Chapter 6 Summary

At dawn on Thursday, January 24, the body of Marina Montoya is discovered in a vacant lot north of Bogotá. Six bullets had been fired into her skull. Unbelievably, her identity is concealed and she is buried in a mass grave dug three weeks prior for two hundred corpses.

December 14, 1990 sees the issuance of Decree 3030, which, in addition to modifying 2047 and nullifying all previous decrees, introduces the judicial accumulation of sentences. The gist thereof is that a person tried for several crimes, whether in the same trial or subsequent ones, would serve only the longest sentence and not the accumulated time of all the sentences combined. That it did not address the terrorists' greatest concerns, namely, the vague conditions for non-extradition and the fixed time limit on pardonable crimes doomed it to failure. The decree seemed almost harsher than the first and Pablo Escobar...