Hugo Martinez (16 October 1946-22 March 2020) was a colonel of the Colombian national police who served as the commander of Search Bloc during the hunt for Pablo Escobar. He took command of Search Bloc in 1992 after the assassination of Colonel Horacio Carrillo by the Medellin Cartel, and Martinez was known for his traditional and methodical ways. It would be under Martinez that Escobar was tracked down and killed on 2 December 1993, a success celebrated by many Colombians and people around the world.
Biography[]
An official picture of Martinez
Hugo Martinez was a veteran policeman who served on the police force for 26 years, and he spent three of those years fighting FARC in the jungles. He was methodical, favored procedure, and adhered to strict protocol, and he was seen as a reliable candidate for the leader of Search Bloc after the assassination of Colonel Horacio Carrillo by the Medellin Cartel in 1992. President Cesar Gaviria and United States ambassador Arthur Crosby agreed that Martinez was the right choice to lead the hunt for Pablo Escobar, but he had to be persuaded to accept the command.
Taking command of Search Bloc[]
After President Gaviria gave a speech to the 1992 graduates of the Colombian Police Academy, of which Martinez's son Hugo Martinez Jr. was a part, Gaviria asked Martinez to take command of Search Bloc. Martinez insisted that there was someone more up to the task than him, but Gaviria told him that his son happily joined Search Bloc along with other talented policemen, and he asked Martinez to consider the offer. Martinez was pressured into accepting the command, and he became the leader of the hunt for Escobar. He decided to change the Search Bloc's tactics from bullet-to-bullet with Escobar's men to grid searches, having his men search the barrios and process anything of use before heading to the next neighborhood. The tactic was conventional and dated, but he felt that it would be useful for the hunt against Escobar.
For months, Martinez and his men were beaten to Escobar's sicarios by the Los Pepes vigilante death squad, which killed the sicarios before the Search Bloc policemen could capture them. Martinez and his men had a run-in with Los Pepes in late 1992 when Carlos Castano Gil and a few of his men tried to enter a cordoned-off area of Medellin as the Search Bloc attempted to capture Nelson Hernandez. Martinez's son was tricked by Castano, who took his gun and held him at gunpoint, and the situation was only defused when DEA agent Javier Pena convinced Castano to let him go. Castano and the Los Pepes paramilitary men were allowed to go through, and they would kill Hernandez's wife and father-in-law.
In 1993, Martinez and his men failed to kill Escobar during a raid on a staging base for the planned Medellin Cartel raid on the Cali Cartel base at Montecasino, and Escobar went into hiding for months. However, he would return to Medellin in December 1993, and Martinez Jr. tracked him down with radio technology. Martinez sent an operational team to raid the Los Olivos neighborhood where Escobar was hiding, and Escobar was killed in the ensuing shootout with the police. Martinez was hailed as a hero, as he had finally put an end to the terrifying Escobar. In 1995, he also led the raid that arrested Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, but Rodriguez's son Nicolas Rodriguez discovered papers in Guillermo Pallomari's office that claimed that Martinez had accepted money from the Cali Cartel, discrediting him. Martinez was forced to turn in his gun and badge as a result of the scandal, a scheme created by the Rodriguez brothers to secure Gilberto's release.