In Colombia, kidnapping was a business strategy. A trafficker owed money might kidnap the child or wife of his debtor. Sometimes family members or business associates were deposited with creditors as collateral. If a deal fell through, depending upon the rationality of the creditor, more time might be allowed for the transaction to be concluded and the collateral released, or the collateral might be killed to set an example to other debtors.
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Kidnappers targeted a future founder of the Medellín Cartel, Carlos Lehder. With millions to spend, Lehder decided to invest in his Colombian hometown, Armenia, population 180,000- where he was remembered as a lively young person willing to share his lunch with fellow high-school students. At first, he donated - by way of a German with blonde hair, who didn't speak any Spanish- a Piper Navajo plane to his community, but they didn't know what to do with it. Adorned with fancy jewellery, clothes, cars and friends, he swaggered around the town, opening businesses and making pronouncements. He triggered a bubble in real estate that tripled prices. He gathered a following of young fans and lovers, several of whom ended up pregnant. Hailing him as Don Carlos, teenagers copied his haircut: tousled with a centre parting. When asked about the source of his wealth, he replied, "I worked in restaurants in New York. Then I sold cars. Later I sold airplanes in the United States.
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Lehder should have known better than to travel without his neo-Nazi friends. In November 1981, he got into a chauffeur-driven car and set off for a ranch twenty miles away, towards Cali. After eight miles, he spotted a car in the middle of the road with its hood up, the driver examining the engine. The chauffeur stopped, left his gun on the front seat and both men got out.
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Two men with guns appeared, dragged the chauffeur away and deposited him at the side of the road. They tied Lehder's hands behind his back and threw him into the car. They dropped the hood and sped off.
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Due to his knowledge of karate, Lehder convinced himself that he could escape. He wriggled his bound hands free, opened the door and dived out. After rolling down a grassy slope, he ended up in a park. While he sprinted away, bullets whizzed by him. Hit in the back, he fell, but managed to spring up again and run so far that the kidnappers quit.
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Citizens were outraged by the assault on the German-Colombian investor. A hunt proceded for the kidnappers. For two weeks, Lehder was convalescing in a clinic, with his entourage all over the place, hanging onto every update on his health.
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His hit men tracked the kidnappers down to the April 19 Movement or the M-19, a 2,500-member guerrilla army engaged in a war with the Colombian army in the Valley of Cauca. Just a year earlier, Lehder had boasted to Jung about his alliance with these fellow revolutionaries.
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In the 1980s, the M-19 was a popular political movement, but Narcos portrayed them as a clownish urban cell willing to do anything for Pablo. Sometimes the M-19 worked with the traffickers, other times they kidnapped them, depending upon whatever was more profitable. After all, the traffickers were wealthy and they couldn't run to the police. They were supposed to be easy targets.
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On November 12, 1981, the M-19 snatched Martha Ochoa, the Ochoa brothers' youngest sister, from the campus of the University of Antioquia in Medellín, and demanded millions of dollars from the Ochoas. In response, Jorge Ochoa- seconded by Pablo - hosted a meeting, where he proposed the formation of an army, Muerta a Secuestradores, MAS, translated as Death to Kidnappers. Recovering from his gunshot wound, Lehder also played a key role in the meeting.
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Also present was another co-founder of the Medellín Cartel, Rodríguez Gacha a.K.a the Mexican because of his love of mariachi music and all things Mexican. Due to his affection for wearing straw fedoras, his other name was Big Hat. Short stubby Gacha named his ranches after Mexican cities. He was born in a small town, Pacho, north of Bogotá, to a poor family of pig farmers. As a young man, he developed a lethal reputation as a hired killer. One of his early alliances was with a cocaine queen who had earned her status by murdering her competition. He rose up in the emerald business, which had an even more violent reputation than cocaine. Killing anyone who got in his way, Gacha pioneered trafficking routes through Mexico and into the US.
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Gacha entered Narcos with a dramatic scene, whereby he gate-crashed a party and shot all of the guests, including one of his business partners. Although Gacha had sanctioned such a hit, he wasn't present when it had happened in 1989, a decade after its portrayal in Narcos. The hit had occurred in the mansion of Gacha's associate, Gilberto Molina, killing eighteen.
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Two hundred and twenty-three business-men based all over Colombia attended the meeting and approved Death to Kidnappers. They included traffickers, smugglers and pilots. Each donated two million pesos and ten hit men.
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After the MAS meeting and the drafting of a communiqué, the participants attended a picnic at a ranch outside of Medellín, where they discovered that they had lots in common. Never before had they gathered like this to form public policy.
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The relationships cemented that day gave birth to the Medellín Cartel, whose leaders were Pablo Escobar, the Ochoa brothers, Carlos Lehder and Gacha. The term Medellín Cartel came from American prosecutors looking to simplify their cases and obtain longer sentences. A Medellín lawyer, Gustavo Salazar, said that the cartels never existed. They were collections of traffickers who collaborated sometimes.
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Copies of the MAS communiqué were loaded onto a plane, which flew towards a Cali soccer stadium on a Sunday afternoon, just prior to a match between Medellin and Cali. After the referee blew the starting whistle, leaflets descended from the sky onto the pitch. They described a general assembly, whose members would no longer tolerate kidnapping by guerrillas seeking to finance revolutions "through the sacrifices of people, who, like ourselves, have brought progress and employment to the country… The basic objective will be the public and immediate execution of all those involved in kidnappings, beginning from the date of this communiqué."
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