. Immediately after the murder, the investigation was sent to Criminal Instruction Tribunal No. 60, where an unidentified judge began receiving death threats almost immediately. Frightened, he asked superiors to transfer the case away from his courtroom. The case then was moved to Tribunal No. 71, where Judge Andres Enrique Montañez courageously began the investigation.

Meanwhile, police in Medellín and Bogotá began to receive a barrage of tips and new leads. Six months after the murder, in June 1987, they received a lead that began to unravel the murder mystery: A tip to search the Medellín home of Edison Harvey Hill Muñoz, a thug identified as a trainer for cartel hit men. When police arrive at Hill Muñoz’s house, a shootout broke out. Hill Muñoz was killed by police. A search led police to the motorcycle with the license plate FAX84.

In the Colombian underworld, the cops were rumored to be getting close to Cano killers. As police increased the heat, leaders of the murder gang decided to try to erase some footprints. The first order of business was to kill Alvaro García Saldarriaga , the 23-year-old hit man, whom witnesses had identified to police.

García Saldarriaga was found dead by a riverbank on May 25, 1987. His body was claimed by his mother María Ofelia, an illiterate woman in her 50s.

Within six months the judge and investigators from the Department of Administrative Security (DAS) determined that the Cano murder was part of a conspiracy carried out by Escobar and his henchmen. Judge Montañez issued a detention order against Escobar; Porrás; Gilberto Ignacio Rodríguez, a former governor of Amazona Province; his girlfriend, Dulcinea Cormo Galindo, who lived in Leticia; a doctor named Héctor Villegas, and several thugs from Los Priscos criminal gang.

But immediately after the ruling, Judge Montañez decided to take an extensive vacation. The case was reassigned temporarily to Judge Eduardo Triana.

Dulcinea Cormo, Villegas and Porrás were dropped from the investigation for lack of evidence. The DAS determined that Luis Eduardo Osorio Guizado, alias "La Guagua," or muskrat, was the hit team’s leader.

In late July police grabbed a surprise suspect. María Ofelia Saldarriaga, the mother of the slain hit man, was identified as an accomplice. On a hunch, police had placed a tap on her telephone after learning that she had recently deposited $15,000 (based on 1986 exchange rates) in her bank account. One night she called Pablo Enrique Zamora Rodríguez, alias El Rolo, and the man who carried out the murder with her son. She told him to dispose of the motorcycle.

THE CARTEL CONTINUED its vicious campaign against El Espectador. On April 12, 1987, thugs blew up a statue of Cano, recently erected in a Medellín park. Cartel men warned Medellín establishments to stop dis-tributing the newspaper, or they would be attacked.

The legal proceedings continued until August 1987 when terror reached the court system. On Aug. 1, police engaged in a surprise shootout two blocks from the home of the judge in charge of the Cano case. Killed in the encounter was José Roberto Frisco Lopera, the most feared Los Priscos gang member. In a subsequent raid of his downtown hotel room, Nueva Granada, police discovered grenades, machine guns and maps of the area where Judge Triana lived. The intimidation campaign also was directed at workers in the judge’s chambers. Callers offered those workers US$20,000 for information, or "You will be sorry." On Aug. 2, Judge Triana bravely issued an arrest warrant for Saldarriaga and El Rolo, extending the period of incarceration. But on Aug. 5, overwhelmed by threats, he fled for Europe.

By Aug. 15, the case was back to Judge Montañez, who had returned to Colombia. He rejected it, arguing that it had fallen out of his jurisdiction and sent it to the Superior Court. Unknown to the authorities, cartel emissaries already had bought off Judge Montañez , as subsequent rulings showed. The Superior Court rejected the case and ordered him to take the case back. He refused.

The case was now without a permanent tribunal. Investigations continued under various alternate judges. Ruben Dario Mejía and Alejandro Naranjo Rubian, two of Escobar’s best-known defense lawyers, filed legal briefs to gain the release of Saldarriaga and El Rolo.

Eventually, Judge Montañez was forced to take the case back. In December 1987, days before the one-year anniversary of the murder, the judge indicted El Rolo, María Ofelia Saldarriaga and various members of Los Priscos. He also identified Carlos Martínez Hernández, Antonio Ochoa and Raul Mejía as the signatories on the bank accounts used to pay the killers.

But Judge Montañez also threw out all charges against the intellectual authors: Escobar, Porrás and Rodríguez Gacha.

Authorities still were not suspicious of the judge’s actions. Then in mid-December, he ruled on another headline-grabbing case. Ignoring special rules, he freed drug trafficker Jorge Luis Ochoa, who was serving a 36-month sentence for contraband. Ochoa had been extradited from Spain to Colombia in a suspicious legal maneuver after the United States asked for his extradition. He was a suspect in drug smuggling operations through Nicaragua and a possible suspect in the 1986 murder of Barry Seal, an American informant killed by drug traffickers in Louisiana. The Colombian government was under pressure to keep Ochoa in jail, and any legal decision first had to be cleared by the national prison warden. Montañez ignored all the warnings on the case. After his decision he was fired, and police issued an arrest warrant against him. Cartel payments were discovered in his bank accounts. An administrative investigation of the judge also was started. But he was never arrested, and the investigation was interrupted, without explanation, shortly after it began.

The case was transferred a month later to Judge Consuelo Sánchez Durán, head of Investigative Tribunal No. 87. She immediately issued an arrest warrant against Molina Yepes, a businessman and well-known money launderer. Molina Yepes was using his Medellín delicatessens and money exchange offices as business fronts for Pablo Escobar. The DAS took Molina Yepes to a temporary detention center in Medellín for questioning.

The court learned, from defendant Carlos Martínez Hernández, how Molina Yepes managed the money accounts used to pay for murders. For instance, to open one account, Martínez Hernández deposited US$1 million in the Medellín branch of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The name on the account was Guillermo Martínez, and it included a second authorized signator, one Raul Mejía. Investigators later learned that both Martínez and Mejía were the names of two men now dead, whose identities were used by Molina Yepes to sidetrack investigations. María Ofelia Saldarriaga’s check came from this account.

The outrageous turn of events continued. While under temporary detention at DAS headquarters, Molina Yepes was allowed to go unaccompanied to buy cigarettes and he escaped. The director from Medellín’s DAS office was suspended and investigated following the escape. But a year later the authorities reinstated him to his former position. No charges were ever filed.

The Cano investigation was among several fraying the Colombian legal system. More than 200 judges and court employees were killed, several thousand were threatened, and the cartel penetrated the court system to its core. The Colombian government was beginning to consider a new system, introducing methods that protected its judicial workers. More members of the judicial branch were killed before a new system emerged.

Between March and August 1988, Judge Consuelo Sanchez Duran rebuilt the legal case against Cano’s intellectual murderers: Escobar, Rodríguez Gacha, Porrás and Molina Yepes. Her investigation of Los Priscos gang elicited further incriminating evidence against the intellectual authors. Identifying the gang as the Medellín Cartel’s most important group of enforcers, she concluded they were also responsible for the 1984 murder of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, and the 1985 murder of Col. Jaime Ramírez, director of the anti-narcotics police.

It was at this time that the cartel’s armed group, The Extraditables, began to issue public messages every time a car bomb or assassination was to occur. It also targeted government officials who attempted to curb drug trafficking activities. Judge Sanchez Duran received this warning: "You will be sorry if you implicate Pablo Escobar in the Guillermo Cano murder." And then the slogan: "We prefer a tomb in Colombia to a prison in the United States." Judge Sanchez Duran ignored the warning, issuing an order to begin sentencing procedures against Escobar and others. The trial was to begin on the second anniversary of the Cano assassination , Dec. 17, 1988.

Meanwhile, Colombian President Barco introduced a "state of emergency," and instituted "la justicia de orden público," or "faceless justice" system, ending all trials by jury and keeping confidential the identities of investigators, judges and prosecutors of drug and terrorism cases.

The Cano case, however, remained under the regular justice system. Judge Sanchez Duran was set to start the Escobar trial, but a supposed illness of a defense lawyer forced the postponement of the trial until January 1989.

The events of 1989 eclipsed any legal progress. Escobar and The Extraditables began a massive campaign of violence. Authorities discovered a working relationship between anti-communist paramilitary groups and the Medellín cartel, including Israeli and British mercenaries who had trained the cartel hit men on explosives techniques. A wave of car bombs and assassinations would leave three presidential candidates and a thousand Colombians dead.

Escobar did not forget the Cano family. A heavy blow came in March, when cartel hit men assassinated Héctor Giraldo Galvez, the Cano family lawyer and a well-respected columnist. He was gunned down near his home in Bogotá’s upper-class neighborhood of Chico.

Judge Sanchez Duran tried to begin a trial by jury in May, but police announced that they had discovered cartel plans to terrorize the jury. The trial was postponed. The defense team asked the court to try Escobar and the other alleged intellectual authors separately from the hit men. Judge Sánchez Durán, refusing the request, referred the matter to the Superior Court.

On Aug. 16, Superior Court Magistrate Carlos Valencia endorsed Judge Duran’s decision to try all the defendants together. He signed the order and threw out all defense appeals. Shortly after he left for home. Cartel enforcers killed him as he waited for a bus in downtown Bogotá. Only one person knew he had signed the order; somehow, the system had been penetrated by the cartel.

THE NEXT DAY Escobar ordered the murder of Liberal Party presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan. He was shot Aug. 17 at a campaign rally. President Barco issued a massive anti-drug push and introduced a more stringent court system to protect the identities of judges. The decision was too late for the Cano case. In late 1989, the court combined the Cano case proceedings with that of Supreme Court Magistrate Hernando Baquero Borda, also killed by Escobar in June 1986. For more than a year, judicial proceedings on these two cases were interrupted, as Colombia plunged into a serious public-order crisis. An enraged Escobar had declared war against Colombia.

Finally, on Nov. 21, 1990, the court sought to restart the proceedings. Threats against the jury stopped the decision. The state prosecutor moved to transfer the case to the faceless judges. But Escobar’s defense team fought and won that motion. The case was transferred to Superior Tribunal No. 29.

For the next five years, progress on the case was held up by appeals and counter-appeals. In July 1991, Escobar surrendered, and the case was transferred to Medellín. Three months later, the case was returned to Bogotá, after newly appointed Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff decided to try all the Escobar cases in Bogotá. A year later, in 1992, Escobar escaped from prison. A fugitive for several months, he was finally tracked down by special teams of Colombian anti-narcotics police, aided by U.S. intelligence agents. He was killed as he attempted to escape.

In August 1995, the trial began again. All the intellectual authors, except Molina Yepes, were dead or serving long sentences for other crimes. On Oct. 6, 1995, the court declared María Ofelia Saldarriaga, Pablo Enrique Zamora, Luis Carlos Molina Yepes and Carlos Martínez Hernández guilty of conspiring to commit a crime. All were sentenced to 16 years and 8 months in prison.

A year later, on July 30, 1996, Bogotá's Superior Tribunal revoked the 1995 sentence and ruled that the convicted Saldarriaga, Zamora and Martínez were innocent. The sentence against Molina Yepes was upheld. The magistrates decided that Yepes should have been tried in the killing as a direct intellectual author.