“Better a grave in Colombia than a cage in the USA”: Why did Pablo Escobar blow up a plane over Bogota? In 1989, a Boeing 727 was blown up on the orders of drug lord Pablo Escobar 27.11.2024, 08:00

I thought the transformer exploded

Bogota – Cali is a very short and scenic route if you fly during the day. The plane covers 300 kilometers over the mountains in less than an hour, and frequent flights are required between the capital and the third largest city. That’s why locals call such a trip “running”.

On the morning of November 27, 1989, Boeing 727-21 Flight 203 set off on another of these flights, carrying 101 passengers and six crew members. He only managed to fly to the outskirts of the capital and, while climbing, crashed into the foothills six minutes after takeoff. Eyewitnesses of the disaster unanimously said that flames appeared from the right side of the plane before it crashed, and a few seconds later it broke apart in the air, scattering the wreckage for five kilometers.

“I heard explosions and thought there was something wrong with the transformers at the power plant, but I looked up and saw a plane explode in the air, bodies and luggage starting to fall.” reported local resident Mario Vasquez.

That same morning, an unidentified man called Radio Caracol and said that the ship had been blown up by the Medellin cocaine cartel.

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At the crash site of a Boeing 727 near Bogota, Colombia, November 28, 1989

Carlos González/AP

Colombia is free from traditional problems and international conflicts such as Islamic or red terrorism in Europe and North America. His scourge is much more unpleasant – drugs and those who sell them. It was claimed that five police informants were on board who “handed over” the location of the cartel leader’s secret hideout to the authorities. To take revenge on them, he ordered the plane to be blown up.

In general, this sounded reasonable, since both the Medellin cartel and their counterparts in the Cali cartel had long become the “night force” in their respective areas and were actively at odds with the police and each other, so explosions and murders regularly occurred in the area. country. Due to the extreme poverty of Colombians, it was easy for criminals to recruit fighters: suffice it to say that the police reported the arrest of 120 looters at the scene of the crash, and these were the only ones caught.

But the anonymous caller was probably wrong. The cartel of the city of Cali can be suspected of crime – also extremely brutal, against the background of which the famous Russian Tambov or Uralmashevskaya organized crime groups look like knightly orders. For example, they became famous for carrying out a systematic genocide of the poor and homeless in their hometown with the slogan “pure Kali, beautiful Kali.” But both the local police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) knew that such large-scale and disproportionate actions were not for them. This was the signature handwriting of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellins. However, the goal was most likely not to execute informants.

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At the crash site of a Boeing 727 near Bogota, Colombia, November 28, 1989

Carlos González/AP

“You took the wrong one”

Five years later, a court in Brooklyn (New York) sentenced the organizer of this explosion, 29-year-old Dandeni Camira, to life imprisonment. It should come as no surprise that the trial took place in the United States: Almost all Colombian cocaine is shipped to North America, and so the cartels’ number one enemy is the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), not the corrupt local police. . The specific reason for the trial in the United States was the death of two American citizens on the ship.

Camira was the group’s regular hitman. Although his father worked in the police, he began his criminal career at the age of 12 on the streets of his hometown Medellin. Before it exploded, it killed more than two hundred people, including at least 40 police officers. Escobar paid the price for the elimination of these people, one by one, in the late 1980s. Everyone in uniform will receive $4000. Another of his victims was Luis Galan, president of the local liberal party, who was a presidential candidate in the 1990 elections and was shot dead in the summer of 1989. He declared himself an enemy of the cartels and vowed to eliminate them once he came to power, and Escobar decided to believe him.

According to investigators, Camira also organized the explosion of the plane. He denied this and the fact that he was a murderer nicknamed Fatty (La Quica). He allegedly never saw the witnesses who came to the trial, and his trial itself was the biggest tragedy.

“When I first went to prison [за кражу] I had a three-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. I will never see them. Now they are young. “I would give my life for freedom,” he complained.

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Dandeni Muñoz Mosque

noticias.uol.com.br

There is no doubt that Camira is a ruthless killer; all residents of his hometown recognized him in this role. But there were real doubts that it was he who organized the explosion. According to former FBI bomb expert Fred Whitehurst, US authorities were happy to have Escobar’s henchman on their soil and decided to pin the case on him. “He was a world-famous murderer. So how do you get it back on the street? “They had to come up with a damn excuse,” Whitehurst explained.

We would rather die in our homeland

By the early 1990s, the problem of the Medellin cartel had become so severe that the United States did not hesitate to use illegal methods – for example, individuals associated with American intelligence trained militants of rival cartels who eventually killed Escobar in 1993. It cannot be ignored that Camira was also convicted on false charges; At least Colombian officials stick to this version. In the end, the witnesses at the trial also adhered to a strange version of the execution of informants, without naming specific names.

local journalists to thinkIn fact, it was claimed that the plane blew up because it was flying over Colombian Ministry of Justice Advisor Gerardo Arellano, the person who organized the extradition of criminals to the United States. The slogan of the cartels in those years was “We prefer the grave in Colombia to the cage in the USA”, and therefore they hated those who tried to surrender themselves to this cage many times more than other law enforcement agencies. There was a clear reason for this hatred and slogan: it is very easy to escape from a Colombian prison to take bribes or, as Camira did, who was convicted of Galan’s murder. But we had to sit honestly in America.

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Pablo Escobar, 1976

Colombian National Police

Also on board was another liberal presidential candidate, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. His campaign promise was the same as Galan’s, but he got lucky and canceled the trip at the last minute. Gaviria won the elections and the drug cartels under his rule had a really hard time. It has not yet been possible to completely eliminate them, but Colombia is no longer considered a major criminal “raspberry”.

The only thing experts have no doubt about is exactly how the plane exploded. They did this by deceiving the group’s rank-and-file militant, Albert Prieto. Prieto, who was not yet 18 at the time, was supposed to place a voice recorder under the seats to eavesdrop on the conversation between two people, supposedly the same informants. The young man was not embarrassed by the fact that the weight of the device given to him was not less than a kilogram; perhaps he had never seen a real voice recorder.

Pressing the “record” button activated the bomb, turning Prieto into a suicide bomber who didn’t know what he was. But who exactly convinced the young man to become a terrorist is still a mystery.

This terrorist attack, along with the explosion a week later of a bus filled with dynamite in central Bogota near the headquarters of the DAS (the Colombian equivalent of the FBI), finally made it clear to Colombians and Americans that Escobar and his cartel had to do this. escape at all costs.