Pablo Escobar

• 1. Introduction

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  Pablo Escobar's funeral in Medellín drew more than 25,000 people. Many came from the city's poor neighborhoods, and some of them still pray to him as a saint. A priest known as Father Elkin described Escobar as a profoundly devout man who had been led astray by his ambitions. Escobar himself once told the priest, "It's not important to be repentant, I am a believer." This was the founder and leader of the Medellín Cartel, a man dubbed the "King of Cocaine". His rise left a trail of murdered police officers, judges, locals and prominent politicians. How did a boy from a poor family in Antioquia build an empire that shipped cocaine to the United States on a staggering scale? Why did so many Colombians love him while their own government hunted him? And what is left of his world today?

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• 2. From Tombstones to Ransom

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  Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on the 1st of December 1949 in Rionegro, in Colombia's Antioquia Department. He grew up in the neighboring city of Medellín as the third of seven children. His father was a small farmer and his mother was a teacher. The family was poor. Its roots ran back to the Basque Country in Spain, with some Italian ancestry as well, and Escobar belonged to the Paisa ethnic subgroup.

  In 1966, shortly before his 17th birthday, Escobar dropped out of high school. Two years later he returned alongside his cousin Gustavo Gaviria. Life on the streets of Medellín had hardened both young men, and their teachers saw them as bullies. After more than a year they left again. Escobar still wanted an education of some kind. Using a forged high school diploma, he briefly attended college, hoping to become a criminal lawyer, then a politician, and eventually president. A lack of money ended that plan.

  His first crimes were small and strange. With his gang, he stole tombstones, sandblasted off the inscriptions and resold them. After leaving school he joined gangs that stole cars. Soon the violence grew. He hired criminals to kidnap people who owed him money and demand ransoms. Sometimes he tore up the ransom notes even after the payment arrived.

  The gang's most famous victim was the businessman Diego Echavarria. He was kidnapped in the summer of 1971 and eventually killed. His family paid a ransom of $50,000, and the case made the gang well known. A decade into this life, Escobar was about to meet the product that would make him rich.

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• 3. Silver or Lead

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  In May 1976, agents of the Colombian Security Service, known as DAS, arrested Escobar as he returned from a trafficking trip to Ecuador. They found 39 kg of cocaine hidden in the spare tire of his car. Escobar had the first judge in the case replaced and bribed the second, and he walked free along with other prisoners. The following year, the agent who had arrested him was assassinated.

  That episode became a method. Escobar bribed public officials and political candidates, and he sent hitmen after anyone who refused the money. The strategy became known as "silver or lead", meaning "money or death". The Medellín Cartel and the Cali Cartel both paid Colombian politicians and campaigned for candidates from the Conservative and Liberal parties. Many of the candidates they funded won, so the drug lords had influence at every level of government.

  Escobar founded the Medellín Cartel in 1976 to distribute powder cocaine. It set up its first smuggling routes from Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, across Colombia and on to the United States. The cartel grew after Escobar met several other drug lords on a farm in April 1978. By the end of that year, they had sent some 19,000 kilograms of cocaine north.

  Demand in the United States kept climbing, and Escobar organized shipments, routes and distribution networks in South Florida, California, Puerto Rico and beyond. By the 1980s he was estimated to be sending 70 to 80 tons of cocaine into the country every month. His net worth was estimated at US$30 billion by the time he died, which placed him among the wealthiest conventional criminals in history.

  Norman's Cay, a Bahamas island about 220 miles southeast of the Florida coast, served as a central transit point from 1978 to 1982. Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder worked with Escobar to develop it. According to one account, Escobar and Robert Vesco bought most of the island. It had a 1 km airstrip, a harbor, a hotel, houses, boats and aircraft, and they added a refrigerated warehouse to store cocaine. Escobar's brother later said Escobar bought none of it and that the island was Lehder's venture alone.

  The profits paid for Hacienda Nápoles. Escobar spent several million dollars on 7.7 square miles of land in Antioquia. The estate had a colonial house, a lake, a sculpture garden, a private bullring and a complete zoo with elephants, giraffes and exotic birds. He also planned a Greek-style citadel nearby, but construction started and was never finished. The same fortune was already flowing into Medellín's poorest neighborhoods, and soon into politics.

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• 4. The Paisa Robin Hood

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  Escobar spent millions of dollars developing some of Medellín's poorest districts. He built housing complexes, parks, football stadiums, hospitals, schools and churches. He also paid the staff of his cocaine lab handsomely. Admirers began calling him the "Paisa Robin Hood". In one interview he allegedly claimed that his fortune came from a bicycle rental company he had founded at the age of 16.

  In 1982 he was elected to the Colombian Congress as an alternate member for the Liberal Party. The post was minor, but Colombian law automatically granted him parliamentary immunity and a diplomatic passport. His community projects, including houses and football pitches, made him popular in the towns he visited.

  Opposition arrived quickly. Rodrigo Lara-Bonilla, the new Minister of Justice, accused Escobar of criminal activity from the first day of Congress. Lara-Bonilla's subordinates had investigated Escobar's arrest in 1976. A few months later, the Liberal leader Luis Carlos Galán expelled Escobar from the party. Escobar fought back, but in January 1984 he announced his retirement from politics. Three months later, Lara-Bonilla was murdered.

  Escobar also kept ties abroad. He maintained relations with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and hired the National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, to carry out bombings and assassinations against government targets. It has also been alleged that he had good relations with communist Cuba. Escobar never forgave Galán for the expulsion.

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• 5. War on the State

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  In the fall of 1985, Escobar was wanted by the authorities and had already bribed and murdered several judges. He asked the Colombian government to let him surrender on condition that he would not be extradited to the United States. The proposal was rejected at first. Escobar then founded the Los Extraditable Organization and implicitly supported it, with the aim of fighting extradition. The group was accused of trying to stop the Colombian Supreme Court from studying whether the extradition treaty with the United States was constitutional.

  On the 6th of November 1985, a far-left guerrilla movement attacked the Colombian Judiciary Building in the Palace of Justice siege. Ninety-eight people died, including nearly half of the Supreme Court justices. Los Extraditable was said to have supported the attackers. Among Escobar's biographers, only Virginia Vallejo has given a detailed account of his role. She said Escobar financed the operation, which was carried out by the guerrilla group M-19. She blamed the army for the deaths of more than 100 people, including 11 Supreme Court magistrates, members of M-19 and cafeteria employees. Her statements led to the case being reopened in 2008, and Colombia's Commission of Truth confirmed many of the events she described. A high-ranking former colonel and a former general were later sentenced to 30 and 35 years in prison for the forced disappearance of people detained after the siege.

  Late in 1986, the Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty illegal, because a presidential delegation had signed it rather than the president. Escobar's victory over the judiciary was short. The new president, Virgilio Barco Vargas, quickly renewed the agreement with the United States.

  On the 18th of August 1989, Galán was assassinated on Escobar's orders. Escobar then planted a bomb on Avianca Flight 203, hoping to kill Galán's successor, César Gaviria Trujillo. Gaviria missed the plane and survived, but all 107 people aboard were killed. Two Americans were among the dead, and the United States government began to intervene directly.

  Vallejo's story did not end there. She was a television anchorwoman who had been romantically involved with Escobar from 1983 to 1987. On the 4th of July 2006, she offered Attorney General Mario Iguarán her testimony in the trial of former Senator Alberto Santofimio, who was accused of conspiracy in Galán's murder. The judge closed the trial on the 9th of July, which was seen as too late. On the 18th of July she was flown to the United States on a Drug Enforcement Administration flight for her safety. Days later, RCN Television aired a video in which she accused Santofimio of urging Escobar to eliminate Galán. Fourteen million people watched it, and the case was reopened. On the 31st of August 2011, Santofimio was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

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• 6. Surrender and Escape

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  After Galán's murder, the administration of César Gaviria moved against Escobar and the drug cartels. Negotiators persuaded Escobar to surrender and end all criminal activity in exchange for a reduced sentence and preferential treatment in custody. He gave himself up in 1991. Shortly before, the new Colombian Constitution of 1991 had prohibited extraditing Colombian citizens to the United States. Many suspected that Escobar and other drug lords had influenced members of the Constituent Assembly who passed the ban.

  Escobar was sentenced to five years in prison, but he served them in La Catedral, a luxurious private prison he built himself. It had a football pitch, a giant dollhouse, a bar, a Jacuzzi and a waterfall. Reports soon surfaced in the media that he was still running criminal activities from inside. On the 22nd of July 1992, the government tried to move him to a conventional jail. Escobar's influence let him learn of the plan in advance, and he escaped. He spent the rest of his life on the run, with a nationwide manhunt closing in.

  His enemies now included the Colombian police, the United States government and his rivals in the Cali Cartel. On the 2nd of December 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, Colombian special forces found him in a house in a middle-class residential area of Medellín. They located him with technology provided by the United States, which traced a call he made to his family. Police tried to arrest him, and the situation quickly turned into an exchange of gunfire. Escobar was shot while trying to escape across the roof, and a bodyguard was shot with him. Bullets hit his torso and his feet, and a bullet to the head killed him. Some still debate whether he was shot by police or took his own life.

  With the Medellín Cartel fragmenting, the rival Cali Cartel came to dominate the cocaine market until the mid-1990s. Then its leaders were either killed or captured by the Colombian government. Escobar was buried at the Monte Sacro Cemetery, next to his parents.

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• 7. The Family Left Behind

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  In March 1976, the 26-year-old Escobar eloped with María Victoria Henao, who was 15. Her family discouraged the match because they considered him socially inferior. They had two children, a son named Juan Pablo and a daughter named Manuela. Escobar was repeatedly unfaithful, yet Henao remained supportive of her husband.

  That loyalty may have saved the family. Members of the Cali Cartel had recorded her conversations with Escobar, and they replayed the tapes for their wives as an example of how a woman should behave. According to the account, this was why the cartel did not kill her and her children after his death. The group still demanded, and received, millions of dollars in reparations for Escobar's war against them. Henao also negotiated for her son's life by personally guaranteeing that he would not seek revenge or join the drug trade.

  In 1995, the family fled Colombia after failing to find a country that would grant them asylum. They went first to Mozambique, then to Brazil, and finally settled in Argentina. Henao took the name María Isabel Santos Caballero, and her son became Sebastián Marroquín Santos. She became a successful real estate entrepreneur until a business associate discovered her identity. She left with her earnings, and local media exposed her as Escobar's widow. She spent eighteen months in prison while her finances were investigated. Authorities could not link the money to illegal activity, and she was released.

  Marroquín has spent years trying to answer for his father. The Argentinian filmmaker Nicolas Entel's documentary Sins of My Father, released in 2009, follows his efforts to seek forgiveness from the sons of Rodrigo Lara and Luis Carlos Galán. It was shown at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and premiered in the United States on HBO in October 2010. In 2014 he published Pablo Escobar, My Father under his birth name, hoping to correct inaccuracies about his father's activities in the 1990s. Escobar's sister, Luz Maria Escobar, also tried to make amends. She made public statements, left letters on the graves of his victims, and organized a public memorial for them on the 20th anniversary of his death.

  Not every family episode was peaceful. On the 28th of October 2006, Escobar's body was exhumed at the request of some relatives who wanted a DNA sample to check the alleged paternity of an illegitimate child. RCN broadcast a video of the exhumation, and Marroquín was furious. He accused his uncle Roberto Escobar and his cousin Nicolas Escobar of being "merchants of death". On the 5th of June 2018, an Argentine federal judge named Nestor Barral accused Henao and her son of money laundering with two Colombian drug traffickers, and he ordered assets of about $1m each to be seized.

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• 8. What Remained

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  After Escobar's death, the government gave the ranch, zoo and citadel at Hacienda Nápoles to low-income families under a law called Extinción de Dominio, meaning Domain Extinction. The property was later converted into a theme park surrounded by four luxury hotels overlooking the zoo.

  Four hippos from his private menagerie were judged too difficult to seize and move, so they stayed behind on the untended estate. By 2007 the animals had multiplied to 16 and were roaming the nearby Magdalena River in search of food. In 2009, two adults and a calf escaped the herd. After attacks on humans and the killing of cattle, one adult nicknamed Pepe was shot by hunters acting with local authorization. By early 2014-40 hippos were reported in Puerto Triunfo, all descended from those original four. A 2016 projection suggested the population would more than double within a decade. National Geographic Channel made a documentary titled Cocaine Hippos. A 2018 article found environmentalists split on whether the animals helped or harmed, though conservationists and locals, especially those in tourism, mostly supported keeping them. By October 2021, the Colombian government had started chemically sterilizing the herd.

  In the United States, Escobar had owned a pink, waterfront mansion of 6,500 square feet at 5860 North Bay Road in Miami Beach. Built in 1948, it was seized by the federal government in the 1980s. Christian de Berdouare, owner of the Chicken Kitchen fast-food chain, bought it in 2014 and hired a documentary crew and professional treasure hunters to search it. They found odd holes in floors and walls, plus a safe that was stolen from its hole in the marble floor before anyone could examine it.

  At 11:53 AM on the 22nd of February 2019, Medellín authorities demolished the six-story Edificio Mónaco in the El Poblado neighborhood. Retired general Rosso José Serrano said Escobar planned some of his most brazen attacks there. The building had been built for Escobar's wife and was gutted by a Cali Cartel car bomb in 1988. It then stood empty and became an attraction for foreign tourists. Mayor Federico Gutierrez wanted a park there honoring the thousands of cartel victims, among them four presidential candidates and some 500 police officers. President Ivan Duque said the demolition "means that history is not going to be written in terms of the perpetrators, but by recognizing the victims".

  Escobar's story has also fed a long line of films, series and songs. Netflix released its series Narcos on the 28th of August 2015, with Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as Escobar. Caracol TV began airing Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal on the 28th of May 2012, starring Andrés Parra. In 2010, ESPN's 30 for 30 film The Two Escobars linked Colombian football to the Medellín cartel. Its second Escobar was the defender Andrés Escobar, no relation to Pablo, who was shot and killed one month after an own goal contributed to Colombia's elimination from the 1994 FIFA World Cup.

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