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receive extraordinarily harsh sentences, like the one given Carlos Lehder, a Colombian drugdealer who had been extradited to the United States in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 130 years. This was possible because a treaty signed during the presidency of Julio César Turbay allowed the extradition of Colombian nationals for the first time. After the murder of Lara Bonilla, President Belisario Betancur applied its provisions with a series of summary extraditions. The traffickers—terrifiedby the long, worldwide reach of the United States—realized that the safest place for them was Colombia, and they went underground, fugitives inside their own country. The great irony was that their only alternative was to place themselves under the protection of the state to save their own skins. And so they attempted—by persuasion and by force—to obtain that protection by engagingin indiscriminate, merciless terrorism and, at the same time, by offering to surrender to the authorities and bring home and invest their capital in Colombia, on the sole condition that they not be extradited. Theirs was an authentic shadow power with a brand name—the Extraditables—and a slogan typical of Escobar: “We prefer a grave in Colombia to a cell in the United States.”
    President Betancurkept up the war. His successor, VirgilioBarco, intensified it. This was the situation in 1989 when César Gaviria emerged as a presidential candidate following the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, whose campaign he had directed. In his own campaign, he defended extradition as an indispensable tool for strengthening the penal system, and announced an unprecedented strategy against the drug traffickers.It was a simple idea: Those who surrendered to the judges and confessed to some or all of their crimes could obtain non-extradition in return. But this idea, as formulated in the original decree, was not enough for the Extraditables. Through his lawyers, Escobar demanded that non-extradition be made unconditional, that confession and indictment not be obligatory, that the prison be invulnerableto attack, and that their families and followers be guaranteed protection. Holding terrorism in one hand and negotiation in the other, he began abducting journalists in order to twist the government’s arm and achieve his demands. In two months, eight had been kidnapped. The abduction of Maruja and Beatriz seemed to be one more in that ominous series.
    Villamizar thought this was the case as soonas he saw the bullet-riddled car. Later, in the crowd that invaded his house, he was struck by the absolute certainty that the lives of his wife and sister depended on what he could do to save them. Because this time, as never before, the war was being waged as an unavoidable personal challenge.
    Villamizar, in fact, was already a survivor. When he was a representative in the Chamber, he had achievedpassage of the National Narcotics Statute in 1985, a time when there was no ordinary legislation against drug trafficking but only the scattershot decrees of a state of siege. Later, Luis Carlos Galán had told him to stop passage of a bill introduced in the Chamber by parliamentarians friendly to Escobar, which would have removed legislative support for the extradition treaty then in effect.It was nearly his death sentence. On October 22, 1986, two assassins in sweatsuits who pretended to be working out across from his housefired submachine guns at him as he was getting into his car. His escape was miraculous. One assailant was killed by the police, and his accomplices arrested, then released a few years later. No one took responsibility for the attempt, but no one had any doubtas to who had ordered it.
    Persuaded by Galán himself to leave Colombia for a while, Villamizar was named ambassador to Indonesia. After he had been there for a year, the U.S. security forces in Singapore captured a Colombian assassin traveling to Jakarta. It was never proved that he had been