biography of pablo escobar

Pablo Escobar

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar helped create and run the notorious Medellín cartel and was responsible for killing thousands of people.

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Establishing the medellín cartel, rapid rise in power, escobar’s short-lived stint in politics, a large body count, escobar’s luxury prison, wife and children, pop culture portrayals, who was pablo escobar.

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug trafficker who collaborated with other criminals to form the Medellín cartel in the early 1970s. Eventually, he controlled over 80 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States, earning the nickname “The King of Cocaine.” He amassed an estimated net worth of $30 billion and was named one of the 10 richest people on Earth by Forbes . He earned popularity by sponsoring charity projects and soccer clubs, but later, terror campaigns that resulted in the murder of thousands turned public opinion against him. After surrendering to the Colombian authorities in 1991, Escobar escaped detainment in 1992 and was a fugitive until his dramatic death in December 1993.

FULL NAME: Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria BORN: December 1, 1949 DIED: December 2, 1993 BIRTHPLACE: Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia SPOUSE: Maria Victoria Henao (1976-1993) CHILDREN: Juan Pablo and Manuela ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1, 1949, in the Colombian city of Rionegro, Antioquia. His family later moved to the suburb of Envigado. He was the third of seven children born in poverty to a schoolteacher mother and a peasant farmer father. From an early age, Escobar packed a unique ambition to raise himself up from his humble beginnings and dreamed of becoming the president of Colombia one day.

Escobar reportedly began his life of crime early, stealing tombstones and selling phony diplomas. It wasn’t long before he started stealing cars, then moving into the smuggling business. Escobar’s early prominence came during the “Marlboro Wars,” in which he played a high-profile role in the control of Colombia’s smuggled cigarette market. This episode proved to be a valuable training ground for the future narcotics kingpin.

It wasn’t by chance that Colombia came to dominate the cocaine trade. Beginning in the early 1970s, the country became a prime smuggling ground for marijuana. But as the cocaine market flourished, Colombia’s geographical location proved to be its biggest asset. Situated at the northern tip of South America between the thriving coca cultivation epicenters of Peru and Bolivia, the country came to dominate the global cocaine trade with the United States, the biggest market for the drug and just a short trip to the north.

Escobar, who had already been involved in organized crime for a decade at this point, moved quickly to grab control of the cocaine trade. In 1975, the drug trafficker Fabio Restrepo from the city of Medellín, Colombia, was murdered. It was widely believed his death came at the orders of Escobar, who immediately seized power and expanded Restrepo’s operation into something the world had never seen. Under Escobar’s leadership, large amounts of coca paste were purchased in Bolivia and Peru then processed and transported to America. Escobar worked with a small group to form the infamous Medellín cartel.

Also around this time, Escobar started a family with his marriage to Maria Victoria Henao, who was 11 years his junior and still a teenager at the time of their 1976 wedding. They went on to have two children.

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

Escobar’s rapid rise brought him to the attention of the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), who arrested him in May 1976 upon his return from a drug trafficking trip in Ecuador. Authorities found 39 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the spare tire of his truck. Escobar escaped the charges by bribing a judge, and the two DAS agents responsible for his arrest were killed the next year, according to Mark Bowden book Killing Pablo . Around this time, Escobar developed his signature pattern of dealing with authorities called plata o plomo , Spanish for “silver or lead,” in which they could accept bribes or be assassinated, according to Bowden.

In 1978, Escobar spent millions to purchase 20 square kilometers of land in Antioquia, Colombia, where he built his luxury estate Hacienda Nápoles . It contained a sculpture garden, lake, private bullring, and other amenities for his family and members of the cartel. It also featured a collection of luxury cars and bikes, as well as a zoo with antelope, elephants, giraffes, hippos, ponies, ostriches, and exotic birds. After Escobar’s death, it was turned into a theme park. (Today, the hippo population—which traces back to Escobar’s original transplants—has swelled in the country , causing environmental destruction and providing tourism opportunities.)

As the demand for cocaine grew in the United States, Escobar established additional smuggling shipments and distribution networks in various locations. That included establishing a shipment base on a private island in the Bahamas with the help of cartel cofounder Carlos Lehder. By the mid-1980s, Escobar had an estimated net worth of $30 billion and was named one of the 10 richest people on Earth by Forbes . Cash was so prevalent that Escobar purchased a Learjet for the sole purpose of flying his money. At the time, Escobar controlled more than 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States; more than 15 tons were reportedly smuggled each day, netting the Medellín cartel as much as $420 million a week.

As Escobar’s fortune and fame grew, he dreamed to be seen as a leader. In some ways, he positioned himself as a Robin Hood–like figure, a description was echoed by many locals, by spending money to expand social programs for the poor. He spent millions to develop Medellín’s poor neighborhoods, where its residents felt he helped them far more than the government ever had. He built roads, electric lines, soccer fields, roller-skating rinks, and more, and paid the workers in his cocaine labs enough money that they could afford houses and cars, according to Bowden.

Still harboring his youthful ambition to become the nation’s president, Escobar entered politics and supported the formation of the Liberal Party of Colombia. In 1982, he was elected as an alternate member of Colombia’s Congress, but Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara-Bonilla investigated him and highlighted the illegal means by which he had obtained his wealth, forcing Escobar to resign two years after his election. A few months later, Lara-Bonilla was murdered, according to the book Kings of Cocaine , by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen.

Escobar was responsible for the killing of thousands of people, including politicians, civil servants, journalists, and ordinary citizens. When he realized that he had no shot of becoming Colombia’s president, and with the United States pushing for his capture and extradition, Escobar unleashed his fury on his enemies in the hopes of influencing Colombian politics. His goal was a no-extradition clause and amnesty for drug barons in exchange for giving up the trade.

Escobar’s terror campaign claimed the lives of three Colombian presidential candidates, an attorney general, scores of judges, and more than 1,000 police officers. In addition, Escobar was implicated as the mastermind behind the bombing of a Colombian jetliner. In November 1989, Escobar arranged for a bomb to be planted on Avianca Flight 203, a domestic passenger flight, as part of an assassination attempt against one of his political enemies, presidential candidate César Gaviria Trujillo. He missed the flight and avoided injury, but the bomb detonated and killed all 107 people on board.

Nine days after the airplane bombing, more than 50 people were killed and more than 2,200 were injured when a truck bomb detonated outside a DAS building in Bogotá, Colombia. The Medellín cartel was also believed to be responsible for this attack. Escobar’s terror eventually turned public opinion against him.

By the 1990s, Escobar was facing increasing pressure from the administration of President César Gaviria, particularly after Escobar’s alleged assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. In June 1991, Escobar negotiated a surrendered to Gaviria’s government in exchange for a reduced sentence and preferential treatment during his captivity. A law at the time prevented his extradition to the United States.

Escobar built his own luxury prison called La Catedral , which was guarded by men he handpicked from among his employees. Often called “Hotel Escobar,” the prison came with a casino, spa, nightclub, football field, jacuzzi, waterfall, and giant doll house.

In June 1992, however, Escobar escaped when authorities attempted to move him to a more standard holding facility. A manhunt for the drug lord, with help from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, was launched that would last 16 months. During that time, the monopoly of the Medellín cartel, which had begun to crumble during Escobar’s imprisonment as police raided offices and killed its leaders, rapidly deteriorated.

Escobar’s family unsuccessfully sought asylum in Germany and eventually found refuge in a Bogotá hotel. Escobar was not so lucky: Colombian law enforcement finally caught up to the fugitive Escobar on December 2, 1993, in a middle-class neighborhood in Medellín. A firefight ensued, and as Escobar tried to escape across a series of rooftops, he and his bodyguard were shot and killed. Escobar had just turned 44 years old the previous day.

Escobar’s death accelerated the demise of the Medellín cartel and Colombia’s central role in the cocaine trade. His end was celebrated by the country’s government and other parts of the world, and his family was placed under police protection. Still, many Colombians mourned his killing. More than 25,000 people attended Escobar’s burial. “He built houses and cared about the poor,” one funeral-goer said at his funeral, according to The New York Times . “In the future, people will go to his tomb to pray, the way they would to a saint.”

In 1976, when he was 26, Escobar married 15-year-old Maria Victoria Henao. She was so young that before marrying her, Escobar had to get a special dispensation from the bishop, which was obtainable for a fee, according to Bowden. They were married until Escobar’s death. The couple had two children together: a son, Juan Pablo, and a daughter, Manuela.

Pablo Escobar: My Father

Today Escobar’s son is a motivational speaker who goes by the name Sebastian Marroquin. Marroquin studied architecture and published a book in 2015, Pablo Escobar: My Father , which tells the story of growing up with the world’s most notorious drug kingpin. He also asserts that his father was not shot and killed, but rather committed suicide.

“My father’s not a person to be imitated,” Marroquin said in an interview. “He showed us the path we must never take as a society because it’s the path to self-destruction, the loss of values, and a place where life ceases to have importance.”

Escobar has been the subject of several books, films, and television programs. Among them was the popular 2012 Colombian television mini-series Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal , which was produced by Camilo Cano and Juana Uribe, both of whom had family members who were murdered by Escobar or his assistants.

Escobar was also portrayed by Academy Award-winning actor Javier Bardem in the film Loving Pablo (2017), which also starred Penelope Cruz as his girlfriend Virginia Vallejo.

The 2015 Netflix television series Narcos was based upon the Escobar’s life, told largely from the perspective of Steve Murphy and Javier Peña , two American drug enforcement agents who worked on the Escobar case for years. In 2016, Escobar’s brother Roberto announced he was prepared to sue Netflix for $1 billion for its portrayal of his family in Narcos . He later abandoned those efforts.

• What is worth most in life are friends, of that I am sure. Unfortunately, along life’s paths one also meets people who are disloyal.
• In Colombia, people enter [drug trafficking] as a form of protest. Others enter it because of ambition.
• I want to be big.
• Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States.
• There have been many accusations, but I’ve never been convicted of a crime in Colombia.
• [Terrorism is] the atomic bomb for poor people. It is the only way for the poor to strike back.

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Biography of Pablo Escobar, Colombian Drug Kingpin

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Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (December 1, 1949–December 2, 1993) was a Colombian drug lord and the leader of one of the most powerful criminal organizations ever assembled. He was also known as "The King of Cocaine." Over the course of his career, Escobar made billions of dollars, ordered the murders of hundreds of people, and ruled over a personal empire of mansions, airplanes, a private zoo, and his own army of soldiers and hardened criminals.

Fast Facts: Pablo Escobar

• Known For: Escobar ran the Medellín drug cartel, one of the largest criminal organizations in the world.
• Also Known As: Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, "The King of Cocaine"
• Born: December 1, 1949 in Rionegro, Colombia
• Parents: Abel de Jesús Dari Escobar Echeverri and Hemilda de los Dolores Gaviria Berrío
• Died: December 2, 1993 in Medellín, Colombia
• Spouse: Maria Victoria Henao (m. 1976)
• Children: Sebastián Marroquín (born Juan Pablo Escobar Henao), Manuela Escobar

Watch Now: 8 Fascinating Facts About Pablo Escobar

Escobar was born on December 1, 1949, into a lower-middle-class family and grew up in Medellín, Colombia. As a young man, he was driven and ambitious, telling friends and family that he wanted to be the president of Colombia someday. He got his start as a street criminal. According to legend, Escobar would steal tombstones, sandblast the names off of them, and resell them to crooked Panamanians. Later, he moved up to stealing cars. It was in the 1970s that he found his path to wealth and power: drugs. He would buy coca paste in Bolivia and Peru , refine it, and transport it for sale in the United States.

Rise to Power

In 1975, a local Medellín drug lord named Fabio Restrepo was murdered, reportedly on the orders of Escobar himself. Stepping into the power vacuum, Escobar took over Restrepo’s organization and expanded his operations. Before long, Escobar controlled all organized crime in Medellín and was responsible for as much as 80 percent of the cocaine  transported into the United States. In 1982, he was elected to Colombia’s Congress. With economic, criminal, and political power, Escobar’s rise was complete.

In 1976, Escobar married 15-year-old Maria Victoria Henao Vellejo, and they would later have two children, Juan Pablo and Manuela. Escobar was famous for his extramarital affairs and tended to prefer underage girls. One of his girlfriends, Virginia Vallejo, went on to become a famous Colombian television personality. In spite of his affairs, he remained married to María Victoria until his death.

Narcoterrorism

As the leader of the Medellín Cartel, Escobar quickly became legendary for his ruthlessness, and an increasing number of politicians, judges, and policemen publicly opposed him. Escobar had a way of dealing with his enemies: he called it plata o plomo (silver or lead). If a politician, judge, or policeman got in his way, he would almost always first attempt to bribe him or her. If that didn’t work, he would order the person killed, occasionally including the victim's family in the hit. The exact number of men and women killed by Escobar is unknown, but it certainly goes well into the hundreds and possibly into the thousands.

Social status did not matter to Escobar; if he wanted you out of the way, he'd get you out of the way. He ordered the assassination of presidential candidates and was even rumored to be behind the 1985 attack on the Supreme Court, carried out by the 19th of April insurrectionist movement, in which several Supreme Court justices were killed. On November 27, 1989, Escobar’s cartel planted a bomb on Avianca flight 203, killing 110 people. The target, a presidential candidate, was not actually on board. In addition to these high-profile assassinations, Escobar and his organization were responsible for the deaths of countless magistrates, journalists, policemen, and even criminals inside his own organization.

Height of His Power

By the mid-1980s, Escobar was one of the most powerful men in the world, and Forbes magazine listed him as the seventh richest. His empire included an army of soldiers and criminals, a private zoo, mansions and apartments all over Colombia, private airstrips and planes for drug transport, and personal wealth reported to be in the neighborhood of $24 billion. Escobar could order the murder of anyone, anywhere, anytime.

He was a brilliant criminal, and he knew that he would be safer if the common people of Medellín loved him. Therefore, he spent millions on parks, schools, stadiums, churches, and even housing for the poorest of Medellín’s inhabitants. His strategy worked—Escobar was beloved by the common people, who saw him as a local boy who had done well and was giving back to his community.

Legal Troubles

Escobar’s first serious run-in with the law came in 1976 when he and some of his associates were caught returning from a drug run to Ecuador . Escobar ordered the killing of the arresting officers, and the case was soon dropped. Later, at the height of his power, Escobar’s wealth and ruthlessness made it almost impossible for Colombian authorities to bring him to justice. Any time an attempt was made to limit his power, those responsible were bribed, killed, or otherwise neutralized. The pressure was mounting, however, from the United States government, which wanted Escobar extradited to face drug charges. He had to use all of his power to prevent extradition.

In 1991, due to increasing pressure from the U.S., the Colombian government and Escobar’s lawyers came up with an interesting arrangement. Escobar would turn himself in and serve a five-year jail term. In return, he would build his own prison and would not be extradited to the United States or anywhere else. The prison, La Catedral, was an elegant fortress which featured a Jacuzzi, a waterfall, a full bar, and a soccer field. In addition, Escobar had negotiated the right to select his own “guards.” He ran his empire from inside La Catedral, giving orders by telephone. There were no other prisoners in La Catedral. Today, La Catedral is in ruins, having been hacked to pieces by treasure hunters looking for hidden Escobar loot.

Everyone knew that Escobar was still running his operation from La Catedral, but in July 1992 it became known that the drug kingpin had ordered some disloyal underlings brought to his “prison,” where they were tortured and killed. This was too much for even the Colombian government, and plans were made to transfer Escobar to a standard prison. Fearing he might be extradited, Escobar escaped and went into hiding. The U.S. government and local police ordered a massive manhunt. By late 1992, there were two organizations searching for him: the Search Bloc, a special, U.S.-trained Colombian task force, and “Los Pepes,” a shadowy organization of Escobar’s enemies made up of family members of his victims and financed by Escobar’s main business rival, the Cali Cartel.

On December 2, 1993, Colombian security forces—using U.S. technology—located Escobar hiding in a home in a middle-class section of Medellín. The Search Bloc moved in, triangulated his position, and attempted to bring him into custody. Escobar fought back, however, and there was a shootout. Escobar was eventually gunned down as he attempted to escape on the rooftop. Although he was also shot in the torso and leg, the fatal wound passed through his ear, leading many to believe that Escobar committed suicide. Others believe one of the Colombian policemen fired the bullet.

With Escobar gone, the Medellín Cartel quickly lost power to its rival, the Cali Cartel, which remained dominant until the Colombian government shut it down in the mid-1990s. Escobar is still remembered by the poor of Medellín as a benefactor. He has been the subject of numerous books, movies, and television series, including "Narcos" and "Escobar: Paradise Lost." Many people remain fascinated by the master criminal, who once ruled one of the largest drug empires in history.

• Gaviria, Roberto Escobar, and David Fisher. "The Accountant's Story: inside the Violent World of the Medellin Cartel." Grand Central Pub., 2010.
• Vallejo, Virginia, and Megan McDowell. "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar." Vintage Books, 2018.
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Pablo Escobar Biography

Birthday: December 1 , 1949 ( Sagittarius )

Born In: Rionegro

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria often referred as the ‘King of coke’ was a notorious Colombian drug lord. He was considered as the most flagrant, influential and wealthiest criminal in the history of cocaine trafficking. The ‘Medellin Cartel’ was formed by him in collaboration with other criminals to ship cocaine to the American market. The 1970s and 1980s saw Pablo Escobar and the ‘Medellin Cartel’ enjoying near monopoly in the cocaine smuggling business in the U.S. shipping over 80% of the total drug smuggled in the country. He earned billions of dollars and by the early 90s his known estimated net worth was $30 billion. The earnings sum up to around $100 billion when money buried in various parts of Colombia are included. In 1989 Forbes mentioned him as the seventh wealthiest person in the world. He led an extravagant life with the fortune he made. His empire included four hundred luxury mansions across the world, private aircrafts and a private zoo that housed various exotic animals. He also had his own army of soldiers and seasoned criminals. While his vast empire was built on murders and crimes, he was known for sponsoring soccer clubs and charity projects.

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Nick Name: El Doctor, El Patrón, Don Pablo, El Señor

Also Known As: Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria

Died At Age: 44

Spouse/Ex-: Maria Victoria Henao

father: Abel de Jesús Dari Escobar

mother: Hemilda Gaviria

siblings: Roberto Escobar

children: Juan Pablo Escobar, Manuela Escobar

Born Country: Colombia

Gangsters Drug Lords

Height: 1.67 m

Died on: December 2 , 1993

place of death: Medellín, Colombia

education: University of Antioquia

You wanted to know

Who shot pablo escobar.

It is still not clear who actually fired the final shot into Pablo Escobar’s ear. There are various theories regarding this. Some believe that he was shot during the gunfight with the Colombian National Police or was possibly executed by them. But, Pablo Escobar’s brothers Roberto Escobar and Fernando Sánchez Arellano are of the view that Pablo Escobar committed suicide and he shot himself through the ear. They have said that Pablo Escobar had repeatedly told them that if ever he was cornered, he would 'shoot himself through the ear'.

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In ‘The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel’ Roberto Escobar discussed how an obscure and simple middleclass person like Pablo Escobar rose to become one of the richest men under the Sun.

Roberto Escobar used to keep track of all the money earned by Pablo Escobar as his accountant. At its peak when ‘Medellin Cartel’ smuggled 15 tons of cocaine daily to the U.S. worth over half a billion dollars, Pablo and his brother purchased rubber bands worth $1000 per week to wrap the cash bundles. About 10% of the money stored in their warehouses was lost every year due to spoilage by rats.

Pablo Escobar entered the drug trade in the 1970s and developed his cocaine operation in 1975. He himself used to fly a plane between Colombia and Panama for smuggling the drug to the U.S.

In 1975, after he returned to Medellin from Ecuador with a heavy load, he was arrested along with his men. Thirty-nine pounds of white paste was found in their possession. He failed in an attempt to bribe the judges of his case and later killed the two arresting officers resulting in dropping of his case. Soon he started applying his tactics of either bribing or killing to deal with the authorities.

Earlier, he used to smuggle cocaine in old tyres of planes and a pilot would receive $500,000 per flight. Later when its demand in the U.S. escalated, he arranged for additional shipments and alternative routes and networks including California and South Florida.

In collaboration with Carlos Lehder he developed Norman’s Clay in the Bahamas as the new island trans-shipment point. Between 1978 and 1982, this point remained the main route of smuggling for the Medellin Cartel’.

Pablo Escobar shelled out several million dollars and purchased 7.7 square miles of land which includes his estate ‘Hacienda Napoles’.

The mid-1980s saw him at the peak of his power smuggling about 11 tons of cocaine per flight to the U.S. According to Roberto Escobar, Pablo Escobar also employed two remote controlled submarines to smuggle cocaine.

In 1982, the ‘Colombian Liberal Party’ elected him to the ‘Chamber of Representatives of Colombia’ as an alternate member. He represented the Colombian government officially at the swearing ceremony of Felipe Gonzalez in Spain.

Another allegation against Escobar was that he backed the left-wing guerrillas of the ‘19th April Movement’ (M-19) who stormed the Colombian Supreme Court in 1985. Many of the judges on the court were murdered and files and papers were destroyed at a time when the court was considering Colombia’s extradition treaty with the United States The treaty would have allowed the country to extradite drug lords to the United States for prosecution.

As his network expanded and gained notoriety, he became infamous worldwide. By that time the ‘Medellin Cartel’ controlled a major portion of drug trafficking covering the United States, Spain, Mexico, Dominic Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and other countries of Europe and America. Rumours that his network reached Asia were also doing the rounds.

His policy to deal with the Colombian system that encompassed intimidation and corruption was referred as ‘plata o plomo’. Though literally it means ‘silver or lead’ in his dictionary, it meant either accept ‘money’ or face ‘bullets’. His criminal activities included killings of hundreds of state officials, civilians and policemen and bribing politicians, judges and government officials.

By 1989 his ‘Medellin Cartel’ was in control of 80% of cocaine market in the world. It was generally believed that he was the chief financier of the Colombian football team ‘Medellín's Atlético Nacional’. He was also credited for developing multi-sports courts, football fields and aiding children’s football team.

Although he was considered an enemy of the Colombian government and the U.S., he was successful in creating goodwill among the poor people. He was instrumental in building schools, churches and hospitals in western Colombia and also donated money for housing projects of the poor. He was quite popular in the local Roman Catholic Church and the locals of Medellin often helped and protected him including hiding him from authorities.

His empire became so powerful that other drug smugglers gave away 20% to 35% of their profit to him for smooth shipment of their cocaine to the U.S.

In 1989, he was accused of getting Luis Carlos Galan, a Colombian presidential candidate, assassinated. He was also accused of the bombings at the ‘DAS Building’ in Bogota and at the Avianca Flight 203.

After the murder of Luis Carlos Galan the Cesar Gavitis led administration acted against him. The government negotiated with him to surrender on condition of a lesser sentence along with favourable treatment during his imprisonment.

In 1991, he surrendered to the Colombian government and was kept in La Catedral that was converted into a private luxurious prison. Before he surrendered the newly approved Colombian Constitution prohibited extradition of Colombian citizens which was suspected to be influenced by Escobar and other drug mafias.

On July, 1992, after finding that Pablo Escobar was operating his criminal activities from La Catedral, the government tried to shift him to a more conventional jail. However, he came to know of such plan through his influence and made a timely escape.

The U.S. ‘Joint Special Operations Command’ and ‘Centra Spike’ jointly started hunting him in 1992. ‘Search Bloc’ a special Colombian task force was trained by them for this purpose.

The ‘Los Pepes’ (Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, "People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar") a vigilante group aided by rivals and former associates of Pablo Escobar executed a bloody carnage. This resulted in killing of around 300 relatives and associates of Escobar and destruction of huge amount of property of his cartel.

There was Co-ordination among ‘Search Bloc’, the Colombian and U.S. intelligence agencies and ‘Los Pepes’ through intelligence sharing so that ‘Los Pepes’ could bring down Escobar and his remaining few allies.

Pablo Escobar married Maria Victoria in March 1976. The couple had two children - Juan now known as Juan Sebastián Marroquín Santos and Manuela Escobar .

On December 2, 1993, after a fifteen month manhunt by ‘Search Bloc’, the Colombian and the U.S. intelligence agencies and the ‘Los Pepes’, he was found from his hiding and shot by the ‘Colombian National Police’. It still remains a mystery as to who shot him in his head as the relatives of Escobar believe that he shot himself to death.

Around 25,000 people attended his burial including most of the Medellin’s poor who were extensively aided by him. His grave rests at Itagui’s ‘Cemetario Jardins Montesacro’.

During 1990s, the government expropriated his luxurious estate ‘Hacienda Napoles’, the unfinished Greek-style citadel and the zoo under the law ‘extinción de dominio’ and handed them over to the low-income families. The property was reformed to a theme park encompassed by four luxury hotels alongside the zoo and a tropical park.

Pablo Escobar has remained a subject of several books, films, television shows, documentaries, music and even games.

See the events in life of Pablo Escobar in Chronological Order

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Pablo Escobar: The Rise and Fall of the ‘King of Cocaine’

06 Nov 2023

In the annals of criminal history, the name Pablo Escobar looms large. A charismatic and ruthless Colombian drug lord, Escobar rose from humble beginnings to become the world’s most powerful and feared criminal. Yet, his meteoric rise was matched only by his cataclysmic fall.

Here we delve into the life and death of the infamous Pablo Escobar. 

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on 1 December 1949, in Rionegro, Antioquia in Colombia and came from a humble background. Raised in Medellín as the third of seven children, his father was a farmer and his mother worked as a teacher. 

Early on, Escobar demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit (and criminal tendencies), engaging in various schemes like selling fake diplomas, smuggling stereo equipment and selling stolen tombstones.

He left school in 1966 just before he turned 17, but returned two years later. His hard life on the streets of Medellín had shaped his teachers’ view of him, and a year later, Escobar dropped out of school again. Nevertheless, having forged a high school diploma, Escobar briefly studied in college with dreams of becoming a criminal lawyer, politician and even president, but gave up due to financial constraints.

Before long, he started stealing cars (resulting in his first arrest in 1974), and played a prominent role in controlling the smuggled cigarette market. 

In the 1970’s, Colombia emerged as a key location for marijuana smuggling, and Escobar initially worked as a small-time marijuana dealer for various drug smugglers. (During this time, Escobar notably kidnapped businessman Diego Echavarria, later killing him in 1971, despite having received the $50,000 ransom.)

He gradually transitioned to the cocaine trade, recognising the immense profit potential due to Colombia’s strategic position between coca cultivation centres in the south, and the lucrative North American market. 

Pablo Escobar’s mugshot, taken by the regional Colombia control agency in Medellín in 1976

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Colombian National Police / Public Domain

Cocaine empire

Escobar’s ascent in the world of narcotics was spectacular. In 1976, he founded a criminal organisation that evolved into the infamous Medellín Cartel, a drug trafficking organisation based in Medellín, Colombia, which would go on to become one of the most powerful and influential criminal groups in history. 

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Escobar played a pivotal role in the ‘cocaine cowboy’ era in Miami. H is network of smugglers used ingenious methods to establish the first smuggling routes, transporting vast quantities of cocaine from Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador through Colombia and into America. This operation involved various means, from submarines to small aircraft landing in remote fields.

Escobar’s meteoric rise caught the attention of the Colombian Security Service, leading to his arrest in May 1976 when a significant amount of cocaine was discovered in his car. Managing to influence the legal process, he was released; the following year the agent who had arrested him was assassinated.

Escobar’s infiltration of the drug market created unprecedented demand for cocaine in America. Under his leadership, the Medellín Cartel came to dominate the global cocaine trade, controlling over 80% of the cocaine shipped to America. This immense operation earned him an estimated $420 million a week, and the nickname ‘The King of Cocaine’. By the 1980’s, the sheer volume of cocaine entering the US (approximately 70-80 tonnes per month)  made Escobar one of the ten wealthiest people on the planet, with an estimated net worth of around $30 billion, according to Forbes .

Escobar’s vast wealth afforded him a lavish lifestyle, including private planes, a Caribbean getaway on Isla Grande, and numerous luxurious homes and safe-houses, including a 7,000 acre estate in Antioquia which he bought for $63 million. It was here he built his luxurious ranch, Hacienda Nápoles , which included a zoo featuring around 200 animals (including elephants, giraffes, and hippos), a lake, sculpture garden, air-strip, private bullring, football pitch, tennis court, artificial lakes, and numerous other amenities for his family and the cartel.

Escobar paid his staff generously, and gained a reputation for philanthropic efforts, spending millions developing some of Medellín’s most impoverished neighbourhoods, building housing, parks, football stadiums, hospitals, schools, and churches, leaving a complex legacy of both criminality and social investment.

By the late 1980s, Escobar’s wealth was such that he reportedly offered to pay off Colombia’s $10 billion debt in exchange for exemption from any extradition treaty. During his final years on the run, he famously reportedly burned $2 million to keep his daughter warm.

Entrance to Hacienda Nápoles, the luxurious estate built and owned by Pablo Escobar in Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia Department, Colombia

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / XalD / CC BY 3.0

‘Plata o plomo’

Escobar’s dominance of the cocaine trade was characterised by corruption, intimidation, and violence. His guiding principle was ‘plata o plomo’ (‘silver or lead’) – effectively meaning ‘bribes or bullets’. Throughout his reign, he systematically  bribed and intimidated Colombian law enforcement agencies, public officials and political candidates.

The financial backing provided by both the Medellín Cartel and its rival, the Cali Cartel, to political candidates had a profound impact on Colombian politics. These cartels were able to exert influence at every level of government, enabling them to manipulate political processes, bribe politicians, and effectively control the political landscape.

The Medellín Cartel was not only engaged in a battle against rival drug cartels, but also resorted to a reign of terror when Escobar introduced the concept of ‘narco-terrorism’, employing tactics such as bombings, assassinations, and extortion to maintain control over Colombia and to intimidate rivals and enemies. The Medellín Cartel’s ruthlessness knew no bounds, operating with total impunity.

Escobar’s criminal empire resulted in the deaths of around 4,000 people who dared to challenge his reign, including police officers, government officials, journalists, and judges. Under his influence, Colombia became the murder capital of the world, marked by unimaginable violence and corruption.

In the 1980s, Escobar’s influence and popularity amongst many Colombians prompted him to enter politics, where he played a significant role in the formation of the Liberal Party of Colombia. He was elected to an alternate sea in the country’s Congress in 1982, and in this capacity, further developed community projects, earning him popularity and support among the local population in the areas he frequented. Now a public figure, his philanthropic efforts led to his nickname as a modern-day ‘ Robin Hood Paisa’ . 

Escobar’s political position granted him parliamentary immunity and a diplomatic passport. However, his political career faced opposition when t he new Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara-Bonilla, accused him of criminal activities. Lara-Bonilla launched an investigation into Escobar’s 1976 arrest, and a few months later, Liberal leader Luis Carlos Galán expelled Escobar from the party. 

Although Escobar fought back, after a campaign to expose his criminal activities he announced his retirement from politics in January 1984. Three months later, Lara-Bonilla was assassinated.  Escobar’s political ambitions were further thwarted by the Colombian and America governments, who continually pushed for his arrest and extradition to America.

Left: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, circa (1984). Right: Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara (centre) and presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán (left) were both assassinated by orders of Escobar

Image Credit: Left: Alamy / The Hollywood Archive. Right: Wikimedia Commons / Flickr.com/people/ivanmarulanda/ CC BY 2.0

Fight against extradition and ‘narco-terrorism’

In the mid-1980s, Escobar waged a campaign against the Colombian judiciary, bribing and murdering several judges to further his objectives. In 1985, Escobar requested the Colombian government allow his conditional surrender without extradition to America.

When this was denied, Escobar founded the Los Extraditable Organisation to fight extradition policies. This organisation was subsequently implicated in obstructing the Colombian Supreme Court from studying the constitutionality of Colombia’s extradition treaty with America.

In retaliation, the Colombian Judiciary Building was attacked, resulting in the deaths of half of the Supreme Court’s justices. The violence escalated, leading the Supreme Court to subsequently declare that the previous extradition treaty was illegal in late 1986 because it had been signed by a presidential delegation, not the president.

However, Escobar’s victory over the judiciary was short-lived, as the new Colombian president, Virgilio Barco Vargas, promptly renewed the extradition agreement with America.

Escobar’s grudge against Luis Carlos Galán, who had removed him from politics, led to Galán’s assassination in August 1989. In further retaliation, one of Escobar’s most notorious acts of narco-terrorism included his alleged orchestration of the bombing of Avianca Flight 203 in 1989, which killed all 107 people on board in an attempt to assassinate Galán’s successor, César Gaviria Trujillo. Gaviria missed the plane and survived. Escobar’s involvement in this, as well as the bombings of DAS (Department of Security) buildings, prompted direct US government intervention due to the killing of two Americans in the Avianca bombing.

La Catedral

The US government recognised the grave threat posed by the Medellín Cartel and initiated a massive effort to apprehend Escobar and dismantle his cartel empire. American and Colombian authorities cooperated extensively in an unprecedented manhunt, spanning years and involving multiple countries. 

The newly approved Colombian Constitution of 1991 prohibited the extradition of Colombian citizens to America. However, this was a controversial act, as it was suspected that Escobar and other drug lords had exerted influence over members of the Constituent Assembly to pass the legislation.

Nevertheless, later that year , Escobar negotiated with the government, offering to turn himself in to authorities and cease all criminal activity in exchange for a reduced sentence of five years’ imprisonment, and preferential treatment during this captivity.  Colombian officials agreed to the terms, and Escobar was housed in his own, luxurious, self-built private prison, La Catedral . This ‘prison’ featured a football pitch, giant dollhouse, nightclub, bar, jacuzzi, sauna, and even a waterfall.

The bedroom of the luxurious private prison, La Catedral, where Pablo Escobar was confined

The kingpin’s fall

Despite this highly reasonable deal, reports emerged that Escobar had tortured and killed two cartel members while at La Catedral , prompting the government’s decision to move him to a more conventional jail on 22 July 1992. However, Escobar’s influence had enabled him to discover the plan in advance, and he successfully escaped, abandoning his opulent lifestyle and living in hiding while on the run as a fugitive.

This led to a nationwide manhunt; Escobar faced threats from the Colombian police, the US government, and the rival Cali Cartel – leading to the Medellín Cartel’s downfall. A period of intense surveillance and tracking culminated in a large-scale operation on 2 December 1993 when Colombian special forces, with technological assistance from America, located Escobar’s hideout in a middle-class neighbourhood in Medellín.

An attempt to arrest Escobar quickly escalated, leading to gunfire exchanges. In the end, authorities stormed the building, resulting in the death of Pablo Escobar and his bodyguard as they tried to escape from the rooftop. Escobar sustained multiple gunshot wounds, including one to the head. This prompted speculation that Escobar had killed himself, especially as he had once expressed a preference for a grave in Colombia over a jail cell in America.

Nevertheless, his death, one day after his 44th birthday, marked the end of an era.

Pablo Escobar’s legacy continues to loom large – not only as a notorious criminal but as a cultural phenomenon.

While many decried the heinous nature of his crimes, in Colombia, he was perceived by some as a Robin Hood-like figure, particularly in Medellín, where he was credited with providing amenities to the city’s poor that the government had not. Indeed Escobar’s funeral drew over 25,000 people, and his memory remains influential.

His former private estate, Hacienda Nápoles , was given to low-income families by the government, and also converted into a theme park surrounded by four luxury hotels overlooking Escobar’s zoo. (Most of the zoo’s animals were transferred to other zoos, yet 4 hippos were left behind. By 2014, 40 hippos were reported to exist in the area, and by 2021, Colombian authorities began a chemical sterilisation program to control the hippo population.)

The city of Medellín, Colombia, where Escobar grew up and began his criminal career

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / seth pipkin 2007 / CC BY-SA 2.0

Escobar’s life story has been the subject of numerous books, films, and television series, most notably Narcos , serving as a cautionary tale about the immense power organised crime can amass, the devastating consequences and effects of the drug trade, the corruption it breeds, and its tragic human cost.

Although Escobar’s death marked the end of his reign, it did not signal the end of the drug trade, or its challenges. The Cali Cartel dominated the cocaine market in the years following Escobar’s demise. In Colombia, memories of Escobar’s reign of terror remain vivid. While Colombia has made significant progress in curbing drug violence and improving security since his death, the drug trade and associated violence have not been entirely eradicated, and challenges persist.

In America, the pursuit and eventual downfall of Pablo Escobar represented a turning point in the fight against drug cartels, underscoring the importance of international cooperation in addressing transnational crime, and laying the groundwork for further efforts to combat the drug trade .

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Pablo Escobar

We discuss the life of Pablo Escobar and his initiation into crime. In addition, we explain why he is considered one of the greatest criminals in history.

Who was Pablo Escobar?

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian criminal and drug trafficker, founder and leader of the criminal organization known as the Medellín Cartel. Dubbed the "King of Cocaine", in his short lifespan of just 44 years, he was the world's leading drug trafficker during the 1980s, managing to amass a fortune estimated at 30 billion dollars .

At the height of his criminal empire, Escobar led an extravagant lifestyle, owning a 2,800-hectare estate called " Hacienda Nápoles " ("Naples Estate" in Spanish), on which he had artificial lakes, a landing strip, a zoo, a bullring, and life-sized dinosaur statues.

He also established various philanthropic and social assistance organizations that earned him a Robin Hood-like image , so much so that he managed to secure a seat in the nation's congress in 1982.

However, Escobar's infamous ruthlessness was widely widespread among his acquaintances and collaborators: he was known for solving problems with " plata o plomo " (literally "silver or lead", meaning money or death). In 1989, he was the mastermind behind the bombing of an airplane, which killed around 100 people.

Killed by the police in 1993, his figure has become part of contemporary urban mythology and has been a source of inspiration for literature works and film.

• See also: Fidel Castro

Early life of Pablo Escobar

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1, 1949, in the town of Rionegro, in the Colombian state of Antioquia. He was the second of seven children of a humble household born to farmer Abel de Jesús Escobar Echeverri and schoolteacher Hermilda de los Dolores Gaviria Berrío.

Shortly after Pablo's birth, the family moved to Envigado, in the suburbs of Medellín, Colombia's second largest city. There, Pablo grew up and soon his leadership skills and his knack for business became evident: together with his cousin Gustavo Gaviria, they organized raffles, traded magazines, and made low-interest money loans.

Eventually, Pablo was elected as president of the Student Welfare Council, managing to gain access to school information, such as exams. Teachers recall him as a quiet boy, obsessed with his appearance and with a complex about his height . During this period, Pablo came into contact with the revolutionary left. Many of his former peers took up armed struggle. According to them, Pablo sympathized with the leftist imaginary, while at the same time he dreamed of amassing a true fortune .

In 1969, he completed his high school education at the Lucrecio Jaramillo Vélez high school and was admitted to the Economics program at the Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana of Medellín. However, he soon lost interest in university studies and preferred to engage in illicit businesses. He would allegedly have sworn to commit suicide if he did not have a million pesos at his disposal by the age of 25 .

Beginnings in the drug trafficking

Since he moved to Medellín, Pablo had been in contact with other young people from the poorest neighborhoods. Among them were the sons of the wealthy Henao family: Mario, Carlos and Fernando, and his own cousin Gustavo. As teenagers, Pablo, Mario and Gustavo became friends and partners in crime , including the forgery of diplomas, the smuggling of sound equipment, and the theft of aluminum tombstones.

This trio of young criminals attracted the attention of local organized gangs, among them that of Diego Echavarría Misas, a famous smuggler, and later Alfredo Gámez López, dubbed the "Padrino" (the "Godfather"), the country's leading smuggler. By then, Pablo and his accomplices had already become skilled car thieves .

Initially acting as bodyguards and hit men, soon the "Godfather" Gámez López sent them on a trip to buy coca paste in Peru and Ecuador, for later processing in Colombia. This was how they entered drug trafficking. Those were the years of the "Marimba Bonanza" , and thousands of dollars were flowing into Colombia from the export of marijuana to the US.

Around that time, they also became acquainted with smugglers Elkin Correa and Jorge Gonzalez. From them, Pablo learned the smuggling routes and established important connections in the drug world , which would later prove very useful in founding the Medellín Cartel. Pablo's steely resolve, his ruthless personality, and the fact that he did not consume cocaine made him very popular within the organization.

On June 9, 1976, Pablo and Gustavo were arrested for the first time near Medellín, transporting a shipment of 20 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the wheels of their car. They were released after a few months in prison.

The " bonanza marimbera " ("marimba bonanza") was the name given to the influx of millions of dollars from drug trafficking into Colombia between 1974 and 1985 from the illegal export of marijuana to the United States. This "bonanza" proved of great importance for the growth of local drug cartels, ending in the mid-1980s, when marijuana cultivation in Colombia was largely replaced by cocaine.

Marriage to "La Tata"

At the age of 24, Pablo met Victoria Henao Vallejo, a sister of his associate Mario, and declared his love for her . At that time, the young woman was 13 years old. Despite her family's opposition, Pablo and Victoria got married two years later . In 1977, Juan Pablo was born, and in 1984, Manuela. The couple remained together until Pablo's death.

Following Pablo's death, Victoria and her children had to flee Colombia. Since almost no country accepted them, they emigrated to Mozambique, where they lived in very harsh conditions.

Eventually, they legally changed their names and emigrated to Buenos Aires, where they were victims of extortion by an accountant who knew their real identities. They were imprisoned, being released eighteen months later, thanks to the mediation of Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

Shortly after Pablo's marriage, "Padrino" Gámez López was denounced and investigated by the Colombian state, and ended up in jail on two occasions. His contacts in politics, however, helped him serve just one year in prison before retiring to the Caribbean city of Cartagena.

From then on, many minor players were in charge of the drug business. In 1977, they all came together in a single organization, which in 1982 was given the name of the cartel de Medellín (Medellín Cartel). Pablo Escobar was among its founders and became the head of the organization , which was responsible for the production, distribution, and sale of 80% of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Medellín Cartel

Since its origin, the Medellín Cartel had a hierarchical and well-organized structure, which allowed its associates to share resources , carry out operations, and yet maintain their production centers and business separate.

"Medellín Cartel" was named by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), since it was based in the city of Medellín. The cartel's boom took place in the 1980s, as cocaine consumption took hold in the United States, with Colombia becoming its major supplier .

To establish its dominance, the cartel resorted to murder, corruption, and bribery. Escobar, at the head of this criminal organization, imposed the so-called "silver or lead law" , according to which the cartel offered government officials money in exchange for their favors, or else their lives and their families were under threat if they refused the bribe.

Eventually, the cartel resorted to terrorism and armed confrontation, both with state forces and with the rival cartel, based in Cali. This sparked a bloody "cartel war" that lasted from 1986 to 1993 .

The "Cali Cartel," so named by the DEA, was led by brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, as well as José Santacruz Londoño and Hélmer Herrera Buitrago. It was also known as "The Cocaine Inc.", "The lords of Cali", or "The Cali KGB".

Pablo Escobar and politics

By the age of 29, Pablo Escobar had already amassed a considerable fortune . He was dubbed " El Patrón " (The Boss) by members of the cartel. It was then that he decided it was time to have a front, or as he called it, "a screen," which would allow him to appear openly in public. And so it was that Pablo Escobar entered the world of politics .

Presenting himself as a philanthropist, he began to show himself publicly with lawyers, financiers, politicians, and to cultivate an image of a successful man . He soon began the construction of facilities intended for the lower classes of Medellín, such as sports stadiums and even an entire neighborhood called " Medellín sin tugurios " (Medellín without slums), which later became known as " Barrio Escobar ". These types of actions earned him the affection of the popular classes, while also the accusation of populism.

At the same time, Escobar embarked on a life of excess and eccentricities. He invested 62 million dollars to buy and develop a plot of land in Puerto Triunfo, 112 miles (180 km) from Medellín . There, he established his luxurious " Hacienda Nápoles ", which featured a private landing strip and a hangar for airplanes, motorcycles, vans and other vehicles, a gas station, a bullring, a stable, a medical center, dinosaur statues, and a zoo with exotic animals like camels, elephants, rhinoceroses, moose, and hippos.

"Nápoles" was open to visitors during the weekend, as Escobar considered that it also belonged to the Colombian people. The estate also hosted large celebrations.

Through corruption, extortion and hired killings, Escobar managed to gain a significant amount of political, economic, military, and even religious influence, as despite his criminal record, he never ceased to be a devout Catholic .

In this way, Escobar managed to register in the Nuevo Liberalismo (New Liberalism) party, from which he was later expelled. Later, he managed to get himself elected, through various ruses, as an alternate senator  to the Senate for Alternativa Liberal (Liberal Alternative movement) in the 1982 parliamentary elections.

However, Escobar's "screen" began to fracture around 1983 when investigations into his fortune began under Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla (1946-1984), who was part of the Belisario Betancur administration. The investigation of dirty money in Colombian soccer and politics, as well as the reopening of old legal cases against Escobar, allowed Lara to seize planes and properties used in drug trafficking, and to expose jungle labs dedicated to cocaine production. Thus, not only was Escobar's election to parliament questioned, but the origin of the money that financed him was exposed , and the truth was spread by the El Espectador newspaper.

Escobar and his allies attempted to tarnish the minister's reputation by fabricating evidence incriminating him in corruption, but to little avail. In the end, on April 30, 1984, Lara Bonilla was gunned down by Escobar's hit men as he was driving through the streets of Bogotá . This assassination prompted the president to pass an Extradition Law to the United States and declare martial law, which marked the beginning of the war against narcoterrorism in Colombia.

War against narcoterrorism

By 1984, Escobar's political career was over. The revelations in El Espectador had cost him his seat in parliament and his US visa, prompting him to retire from public life. Shortly after, arrest warrants were issued for the leaders of the Medellín Cartel, and Escobar was forced into hiding .

That same year, police forces, in conjunction with the US DEA, discovered and raided a complex of cocaine processing laboratories near the Yari River, known as Tranquilandia . It was a major blow to Escobar's operations , and the cartel responded by unleashing a wave of terror: car bombs, assassinated journalists, and shot judges became daily news.

Many politicians and officials, bought or threatened by Escobar, allowed the organization to act with impunity, even though its leaders, then dubbed " los extraditables " (the extraditable ones), were already publicly known. At the same time, the Medellín Cartel secured international allies. They already had the support of similar organizations in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Cuba .

Until then, Escobar and his allies controlled 90% of Colombia's drug trade but had good relations with rival cartels. However, after the assassination of Minister Lara, a crime the Cali Cartel considered counterproductive, starting in 1986 tensions between the two cartels led to a new escalation of violence: the cartel war .

War between cartels

The break between the two major Colombian drug cartels occurred under circumstances that remain unknown . According to Jhon Jairo Velásquez "Popeye," one of the most notorious hit men for the Medellín Cartel, tensions flared when one of Escobar's most loyal men asked him to carry out a personal vendetta against a member of the Cali Cartel, known as "Piña."

"Piña" was protected by Helmer "Pacho" Herrera, the fourth in command of the Cali Cartel, who did not take kindly to Escobar's request to hand over his subordinate. When Escobar's request was ignored, the boss ordered the kidnapping and execution of "Piña," triggering the break between the two organizations .

In addition to fighting each other, the cartels contributed to the capture of rival leaders at the hands of the police. In this context, in 1987, Escobar lost two of his closest associates . In February Carlos Lehder was arrested, and in November, Jorge Luis Ochoa. Ochoa, however, was released after a riot in La Modelo prison.

Early the following year, a car carrying 154 pounds (70 kg) of dynamite exploded in front of the Monaco building, where the Escobar family lived . There were no fatalities, but the building was severely damaged, and although the Cali Cartel denied involvement, Escobar considered this event a formal declaration of war.

From then on, Escobar launched an offensive against the operations of his Cali rivals . In 1988, he set fire to and dynamited dozens of properties owned by the Rodríguez Orejuela family and began an espionage operation against them.

Terror years

The year 1989 was one of the bloodiest in the conflict between the cartels and the state.

At the end of 1988, the secretary general of the Colombian presidency, Germán Montoya, had attempted to approach the group of " los Extraditables ", opening the possibility of dialogue. The Medellín Cartel then proposed to the state to grant them legal pardon and a demobilization plan to put an end to the conflict . The initiative was unsuccessful, largely due to the United States' refusal to negotiate with the criminals.

The Medellín Cartel was quick to respond, assassinating judges, government officials, and Colombian public figures. The bloodshed included the bombing of the Mundo Visión television station and the murder of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán , an enemy of drug trafficking and the person who had the best chance of being elected.

Galán's assassination spurred the Colombian state to declare war on narcoterrorism. Through new decrees, President Virgilio Barco Vargas approved special measures (some even contrary to the National Constitution) for the persecution and treatment of drug traffickers.

These measures included expedited extradition to the United States, the confiscation of drug traffickers' personal assets, and the creation of the Elite Group, composed of 500 specially trained agents to deal with " Los Extraditables " . In the days that followed, the government carried out about 450 raids and arrested nearly 13,000 people linked to drug trafficking.

The Medellín Cartel responded with a declaration of total war. Between September and December of 1989, more than 100 explosive devices detonated in the cities of Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Bucaramanga, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Pereira. In addition to the acts of hired assassination, there were an estimated 300 terrorist attacks during those three months , resulting in a toll of nearly 300 civilian deaths and over 1,500 wounded.

However, the Colombian state did not give in. In November 1989, Escobar was close to being captured in an operation at the El Oro estate in Antioquia , where his brother-in-law Fabio Henao was killed and 55 of his men were captured. Later, on December 15, 1989, the second in command of the Medellín Cartel, the "Mexican" Rodríguez Hacha, was shot by the police on the country's north coast , along with his son and bodyguards.

As the noose tightened around them, "Los Extraditables" announced another call for dialogue with the government, first kidnapping the son of the secretary of the presidency, Álvaro Diego Montoya, and two relatives of President Barco. A brief truce ensued, and in the early 1990, a committee of Colombian notables was formed to negotiate with the narcoterrorists .

Escobar and his associates responded by releasing the hostages to show a genuine willingness for dialogue . In addition, they handed over a bus full of explosives and revealed the location of one of their clandestine laboratories in the town of Chocó. But the dialogue was in fact a ploy to buy time while initiating a large-scale operation in Envigado, Antioquia.

On March 30, the cartel ended the truce. Escobar put a price on the life of every police officer the criminals killed , unleashing an urban war that by the end of July had left hundreds dead and injured, including Senator Federico Estrada Vélez.

Government forces also committed excesses: in retaliation for the murder of nearly 215 police officers between April and July of 1990, their death squads carried out clandestine executions in the slums every night .

That same year in June, Escobar's military leader, John Jairo Arias Tascón, alias "Pinilla", was assassinated. Following an operation in Magdalena from which Escobar miraculously managed to escape again, the cartel announced a new truce in combat, just in time for the election of the new government of César Gaviria .

Imprisonment of Pablo Escobar

The new Colombian administration seemed willing to end the conflict as soon as possible. On August 11, the Elite Group killed Gustavo Gaviria Rivero, " El León ," cousin and right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, in a shootout . The "patrón" began to lose his most reliable associates.

At the same time, Justice Minister Jaime Giraldo Ángel announced a legislative plan to facilitate the surrender of narcoterrorists, offering a reduction in their sentences and imprisonment in Colombia (the narcos feared extradition to the United States, above all) in exchange for voluntary surrender and confession of at least one crime committed.

The Ochoa brothers were the first of Escobar's high-level henchmen to accept the offer, between December 1990 and February 1991 . The patrón, distrusting the government's word, began a series of selective kidnappings.

Several of these captives died in rescue attempts or were executed in retaliation for the government's actions. Escobar's idea was to pressure the government to design a plan tailored to his needs. But in the absence of a response, he resumed his methods of terrorism: between December 1990 and the early months of 1991, at least 44 people were killed in bombings and shootings , including former Justice Minister Enrique Low Murtra.

Eventually, the government had no choice but to give in to Escobar's demands. In June 1991, the boss of the Medellín Cartel surrendered to justice, to be confined in La Catedral prison in Envigado . From there, he continued to control his illegal operations remotely, thanks to his two associates in hiding: Fernando " El Negro " Galeano and Gerardo "Kiko" Moncada.

During his imprisonment, Escobar was attended to by his wife, " La Tata ," and was in constant contact with his henchmen. He received many messages and documents in his room. At La Catedral he received visits from celebrities, beauty queens, and soccer players .

The room where Escobar was held at La Catedral was akin to a five-star hotel suite : a large bed, cozy decoration, TV sets, video and music players, imported furniture, a personal library, and carpeted floors. The prison also had pool rooms, a bar, and a soccer field. Parties, orgies, and business meetings were held nearby, as Escobar continued to lead his criminal operation from jail. The prison itself, as was later discovered, had been commissioned by Escobar himself on land that belonged to him.

In 1992, Escobar's actions became public knowledge, and the Gaviria government decided to transfer him to a "real prison" . Aware of the decision, Escobar planned his escape with the assistance of his henchmen, and on July 22, he escaped by breaking through a plaster wall at the back of the prison.

Escobar's escape was a serious blow to the Gaviria government and the Colombian justice system . The creation of a "Search Bloc" composed of the police, the army, and the US DEA was immediately announced, and a reward of 2.7 billion pesos was offered for information leading to the "patrón's" capture .

Death of Pablo Escobar

Pablo Escobar's return to freedom was marked by a reality that was very different from the one he had left before his surrender. A fracture was growing in the Medellín Cartel and sectors opposed to his leadership eventually allied with his enemies in Cali . This broad alliance against him ended in October 1992 with one of his last military leaders, Brances Alexander Muñoz, alias "Tyson".

The resources of the Medellín Cartel began to dwindle, and their actions became more desperate. Car bombs exploded in Bogotá, Barrancabermeja, and other cities, killing civilians and officers indiscriminately. Escobar sought to renegotiate his surrender and authorized the delivery of some of his most trusted associates , but in response, actions against him intensified.

On January 30, 1993, a new actor joined the conflict: the paramilitary gang of "Los pepes" (acronym for "Perseguidos Por Pablo Escobar"), dedicated to pursuing and killing Escobar's front men, collaborators and cover-ups.

By March 1993, around 100 hit men and 10 of the cartel's military leaders had been killed, and nearly 1,900 collaborators arrested. Meanwhile, 300 other " gatilleros " (hired gun thugs) had been gunned down by rival gangs.

Escobar's wife and children had unsuccessfully sought asylum in the United States and Germany and lived under police surveillance, so they were used as bait by the authorities. On December 2, 1993, after 17 months of intense search, Escobar was cornered by the police in the middle-class neighborhood of Los Olivos, in Medellín .

There, the last of his hit men, Jesús Agudelo, alias "Limón", was killed, and Escobar tried to escape through the roofs of the neighboring houses, but he was shot three times and died on the spot . His death marked the end of the Medellín Cartel and was photographically recorded by the Search Bloc. He was 44 years old.

The next day, his death was announced as a major victory in the fight against drug trafficking. His family mourned his death along with thousands of supporters from the lower classes, who still paradoxically expressed their gratitude. His coffin was accompanied to the Montesacro Gardens cemetery in Itagüí by a massive procession .

This duality of his image made him both an infamous criminal and a popular hero. His life of violence and eccentricities has served as inspiration for numerous newspaper reports and fiction series.

Explore next:

• Che Guevara
• Adolf Hitler
• Octavio Paz
• Palacios, R. (2022). “Celda cinco estrellas, reinas de belleza y orgías: la vida de Pablo Escobar en la cárcel que mandó a construir”. Infobae . 
• Salazar, A. (2012). La parábola de Pablo . Penguin Random House.
• Rockefeller, J. D. (2015). Pablo Escobar: El auge y la caída del rey de la cocaína . Createspace.
• Tikkaken, A. (s. f.). Pablo Escobar (Colombian criminal). The Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/  
• Villatoro, M. (2014). “La verdadera historia de Pablo Escobar, el narcotraficante que asesinó a 10.000 personas”. ABC cultural . https://www.abc.es/

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Money, Drugs and Madness: The Life and Death of Pablo Escobar

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Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian druglord, once blew up a plane filled with innocent people in a desperate attempt to kill one of his countless enemies. One hundred and seven people died that morning in 1989 when a bomb was detonated on Avianca Flight 203. Three more were killed by falling pieces of the aircraft. Escobar's target wasn't even on board.

Among his multitude of crimes, Escobar ordered (and had carried out) the assassination of a Colombian presidential candidate and the country's minister of justice . He placed a bounty on policemen; hundreds were killed. As many as 50,000 people — the death toll may be lower, though most figure the total is at least in the low five figures — were murdered under the reign of "The King of Cocaine ."

For all the gauzy remembrances that some lamely cling to — Escobar as the dedicated family man, the poor son of Colombia made good, a Latin American Robin Hood — the two men who finally brought Escobar to justice want you to remember: He was none of those.

"There's nothing to glamorize about this guy," says Steve Murphy, a former Drug Enforcement Agency agent whose work is dramatized in " Narcos ," the Netflix series that debuted in 2015. "He's nothing more than a mass murderer. People look up to him like he's some kind of a hero. Let me tell you, if he told you to do something, and he's your idol, and you didn't do it, he'd kill you. He didn't care that you liked him. It was all about him."

Who Was Pablo Escobar?

Was he really that bad, how did he come to his end, escobar's legacy lives on.

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born in Rionegro, Colombia, in 1949. As a youngster, he and his family moved to a suburb of Medellin, and by the time he was in his teens, he was deep into the criminal world, stealing cars and reselling gravestones he pilfered from local cemeteries.

It wasn't until Escobar hit his 20s that he was introduced to big-time crime; taking coca, grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, synthesising it into cocaine, and shipping it to sell in the United States. By his late 20s, Escobar had founded and assumed sole control of the Medellin cartel, maybe the most successful criminal operation ever. At its height, the cartel pulled in an estimated $420 million — million — a week , 80 percent of the cocaine business worldwide.

The Medellin cartel made so much money that it literally had to stuff cash in bags — billions of U.S. dollars — and bury it. Escobar became a millionaire in his 20s. His fortune soon soared into the billions. He hit the Forbes list of richest people in the world seven years running, from 1987 (when he was estimated to be worth $3 billion) through 1993.

Escobar spent his money on a personal zoo (complete with hippos that still run wild ) at a lavish estate in northwest Colombia, Hacienda Nápoles. He splurged on cars, on boats, on a fleet of airplanes, on at least one professional soccer team, and on dozens of houses throughout the country. Keenly aware of his public persona, he gave millions away, too, building housing and soccer fields in poor areas of Medellin.

But Escobar grew and maintained that wealth through the 1980s and early '90s, it should be remembered, by being a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.

In silencing politicians, police, journalists and anyone who threatened his empire, Escobar turned to a virtual army of sicarios . These poor, often hand-picked Colombians — mostly teenage boys — were paid to protect Escobar and carry out his wishes. Those wishes often included killing. (A sicario is a hitman or hired assassin.)

"Pablo just manipulated those people is all he did. He gave them things, which was good, but when he needed new sicarios , he went right back in [to the poor sections of town]," Murphy says. "They were willing to die for him. Fight and die for him. We hate to give him credit for anything, but he did have somewhat of a charismatic personality."

Murphy and his partner, Javier Peña, who also is portrayed in the Netflix series, often tangled with the people who would do Escobar's bidding.

"One of them, when I interviewed him," Peña says, "he was 15 years old, and he said, 'I love Pablo Escobar, I will die for him and I will kill for him. He gave me money, my mom now has shelter, has food, has a little house.' He said, 'I'll be dead by the time I'm 23 years old, but I will die and kill for Pablo Escobar. He has given me a life.'"

One of Escobar's main hitmen was Jhon Jairo Velásquez, known as "Popeye." He claims to have personally killed 300 people and ordered (on Escobar's behalf) the murders of 3,000 others.

In the early 1990s, Medellin was known as the most violent city in the world , with 380 homicides per 100,000 people every year.

"On a weekend, there'd be 400 people getting killed. It's hard to comprehend," Peña says. "You'd have two guys on a motorcycle, the guy in the back [shooting]. That was one of their favorite methods. They'd shoot you, they'd take off, in and out of traffic. The stats in Medellin were just unbelievable, the amount of people that were getting killed."

Escobar — one of the earliest of what are now known as "narcoterrorists" — would not only kill. He and his band of sicarios would torture, too.

"The guy had no remorse, had no guilt feelings about killing people, apparently had no conscience," Murphy says. "When he killed people, he didn't just kill them, he wanted to torture 'em to find out what they were saying about him. Javier's got a recording where Pablo is talking to his wife about how much he loves her and the kids, and misses them, and in the background, you can hear a guy being tortured to death."

As the Colombian government — aided by the Drug Enforcement Administration and other American agencies — began to clamp down on Escobar in the late '80s, things turned more violent. A paramilitary force of the Colombian National Police known as the Search Bloc and a vigilante group, "Los Pepes" — Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar — finally helped bring Escobar to his inevitable fate.

More than anything, Escobar feared extradition to the United States and tried to strong-arm the Colombian government into adopting a non-extradition policy. The political fighting led to outright terror and eventually to a full-fledged war between the cartel and the government. Escobar was forced to flee Hacienda Nápoles.

As the body count in Medellin and other places continued to soar and life on the run became unbearable, Escobar cut a deal. The agreement was that Escobar would turn himself in and submit to serving five years in a prison of his choosing. After he served his time, he would not be sent to the U.S. for prosecution. He could keep his money. He could say his debt was paid.

The deal was especially sweet because Escobar personally supervised the building of the "prison," known as La Catedral. It included a soccer field, a helicopter pad, a bar, a dollhouse for his kids, a Jacuzzi and a waterfall. His sicarios served as the guards. He could come and go as he pleased. The cocaine never stopped flowing. Neither did the money.

But that good life was soon to end. When two of his associates, whom he suspected were stealing from the cartel, came to La Catedral, Escobar and his men beat them to death , cut them up and threw them in a fire. That night, he held a barbecue to cover the smell of the smoldering corpses.

Once the authorities found out, they closed in on Escobar, who went on the run again.

"His family tries to portray him as a dedicated family man. I don't believe that at all," Murphy says. "If he was a dedicated family man, all he had to do is five years ... If he was a dedicated family man, now he's a free man, there was no stipulations on taking any of his assets, so he could keep all those billions and billions of dollars. If he's dedicated to his family, now he could watch his children grow up, he could see them get married, have grandchildren. He could have whatever he wanted.

"But, as we all saw, because of his ego that wasn't what he chose. He chose his own personal power. He was after his own personal glory. He chose the violence over his own family."

Seventeen months after leaving La Catedral, with the National Police, the Search Bloc, Los Pepes, the Drug Enforcement Administration and a small army converging on him, Escobar was shot and killed on a rooftop in Medellin. In one well-circulated photo, Murphy crouches over Escobar's lifeless body . "I'm proud to have been part of that," he says. "I don't care what people think."

Some supporters insist that Escobar committed suicide rather than be captured and extradited to the U.S.

"Steve was there. He did not commit suicide," Peña says. "He was killed by a surgical op from the Colombian National Police. They're the ones that did it. No one else."

"Yup," Murphy says. "That's what happened. He engaged the Colombian National Police in a firefight that day and he lost. It's that simple."

Escobar's story has been told many times, notably in " Narcos ," starring Chilean actor Pedro Pascal as Peña and American actor Boyd Holbrook as Murphy. After retiring from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Murphy and Peña have spent the last four years on speaking tours , hitting every continent but Africa and Antarctica, averaging about 75 appearances a year. They have a new book out, too: " Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar ."

More than 25 years have passed since Escobar died on that rooftop. The Medellin cartel is no more. The city's murder rate dropped by 80 percent the year after Escobar's death. "It was the first time that an entire international cocaine production and distribution organization was completely decimated," Murphy says. "We didn't just cut off the head of the snake. We chopped the whole snake up."

Still, even now, Escobar is celebrated as a hero to the poor. His portrait is on murals in Barrio Pablo Escobar , a regular stop for tourists in Medellin. People flock to the ruins of La Catedral and to Escobar's grave site . Escobar's brother, Roberto, an accountant for the cartel who spent 14 years in prison, hawks memorabilia with his brother's likeness and conducts a tour of one of his safehouses.

"This guy should never be idolized," Peña says. "He did build housing, he did help out the Catholic Church, the sicarios — he did help them out. But he always wanted something in return.

"What we say is, Robin Hood didn't kill the next president of Colombia, didn't put a bomb on an airplane. We always talk about the terrorist side of Pablo Escobar. That was the main thing."

Among the many land-holdings that once belonged to Escobar was a 7,336-square-foot (681-square-meter) pink mansion in Miami Beach that was used for drug drops. The mansion included two safes hidden under 4 feet (1.2 meters) of concrete beneath a set of stairs. The mansion was razed a few years ago, but the 30,000-square-foot (2,787-square-meter) lot went on sale for $15.9 million earlier this year.

Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article:

Pablo Escobar

An international drug kingpin with a cult following, Pablo Escobar is legendary for his infamy, but he began his life with rather modest roots. Born to a simple farmer, no one ever dreamed Escobar would become the number one drug dealer in the world. He carved out a drug empire in the city of Medellín, Colombia and the surrounding Aburrá Valley and Andes mountain range. 

Inside you will read about...

✓ The Son of a Farmhand ✓ Pablo’s Political Career ✓ The Hit Job ✓ Palace of Justice Siege ✓ Prison Break and Manhunt ✓ Escobar’s Rooftop Death And much more!

As Escobar gained wealth and prestige off of the cocaine trade, he became a kind of populist Robin Hood to the masses. He often used his money for philanthropist purposes such as building parks and soccer stadiums and even helping to pave highways. At first the government was willing to turn a blind eye to his business practices, but once Escobar gained a seat as an official alternate representative in the Colombian Congress everything changed. And by 1993 he was on the run, not just from the Colombian government but also from the CIA, rival drug cartels, paramilitary groups, and the ever-infamous vigilante death squad Los Pepes. Cornered and with nowhere left to run, the man who used to be known to raise the roof would spend his last few moments of life bleeding to death on a rooftop. This is the story of Pablo Escobar.

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Pablo Escobar

Pablo Escobar has been played onscreen by Benicio del Toro (in the 2014 feature film Escobar: Paradise Lost ) and by Brazilian star Wagner Moura (in the Netflix series Narcos , launched in 2015).

• Biography of Pablo Escobar The Latin American History site has all the basic details
• Wikipedia: Narcos Exhaustive detail on the show, its cast and its episodes
• Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Official site for the book by his former mistress, Virginia Vallejo-Garcia
• Pablo Escobar Archives Trove of historical articles, many in Spanish
• J. Michael Luttig

Here are the facts and trivia that people are buzzing about.

Copyright © 1998-2018 by Who2? , LLC. All rights reserved.

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Medellín Dispatch

25 Years After Escobar’s Death, Medellín Struggles to Demolish a Legend

By Nicholas Casey

• Sept. 22, 2018

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — When the mayor of Medellín showed up, he was bearing a sledgehammer.

He stood with it in front of the former home of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord whose cocaine empire once placed him on lists of the world’s richest and most wanted.

Mr. Escobar lived for years in the Monaco Building, a white, six-story edifice with a penthouse apartment on top and his family name still inscribed in fading letters on the exterior.

The building was bombed in 1988 by Mr. Escobar’s rivals, and not long afterward, he abandoned it. Weeds grew in cracks in the driveway. A satellite dish collected old leaves. And for a while, Medellín could ignore the now-empty Monaco.

Recently, however, attention to the building has returned, piqued by scores of international books, telenovelas and movies about Mr. Escobar.

Tourists now sidle up to the gate, snapping photos and posting them on Instagram. Tour guides stop by. A former cartel hit man-turned-YouTube-star appeared, offering DVDs recounting his exploits with Mr. Escobar and anecdotes from the day the building was attacked.

In April, fed up, the mayor intervened.

“This symbol, which is a symbol of illegality, of evil, will be brought to the ground,” said Federico Gutiérrez. The mayor vowed to topple the building by next year and to put a park remembering victims in its place.

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Pablo Escobar: 8 Interesting Facts About the King of Cocaine

More than two decades after his death, Pablo Escobar remains as well known as he was during his heyday as the head of the Medellín drug cartel . His fixture in popular culture is largely thanks to countless books, movies, and songs. We’ve decided to make our contribution with a list of facts about the life of the larger-than-life Escobar.

Rise to Power

Escobar, the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher, began his life of crime while still a teenager. According to some reports, his first illegal scheme was selling fake diplomas. He then branched out into falsifying report cards before smuggling stereo equipment and stealing tombstones in order to resell them. Escobar also stole cars, and it was this offense that resulted in his first arrest, in 1974. Shortly thereafter, he became an established drug smuggler, and by the mid-1970s he had helped found the crime organization that evolved into the Medellín cartel.

Mucho Dinero

At the height of its power, the Medellín cartel dominated the cocaine trade, earning an estimated $420 million a week and making its leader one of the wealthiest people in the world. With a reported worth of $25 billion, Escobar had ample money to spend—and he did. His lavish lifestyle included private planes, luxurious homes (see below), and over-the-top parties. In the late 1980s he reportedly offered to pay off his country’s debt of $10 billion if he would be exempt from any extradition treaty. In addition, while his family was on the run in 1992–93, Escobar reportedly burned $2 million in order to keep his daughter warm. Despite his best efforts, however, even Escobar couldn’t spend all that money, and much of it was stored in warehouses and fields. According to his brother, about 10%, or $2.1 billion, was written off annually—eaten by rats or destroyed by the elements. In some cases, it was simply lost.

Hacienda Nápoles

Escobar owned a number of palatial homes, but his most-notable property was the 7,000-acre estate known as Hacienda Nápoles (named after Naples, Italy), located between Bogotá and Medellín. Reportedly costing $63 million, it included a soccer field, dinosaur statues, artificial lakes, a bullfighting arena, the charred remains of a classic car collection destroyed by a rival cartel, an airstrip, a tennis court, and a zoo (more on that later). The estate—the front gate of which is topped by the plane he used on his first drug run to the U.S.—was later looted by locals, and it is now a popular tourist attraction.

King of the Jungle

Escobar’s private zoo was home to some 200 animals, including elephants, ostriches, zebras, camels, and giraffes. Many of the creatures were smuggled into the country aboard Escobar’s drug planes. After his death in 1993, most of the animals were transferred to zoos. However, four hippopotamuses were left behind. They soon multiplied, and by 2016 upwards of 40 lived in the area. The potentially dangerous animals have damaged farms and inspired fear in locals. Authorities began castrating male hippos in an effort to control the population.

Perhaps hoping to win the support of everyday Colombians, Escobar became known for his philanthropic efforts, which led to the nickname Robin Hood . He built hospitals, stadiums, and housing for the poor. He even sponsored local soccer teams. His popularity with many Colombians was demonstrated when he was elected to an alternate seat in the country’s Congress in 1982. Alas, two years later he was forced to resign after a campaign to expose his criminal activities. The justice minister who led the efforts was assassinated.

“Plata o Plomo”

Escobar’s way of handling problems was “plata o plomo,” meaning “silver” (bribes) or “lead” (bullets). While he preferred the former, he had no qualms about the latter option, earning a reputation for ruthlessness. He reportedly killed some 4,000 people, including numerous police officers and government officials. In 1989 the cartel was blamed for detonating a bomb on a plane that was carrying an alleged informant. Some 100 people died.

La Catedral

In 1991 Escobar offered to turn himself in to authorities—if he was allowed to build his own prison. Surprisingly—or perhaps not—Colombian officials agreed. The result was the luxurious La Catedral. Not only did the facility include a nightclub, a sauna, a waterfall, and a soccer field; it also had telephones, computers, and fax machines. However, after Escobar tortured and killed two cartel members at La Catedral, officials decided to move him to a less-accommodating prison. Before he could be transferred, however, Escobar escaped, in July 1992. And that brings us to…

The King Is Muerto

After his escape, the Colombian government—reportedly aided by U.S. officials and rival drug traffickers—launched a massive manhunt. On December 1, 1993, Escobar celebrated his 44th birthday, allegedly enjoying cake, wine, and marijuana. The next day, his hideout in Medellín was discovered. While Colombian forces stormed the building, Escobar and a bodyguard managed to get to the roof. A chase and gunfight ensued, and Escobar was fatally shot. Some, however, have speculated that Escobar took his own life. The drug lord, who faced possible extradition to the U.S. if arrested, had once said that he “would rather have a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S.”

Pablo Escobar

As his control over the drug trade grew, so did his control in Colombia, he was even elected to Congress in 1982. At this point, 80% of the world’s cocaine trade was going through Escobar, and his estimated net worth was $25 billion. Despite being a known criminal, his public persona was a positive one to the people of Colombia. He wanted to be liked by the common people, so he built churches, sports fields, and public parks. People regarded him as their own personal “Robin Hood”.

While in Congress, Escobar became known for his plata o plomo tactic, which roughly means “bribery or death”. He would try to bribe fellow politicians to get policy to sway in his favor, and if the bribery ( plata or silver) was refused, he would order the death ( plomo or lead) of the opposition. Some of the most prominent men in Colombia fell victim to Escobar’s murderous plots, such as the Colombian Justice Minister, and the head of Colombia’s National Police Anti-Narcotics Unit. Escobar ordered the death of an estimated 600 police officers during his lifetime.

In 1991, Escobar faced multiple drug charges, so his lawyers came up with an unprecedented compromise. Escobar would build his own prison, and choose his own guards. Needless to say, the prison was essentially a mansion, with a Jacuzzi and other luxurious add-ons, and the guards let him carry out business from prison. This lasted until 1992 when the public found out that Escobar tortured and murdered people inside his prison. The Colombian government decided to place Escobar in a real prison, but before they could act Escobar disappeared.

Two organizations were looking for Escobar, one a US trained Colombian task force called Search Bloc, the other Los Pepes , made up of family members of Escobar’s victims and men from a rival Colombian drug cartel. On December 2, 1993, police forces found Escobar hiding in a middle-class house in Medellín and shot and killed him on the roof. Escobar was destined to die no matter which group found him first.

In August 2015, Netflix released Narcos , an American crime drama depicting Pablo Escobar’s rise to drug kingpin. A second season premiered in September 2016, and Netflix has renewed it for a season three and four.

For more information, please visit: Biography – Pablo Escobar Narcos

Merchandise: Narcos Season 1 Narcos

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Escobar : the inside story of Pablo Escobar, the world's most powerful criminal

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Pablo Escobar Biography: Colombian Drug Lord and Narcoterrorist.

Pablo Escobar was the world’s most successful drug trafficker. He was also its most deadly. During his 17- year reign at the top of the Colombian cocaine empire, he ordered the killings of thousands of people, including judges, ministers of parliament and Presidential candidates. At the height of his power he was raking in over a million dollars a day, yet in the end he was forced to live as a fugitive in the Colombian jungle. Shot down on a rooftop in the city that he had ruled over, his was a fall from grace of epic proportion.

In this week’s Biographics, we go deep into the South American drug world to reveal the true-life story of Don Pablo.

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1st, 1949 in the small town of Rinegro, 45 minutes from Medellin, Colombia. His father, Abel, was a hard working, humble cattle farmer, while his mother Hermilda was a school teacher.

Pablo, the second of seven children, was raised in a middle-class environment in a community that was fuelled by the cocaine and marijuana trade. Although not everyone directly participated in the drug business, they all had a powerful incentive in the protection of those that did. The violence that was part and parcel of enforcing the narcotics trade was all around.

Before Pablo started school, the family moved to Envigado, a small village just out of Medellin, so that Hermilda could establish an elementary school there. Abel sold the farm and took up a job as a neighbourhood watchman. Through her work at the school, Hermilda soon become a popular and well-respected member of the community.

At school, Pablo proved himself to be an able and quick-witted student. Although tending toward the chubby side, thanks to his love of fast food, he was talented in all ball sports, with a special love for soccer. Many of his teachers were involved in social causes, especially the struggle for class equality and they became powerful influences on the boy. By the time he was in his early teens, Pablo was attending street rallies and participating in such activities as throwing rocks at the police.

Pablo became part of a youth culture movement known as Nadaismo which encouraged young people to thumb their noses at the established order, disobey their parents and write their own rules. Part of this counterculture movement involved experimentation with drugs, leading the thirteen-year-old future drug kingpin to develop an addiction to marijuana which would never leave him.

The Young Thug

By the age of sixteen Pablo had developed into a plump, short youth, standing at just over five foot, six inches. He had a round face and wore a slight mustache. A couple of months before reaching his seventeenth birthday, he dropped out of school, bored with the straight-laced routine and keen to make his own way in the world.

After quitting school, the enterprising Pablo started up a little bicycle repair shop. He would prowl the streets and the local dump in search of discarded bicycle parts and then use them to fix bikes for cheap. With the money that he made from this enterprise, he purchased himself a Lambretta motorcycle. Now with a means of fast escape, he began planning how to make money more easily than repairing bicycles for a pittance.

According to legend, Pablo’s foray into crime began with him stealing headstones from the local cemetery, sandblasting the names from them and then reselling them.

Pablo decided that the route to quick cash lay in commercial business robbery. He started by scoping out potential targets. He would then ride to the target business on his motorbike, slip a balaclava over his head and rush the business with a knife or gun in hand, demand the money and then get out of there. It all happened in about 30 seconds.

After a few successful robberies, Pablo recruited his cousin to join him. One would ride the bike and act as the get away rider while the other stormed the business. Within a few months, Pablo became bored with this and moved on to bigger – and easier – things. He established a contact with a Renault car dealer who would provide him with copies of the keys to the cars that he had just sold, along with the addresses of the buyers. All that Pablo had to do was turn up at the addresses and drive the cars away.

In his late teens, Pablo got caught in the act of stealing one of these cars. He ended up spending several months in La Ladera Jail, which was to him, a positive life experience. Here he learned about how to move into bigger time criminal activity, including kidnapping and drug trafficking.

A Violent Reputation

Once back on the street, Pablo and his cousin Gustavo went right back to stealing cars. They built up a collection of stolen engine parts which they would sell off bit by bit. The pair took to building race cars, with Pablo competing in local events. Pablo and Garcia weren’t the only ones stealing cars in Medellin, which led to an extension of his operation. He decided to also sell protection, so that people would pay him to ensure that their car did not get taken.

Pablo was able to provide such a service because he had developed a reputation as an unpredictable and violent young man. If anyone owed him money, Pablo would hire some local thug to kidnap the person. He would them ransom him for whatever was owed to him. From time to time he would have the person killed even when the ransom was paid, simply to engender fear in those he dealt with.

Before long, Pablo decided to specialise in kidnappings for their own sake. Along with his cousin and future brother-in-law he nabbed a rich businessman by the name of Diego Echavarria. This man was intensely disliked by many of the poor workers in Medellin, who were being laid off in droves by industrialists like him. Despite the family okaying the $50,000 ransom demand, Echavarria was beaten, strangled and the dumped in a ditch. Even though he had just committed a terrible crime, his choice of victim made Pablo hugely popular among the common folk of Medellin. In a strange way they saw the killing as Pablo striking a blow for social equality.

Entering the Drug Trade

In 1971, the 22-year old Pablo began working for Medellin based contraband dealer Alvaro Prieto. Under Prieto, Pablo was doing a modest amount of drug trafficking. Before long, however, he decided that he wanted more of a slice of the pie for himself. He drove his stolen Renault 4 to Ecuador and bought five kilos of Peruvian cocaine paste. Successfully passing through a number of police and military checkpoints, he returned to Medellin, where he processed the cocaine. He next contacted fellow criminals the Ochoa brothers to set up a sale to local cocaine chief Fabio Restrepo. The sale netted Pablo close to a hundred thousand dollars, far surpassing anything he had previously done, and setting him firmly on the path to becoming a high-end drug dealer.

Within two months, Fabio Restrepo had been murdered. Suddenly there was a new man at the head of the Medellin cocaine operation – Pablo Escobar. It has never been conclusively proven that Pablo murdered Restrepo, but that was what everyone involved believed. The majority of those working for Restrepo were upper class dandies. They were frightened by Pablo and the ruthless hoodlums he surrounded himself with.

Shortly after muscling his way to the top of the Medellin cocaine syndicate, Pablo married fifteen-year-old Maria Victoria Helena Vellejo. Now aged twenty-six, he had a wife, wealth and power. It seemed like the sky was the limit.

The cocaine trade from Panama, through Colombia and into the United States boomed in the late 1970’s, with most of it being trafficked though Escobar’s organization. Under Pablo, the cocaine industry became streamlined. He purchased a fleet of airplanes, including a Lear jet to transport the drugs into the United States where there was an inexhaustible supply of willing buyers.

Two months after his wedding, Pablo and four others were arrested after returning from a drug run to Ecuador. Drug enforcement agents found 39 kilos of cocaine hidden in the spare tire of their truck. That amount of coke would see Pablo being put away for a long time.

His first tactic in getting out of the mess was to bribe the trial judge. The offer however was flatly rejected. Pablo then had his team research the judge’s background. They discovered that he had a brother who was a lawyer and that the two men did not get on. The lawyer was contacted and offered a huge amount to represent Pablo in the case. As suspected, the judge was forced to recuse himself due to conflict of interest. The new judge didn’t have as many scruples as the first. He accepted a bribe and Pablo and his cohorts walked free.

Exorbitant amounts of money were now pouring into Colombia, with deposits in the country’s four major banks doubling between 1976 and 1980. Pablo was able to use his millions to take possession of every step of his operation, traveling to Peru, Bolivia and Panama and buying up all the cultivation farms and processing plants. He was also able to buy off enforcement agencies in every country, developing a ruthless policy which came to be known as ‘plato o plomo’ – silver or lead. If officials didn’t accept his bribe they could expect to end up dead.

By 1980, Pablo was at the height of his power. With every law enforcement agency on his payroll, he was the unofficial king of Medellin. He wasn’t the only cocaine impresario in Colombia, but he was the most successful. He owned multiple mansions, racing cars, helicopters and planes and was constantly surrounded by bodyguards and hangers on. Cocaine money transformed Medellin, with discos and high-end restaurants opening up all over the city.

One of Pablo’s passions was soccer and now he was able to indulge it. He paid to have fields levelled and sodded and lights installed so that he and his crew could play at night time. He would also employ professional game callers to announce the matches as if they were an FA cup final.

In 1979, Pablo built a lavish country estate on a seventy-four-hundred-acre ranch, eighty miles of Medellin, dubbing it Hacienda Los Napoles. He brought exotic animals from all over the world to populate the farm, built six swimming pools and a huge mansion that could sleep a hundred guests.

At the same time that he was indulging his every materialistic whim in private, Pablo began tending to his public image. He constantly denied that he was involved in any illicit activity, portraying a formal, likeable persona and appearing humble and polite. He consciously cultivated the image that he was a freedom fighter for the underprivileged, setting himself up as an alternative to the establishment. He also poured millions of dollars into social construction programs.

Between 1980-1982, Pablo did more to help out the poor in Medellin than the Colombian government had ever done. One of his most popular initiatives was a housing project called Barrio Pablo Escobar, where houses were built and given to families who had previously been sheltering in shacks at the city dump. This and a host of other projects easily made him the most popular citizen in Medellin.

In private, Pablo conducted himself in an understated manner. He spoke softly and was generally relaxed and casual with those around him. He was hugely self-indulgent – with food, drink and women – and considered himself a law unto himself. On one occasion when an employee was found to have stolen from him, Pablo had him brought before him bound hand and foot and then kicked him into the swimming pool, making everyone watch as the man drowned.

A Brief Political Career

With his popularity among the masses firmly established and his dominance over his empire assured, the next logical step for Pablo was politics. His path to legitimate office began in 1978 when he was elected as a substitute city councillor in Medellin. In 1980 he gave his personal and financial support to the formation of a new national political movement, the New Liberal Party. Then, in 1982 he ran for, and was elected to Congress, albeit as a substitute who attended when the primary delegate from Medellin was unavailable.

A major perk of being elected to Congress was that Pablo now had judicial immunity, meaning that he could not be convicted for a crime under Colombian law. The position also afforded him a diplomatic visa, which he made use of to regularly take his family on trips to the United States. On one trip he purchased an $8 million mansion in Miami Beach, Florida.

Pablo now had political legitimacy to go with his massive wealth. The next acquisition was a personal army. When a friend of the family was kidnapped by M-19 guerrillas, he created a private militia to hunt down the rebels. Pablo’s army was known as ‘Death to Kidnappers.’

Pablo’s wider exposure as a result of his political office was the beginning of his downfall. In Medellin he was viewed as a Robin Hood figure, but when he tried to gain the favor of polite Colombian society he was not welcomed. They viewed him as what he really was – a ruthless cocaine king with absolutely no scruples.

When he turned up to take his seat in Congress as an alternate for the first time on August 16th 1983 with a bevy of bodyguards in tow he was first denied entry for not wearing a tie. He quickly got hold of one and swept into the packed chamber. He slumped down in his allocated seat and began nervously to bite his fingernails.

Immediately the Chamber president stood and demanded that all bodyguards be removed from the chamber. Pablo nodded and his thugs left the room. Within minutes Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara was on his feet. Defending a claim of corruption that had been brought against him, Lara pointed the finger at Pablo, stating . . .

We have a congressman who was born in a very poor area himself, very, very poor, and afterwards, through astute business deals in bicycles and other things, appears with a gigantic fortune, with nine planes, three hangars at the Medellin airport and creates the Movement ‘Death to Kidnappers’, while on the other hand, mounts charitable organizations with which he tries to bribe a needy and unprotected people. And there are investigations going in the United Sates, of which I cannot inform you here tonight in the House, on the criminal conduct of [Pablo Escobar].

Pablo said nothing in the House. When he left he was besieged by reporters. Breaking free, he stormed off. Through his lawyer he informed Lara that if he did not present evidence of his claims within 24 hours he would face legal action. Lara willingly obliged and in the coming days the newspapers were filled with all sorts of revelations about Pablo’s criminal activity.

Pablo was now persona non-grata in political circles. He was kicked out of the New Liberal Party and the US Embassy revoked his diplomatic visa. The Catholic church also renounced their support of him. The government even seized 85 of the exotic animals on Pablo’s ranch claiming that they had entered the country illegally. Pablo’s political career was now in ruins.

Even worse for Pablo, the Colombia government, at Lara’s urgings, were fast tracking an extradition treaty with the US that would see him tried in America for selling cocaine in that country.

In May 1984, Justice Minister Lara was shoot seven times while riding in his chauffeur driven limousine. But Pablo had more powerful enemies. US President Ronald Reagan had announced a major crackdown on the cocaine trade. With the death of Lara, the Colombian government were willing to cooperate with American authorities to go after Narco kingpins. Pablo was the biggest of them all.

The killing of Lara also turned much of the Colombian population against Pablo. By the act he had declared war on the state. For Pablo the heat was too much to bear and he skipped the country, taking a helicopter to Panama City. Yet, despite being offered asylum in Panama by President Manuel Noriega the year before, Pablo and his cronies were not welcomed by the authorities.

After just a few weeks in exile, Pablo was desperate to get back home. He made overtures to the Colombian government, drafting a proposal whereby he would go straight and use his massive influence to rid Colombia of drug trafficking provided that he could retain his possessions in Medellin and that he would be exempt from arrest or extradition to the US.

The offer was roundly rejected. When the Panamanian army raided one of the labs he had situated on the Colombian border he fled Panama for Nicaragua. Meanwhile, he was hearing that his absence from Colombia was undermining his control of the Medellin cartel. The kidnapping of his 73-year-old father was a step too far. Pablo ordered a killing frenzy throughout Medellin. Dozens of suspected kidnappers were gunned down. Finally, the old man was released with no ransom being paid.

All Out War

In the midst of the carnage over his father’s kidnapping, Pablo returned to Colombia. He was now determined to take on the state with everything that he had. Around Medellin he was untouchable, having bought off every official. This allowed him, although being the most wanted man in the country, to move around the town freely.

Pablo’s vengeful focus during the mid-80’s was squarely centered on the judiciary, especially judges who supported the extradition treaty with the US. During this time more than thirty judges were shot dead. Then, in November, 1985, the guerrilla group M-19, having been paid a million dollars by Pablo, stormed the Palace of Justice and held the entire Supreme Court hostage. They demanded that the government renounce the extradition treaty. In the resulting siege, 11 of the 24 justices, along with 40 of the rebels, were killed.

By the beginning of 1988, killings were being reported almost on a daily basis. Martial law was declared in ordered to prevent the state from toppling. On August 18th, 1989 Pablo’s kill squads gunned down both the front-running presidential candidate Luis Galan and a state police chief. In the following four months, the Colombian government apprehended and sent more than twenty suspected drug traffickers to the United States to stand trial. A national police unit was stationed to Medellin specifically to hunt down Pablo. Within the first month, 30 of the two hundred men stationed there had been killed.

Pablo was evading his government and inflicting enormous casualties, but he was a man constantly on the run. He always stayed a step ahead of his pursuers, but he was growing tired of the constant relocations needed to do so. Eventually he agreed to negotiate.

Pablo agreed to put an end to the violence, stop all criminal activity and hand himself in. In exchange he demanded preferential treatment in a prison of his choosing and a reduced settlement. The government had already revoked the extradition treaty to the US with its 1991 Constitution so he didn’t have to worry about being sent to America.

Pablo was duly arrested and tried. He began his sentence at La Catedral prison in June, 1991. But this was like no other prison on earth. It featured a football pitch, jacuzzi and bar. The prison guards were all employees of Pablo. The prison cells were more like hotel suites and the food that Pablo and his fellow inmates ate was prepared by chefs who were brought in from fine restaurants.

After a few months, accounts began to reach official channels that Pablo was continuing to pursue his criminal activities from La Catedral. This was a violation of the surrender agreement and moves were put in place to seize him and move him to a regular prison. Pablo’s connections enabled him to get wind of the plan and he escaped before the authorities could get to him.

The hunt for Pablo was back on. But now the US and Colombian authorities were joined by a vigilante group known as Los Pepes, which stood for ‘People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.’ Los Pepes carried out a ruthless campaign, killing as many as three hundred people who were connected to Pablo and his organization.

Following his escape from La Catedral, Pablo was constantly on the run. Most of his closest associates were dead and his organization was falling apart. He was spending nights sleeping in the jungle, afraid to speak on the radio or to answer the phone.

Fate finally caught up with Pablo Escobar on December 2nd, 1993. Members of a Colombian Search Bloc team had tracked him down to house in the barrio of Los Olivos in Medellin via radio intercepts. The Search Bloc team smashed through the heavy steel door with a sledgehammer, whereupon six of them rushed into the house. It was then that the shooting started. In the house with Pablo was his most loyal bodyguard, known as Limon. They both bolted from the front room and made their way up onto the roof. The six Search Bloc members, along with others outside poured a massive barrage of gunfire at their targets. Limon was hit several times in the back and toppled to the ground below. Then Pablo went down. He was struck several times in the leg and torso but the fatal shot penetrated his skull.

On confirming his target, the leader of the operation spoke excitedly into his radio . . . ‘Viva la Colombia – we have just killed Pablo Escobar!’

But had they?

Pablo had always told his family that, if cornered he would commit suicide by placing a bullet in his skull. Many people believe that he did so, once more escaping the clutches of the Colombian authorities.

Pablo Escobar Video Biography

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Pablo Escobar Biography: Colombian Drug Lord and Narcoterrorist

November 20, 2019 by Biographics Leave a Comment

— Pablo Escobar was the world’s most successful drug trafficker. He was also its most deadly. During his 17- year reign at the top of the Colombian cocaine empire, he ordered the killings of thousands of people, including judges, ministers of parliament and Presidential candidates. —

Transcript Provided by YouTube:

00:00 Pablo Escobar Pablo Escobar was the world’s most successful 00:02 drug trafficker. 00:04 He was also its most deadly. 00:06 During his 17- year reign at the top of the Colombian cocaine empire, he ordered the killings 00:12 of thousands of people, including judges, ministers of parliament and Presidential candidates. 00:17 At the height of his power he was raking in over a million dollars a day, yet in the end 00:23 he was forced to live as a fugitive in the Colombian jungle. 00:27 Shot down on a rooftop in the city that he had ruled over, his was a fall from grace 00:33 of epic proportion. 00:34 In this week’s Biographics, we go deep into the South American drug world to reveal the 00:38 true-life story of Don Pablo. 00:45 Early Life Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 00:59 1st, 1949 in the small town of Rinegro, 45 minutes from Medellin, Colombia. 01:05 His father, Abel, was a hard working, humble cattle farmer, while his mother Hermilda was 01:09 a school teacher. 01:10 Pablo, the second of seven children, was raised in a middle-class environment in a community 01:15 that was fuelled by the cocaine and marijuana trade. 01:18 Although not everyone directly participated in the drug business, they all had a powerful 01:23 incentive in the protection of those that did. 01:27 The violence that was part and parcel of enforcing the narcotics trade was all around. 01:32 Before Pablo started school, the family moved to Envigado, a small village just out of Medellin, 01:36 so that Hermilda could establish an elementary school there. 01:39 Abel sold the farm and took up a job as a neighbourhood watchman. 01:42 Through her work at the school, Hermilda soon become a popular and well-respected member 01:47 of the community. 01:48 At school, Pablo proved himself to be an able and quick-witted student. 01:51 Although tending toward the chubby side, thanks to his love of fast food, he was talented 01:55 in all ball sports, with a special love for soccer. 01:59 Many of his teachers were involved in social causes, especially the struggle for class 02:04 equality and they became powerful influences on the boy. 02:08 By the time he was in his early teens, Pablo was attending street rallies and participating 02:12 in such activities as throwing rocks at the police. 02:16 Pablo became part of a youth culture movement known as Nadaismo which encouraged young people 02:21 to thumb their noses at the established order, disobey their parents and write their own 02:28 rules. 02:29 Part of this counterculture movement involved experimentation with drugs, leading the thirteen-year-old 02:34 future drug kingpin to develop an addiction to marijuana which would never leave him. 02:41 The Young Thug By the age of sixteen Pablo had developed 02:51 into a plump, short youth, standing at just over five foot, six inches. 02:55 He had a round face and wore a slight moustache. 02:58 A couple of months before reaching his seventeenth birthday, he dropped out of school, bored 03:02 with the straight-laced routine and keen to make his own way in the world. 03:07 After quitting school, the enterprising Pablo started up a little bicycle repair shop. 03:11 He would prowl the streets and the local dump in search of discarded bicycle parts and then 03:16 use them to fix bikes for cheap. 03:18 With the money that he made from this enterprise, he purchased himself a Lambretta motorcycle. 03:24 Now with a means of fast escape, he began planning how to make money more easily than 03:29 repairing bicycles for a pittance. 03:31 According to legend, Pablo’s foray into crime began with him stealing headstones from 03:36 the local cemetery, sandblasting the names from them and then reselling them. 03:40 Pablo decided that the route to quick cash lay in commercial business robbery. 03:45 He started by scoping out potential targets. 03:48 He would then ride to the target business on his motorbike, slip a balaclava over his 03:52 head and rush the business with a knife or gun in hand, demand the money and then get 03:57 out of there. 03:58 It all happened in about 30 seconds. 04:00 After a few successful robberies, Pablo recruited his cousin to join him. 04:04 One would ride the bike and act as the get away rider while the other stormed the business. 04:09 Within a few months, Pablo became bored with this and moved on to bigger – and easier 04:14 – things. 04:15 He established a contact with a Renault car dealer who would provide him with copies of 04:19 the keys to the cars that he had just sold, along with the addresses of the buyers. 04:23 All that Pablo had to do was turn up at the addresses and drive the cars away. 04:28 In his late teens, Pablo got caught in the act of stealing one of these cars. 04:32 He ended up spending several months in La Ladera Jail, which was to him, a positive 04:37 life experience. 04:38 Here he learned about how to move into bigger time criminal activity, including kidnapping 04:43 and drug trafficking. 04:46 A Violent Reputation Once back on the street, Pablo and his cousin 04:57 Gustavo went right back to stealing cars. 04:59 They built up a collection of stolen engine parts which they would sell off bit by bit. 05:03 The pair took to building race cars, with Pablo competing in local events. 05:07 Pablo and Garcia weren’t the only ones stealing cars in Medellin, which led to an extension 05:13 of his operation. 05:14 He decided to also sell protection, so that people would pay him to ensure that their 05:20 car did not get taken. 05:21 Pablo was able to provide such a service because he had developed a reputation as an unpredictable 05:26 and violent young man. 05:28 If anyone owed him money, Pablo would hire some local thug to kidnap the person. 05:32 He would them ransom him for whatever was owed to him. 05:35 From time to time he would have the person killed even when the ransom was paid, simply 05:39 to engender fear in those he dealt with. 05:41 Before long, Pablo decided to specialise in kidnappings for their own sake. 05:46 Along with his cousin and future brother-in-law he nabbed a rich businessman by the name of 05:50 Diego Echavarria. 05:51 This man was intensely disliked by many of the poor workers in Medellin, who were being 05:56 laid off in droves by industrialists like him. 05:59 Despite the family okaying the $50,000 ransom demand, Echavarria was beaten, strangled and 06:05 the dumped in a ditch. 06:06 Even though he had just committed a terrible crime, his choice of victim made Pablo hugely 06:11 popular among the common folk of Medellin. 06:14 In a strange way they saw the killing as Pablo striking a blow for social equality. 06:24 Entering the Drug Trade In 1971, the 22-year old Pablo began working 06:32 for Medellin based contraband dealer Alvaro Prieto. 06:36 Under Prieto, Pablo was doing a modest amount of drug trafficking. 06:40 Before long, however, he decided that he wanted more of a slice of the pie for himself. 06:45 He drove his stolen Renault 4 to Ecuador and bought five kilos of Peruvian cocaine paste. 06:51 Successfully passing through a number of police and military checkpoints, he returned to Medellin, 06:55 where he processed the cocaine. 06:57 He next contacted fellow criminals the Ochoa brothers to set up a sale to local cocaine 07:02 chief Fabio Restrepo. 07:04 The sale netted Pablo close to a hundred thousand dollars, far surpassing anything he had previously 07:10 done, and setting him firmly on the path to becoming a high-end drug dealer. 07:15 Within two months, Fabio Restrepo had been murdered. 07:18 Suddenly there was a new man at the head of the Medellin cocaine operation – Pablo Escobar. 07:23 It has never been conclusively proven that Pablo murdered Restrepo, but that was what 07:28 everyone involved believed. 07:30 The majority of those working for Restrepo were upper class dandies. 07:34 They were frightened by Pablo and the ruthless hoodlums he surrounded himself with. 07:39 Shortly after muscling his way to the top of the Medellin cocaine syndicate, Pablo married 07:43 fifteen-year-old Maria Victoria Helena Vellejo. 07:47 Now aged twenty-six, he had a wife, wealth and power. 07:51 It seemed like the sky was the limit. 07:54 On Top The cocaine trade from Panama, through Colombia 07:57 and into the United States boomed in the late 1970’s, with most of it being trafficked 08:03 though Escobar’s organization. 08:04 Under Pablo, the cocaine industry became streamlined. 08:08 He purchased a fleet of airplanes, including a Lear jet to transport the drugs into the 08:13 United States where there was an inexhaustible supply of willing buyers. 08:17 Two months after his wedding, Pablo and four others were arrested after returning from 08:21 a drug run to Ecuador. 08:23 Drug enforcement agents found 39 kilos of cocaine hidden in the spare tire of their 08:28 truck. 08:29 That amount of coke would see Pablo being put away for a long time. 08:32 His first tactic in getting out of the mess was to bribe the trial judge. 08:36 The offer however was flatly rejected. 08:38 Pablo then had his team research the judge’s background. 08:41 They discovered that he had a brother who was a lawyer and that the two men did not 08:45 get on. 08:46 The lawyer was contacted and offered a huge amount to represent Pablo in the case. 08:50 As suspected, the judge was forced to recuse himself due to conflict of interest. 08:55 The new judge didn’t have as many scruples as the first. 08:59 He accepted a bribe and Pablo and his cohorts walked free. 09:02 Exorbitant amounts of money were now pouring into Colombia, with deposits in the country’s 09:07 four major banks doubling between 1976 and 1980. 09:11 Pablo was able to use his millions to take possession of every step of his operation, 09:16 traveling to Peru, Bolivia and Panama and buying up all the cultivation farms and processing 09:21 plants. 09:22 He was also able to buy off enforcement agencies in every country, developing a ruthless policy 09:27 which came to be known as ‘plato o plomo’ – silver or lead. 09:31 If officials didn’t accept his bribe they could expect to end up dead. 09:35 By 1980, Pablo was at the height of his power. 09:38 With every law enforcement agency on his payroll, he was the unofficial king of Medellin. 09:44 He wasn’t the only cocaine impresario in Colombia, but he was the most successful. 09:49 He owned multiple mansions, racing cars, helicopters and planes and was constantly surrounded by 09:55 bodyguards and hangers on. 09:57 Cocaine money transformed Medellin, with discos and high-end restaurants opening up all over 10:02 the city. 10:03 One of Pablo’s passions was soccer and now he was able to indulge it. 10:07 He paid to have fields levelled and sodded and lights installed so that he and his crew 10:11 could play at night time. 10:13 He would also employ professional game callers to announce the matches as if they were an 10:17 FA cup final. 10:18 In 1979, Pablo built a lavish country estate on a seventy-four-hundred-acre ranch, eighty 10:23 miles of Medellin, dubbing it Hacienda Los Napoles. 10:28 He brought exotic animals from all over the world to populate the farm, built six swimming 10:32 pools and a huge mansion that could sleep a hundred guests. 10:36 At the same time that he was indulging his every materialistic whim in private, Pablo 10:41 began tending to his public image. 10:43 He constantly denied that he was involved in any illicit activity, portraying a formal, 10:49 likeable persona and appearing humble and polite. 10:52 He consciously cultivated the image that he was a freedom fighter for the underprivileged, 10:56 setting himself up as an alternative to the establishment. 10:59 He also poured millions of dollars into social construction programs. 11:03 Between 1980-1982, Pablo did more to help out the poor in Medellin than the Colombian 11:08 government had ever done. 11:10 One of his most popular initiatives was a housing project called Barrio Pablo Escobar, 11:15 where houses were built and given to families who had previously been sheltering in shacks 11:19 at the city dump. 11:21 This and a host of other projects easily made him the most popular citizen in Medellin. 11:26 In private, Pablo conducted himself in an understated manner. 11:30 He spoke softly and was generally relaxed and casual with those around him. 11:34 He was hugely self-indulgent – with food, drink and women – and considered himself 11:40 a law unto himself. 11:42 On one occasion when an employee was found to have stolen from him, Pablo had him brought 11:46 before him bound hand and foot and then kicked him into the swimming pool, making everyone 11:51 watch as the man drowned. 12:01 A Brief Political Career With his popularity among the masses firmly 12:06 established and his dominance over his empire assured, the next logical step for Pablo was 12:11 politics. 12:12 His path to legitimate office began in 1978 when he was elected as a substitute city councillor 12:18 in Medellin. 12:19 In 1980 he gave his personal and financial support to the formation of a new national 12:23 political movement, the New Liberal Party. 12:25 Then, in 1982 he ran for, and was elected to Congress, albeit as a substitute who attended 12:32 when the primary delegate from Medellin was unavailable. 12:34 A major perk of being elected to Congress was that Pablo now had judicial immunity, 12:40 meaning that he could not be convicted for a crime under Colombian law. 12:45 The position also afforded him a diplomatic visa, which he made use of to regularly take 12:49 his family on trips to the United States. 12:51 On one trip he purchased an $8 million mansion in Miami Beach, Florida. 12:56 Pablo now had political legitimacy to go with his massive wealth. 13:00 The next acquisition was a personal army. 13:02 When a friend of the family was kidnapped by M-19 guerrillas, he created a private militia 13:07 to hunt down the rebels. 13:09 Pablo’s army was known as ‘Death to Kidnappers.’ 13:12 Pablo’s wider exposure as a result of his political office was the beginning of his 13:17 downfall. 13:18 In Medellin he was viewed as a Robin Hood figure, but when he tried to gain the favour 13:23 of polite Colombian society he was not welcomed. 13:26 They viewed him as what he really was – a ruthless cocaine king with absolutely no scruples. 13:33 When he turned up to take his seat in Congress as an alternate for the first time on August 13:36 16th 1983 with a bevy of bodyguards in tow he was first denied entry for not wearing 13:42 a tie. 13:43 He quickly got hold of one and swept into the packed chamber. 13:46 He slumped down in his allocated seat and began nervously to bite his fingernails. 13:50 Immediately the Chamber president stood and demanded that all bodyguards be removed from 13:54 the chamber. 13:55 Pablo nodded and his thugs left the room. 13:58 Within minutes Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara was on his feet. 14:01 Defending a claim of corruption that had been brought against him, Lara pointed the finger 14:06 at Pablo, stating . . . We have a congressman who was born in a very 14:10 poor area himself, very, very poor, and afterwards, through astute business deals in bicycles 14:15 and other things, appears with a gigantic fortune, with nine planes, three hangars at 14:20 the Medellin airport and creates the Movement ‘Death to Kidnappers’, while on the other 14:25 hand, mounts charitable organizations with which he tries to bribe a needy and unprotected 14:30 people. 14:31 And there are investigations going in the United Sates, of which I cannot inform you 14:34 here tonight in the House, on the criminal conduct of [Pablo Escobar]. 14:39 Pablo said nothing in the House. 14:42 When he left he was besieged by reporters. 14:44 Breaking free, he stormed off. 14:46 Through his lawyer he informed Lara that if he did not present evidence of his claims 14:50 within 24 hours he would face legal action. 14:53 Lara willingly obliged and in the coming days the newspapers were filled with all sorts 14:57 of revelations about Pablo’s criminal activity. 15:05 Downfall Pablo was now persona non-grata in political 15:13 circles. 15:14 He was kicked out of the New Liberal Party and the US Embassy revoked his diplomatic 15:19 visa. 15:20 The Catholic church also renounced their support of him. 15:22 The government even seized 85 of the exotic animals on Pablo’s ranch claiming that they 15:27 had entered the country illegally. 15:29 Pablo’s political career was now in ruins. 15:32 Even worse for Pablo, the Colombia government, at Lara’s urgings, were fast tracking an 15:36 extradition treaty with the US that would see him tried in America for selling cocaine 15:40 in that country. 15:41 In May 1984, Justice Minister Lara was shoot seven times while riding in his chauffer driven 15:47 limousine. 15:48 But Pablo had more powerful enemies. 15:49 US President Ronald Reagan had announced a major crackdown on the cocaine trade. 15:54 With the death of Lara, the Colombian government were willing to cooperate with American authorities 15:58 to go after Narco kingpins. 16:01 Pablo was the biggest of them all. 16:03 The killing of Lara also turned much of the Columbian population against Pablo. 16:07 By the act he had declared war on the state. 16:10 For Pablo the heat was too much to bear and he skipped the country, taking a helicopter 16:14 to Panama City. 16:16 Yet, despite being offered asylum in Panama by President Manuel Noriega the year before, 16:19 Pablo and his cronies were not welcomed by the authorities. 16:22 After just a few weeks in exile, Pablo was desperate to get back home. 16:26 He made overtures to the Colombian government, drafting a proposal whereby he would go straight 16:30 and use his massive influence to rid Colombia of drug trafficking provided that he could 16:35 retain his possessions in Medellin and that he would be exempt from arrest or extradition 16:40 to the US. 16:41 The offer was roundly rejected. 16:44 When the Panamanian army raided one of the labs he had situated on the Colombian border 16:48 he fled Panama for Nicaragua. 16:50 Meanwhile, he was hearing that his absence from Colombia was undermining his control 16:54 of the Medellin cartel. 16:56 The kidnapping of his 73-year-old father was a step too far. 16:59 Pablo ordered a killing frenzy throughout Medellin. 17:02 Dozens of suspected kidnappers were gunned down. 17:05 Finally, the old man was released with no ransom being paid. 17:13 All Out War In the midst of the carnage over his father’s 17:23 kidnapping, Pablo returned to Colombia. 17:25 He was now determined to take on the state with everything that he had. 17:29 Around Medellin he was untouchable, having bought off every official. 17:32 This allowed him, although being the most wanted man in the country, to move around 17:36 the town freely. 17:37 Pablo’s vengeful focus during the mid-80’s was squarely centred on the judiciary, especially 17:42 judges who supported the extradition treaty with the US. 17:46 During this time more than thirty judges were shot dead. 17:49 Then, in November, 1985, the guerrilla group M-19, having been paid a million dollars by 17:54 Pablo, stormed the Palace of Justice and held the entire Supreme Court hostage. 17:59 They demanded that the government renounce the extradition treaty. 18:03 In the resulting siege, 11 of the 24 justices, along with 40 of the rebels, were killed. 18:08 By the beginning of 1988, killings were being reported almost on a daily basis. 18:13 Martial law was declared in ordered to prevent the state from toppling. 18:17 On August 18th, 1989 Pablo’s kill squads gunned down both the front-running presidential 18:22 candidate Luis Galan and a state police chief. 18:25 In the following four months, the Colombian government apprehended and sent more than 18:29 twenty suspected drug traffickers to the United States to stand trial. 18:33 A national police unit was stationed to Medellin specifically to hunt down Pablo. 18:38 Within the first month, 30 of the two hundred men stationed there had been killed. 18:44 Pablo was evading his government and inflicting enormous casualties, but he was a man constantly 18:49 on the run. 18:50 He always stayed a step ahead of his pursuers, but he was growing tired of the constant relocations 18:55 needed to do so. 18:56 Eventually he agreed to negotiate. 18:58 Pablo agreed to put an end to the violence, stop all criminal activity and hand himself 19:03 in. 19:04 In exchange he demanded preferential treatment in a prison of his choosing and a reduced 19:08 settlement. 19:09 The government had already revoked the extradition treaty to the US with its 1991 Constitution 19:15 so he didn’t have to worry about being sent to America. 19:19 Pablo was duly arrested and tried. 19:22 He began his sentence at La Catedral prison in June, 1991. 19:26 But this was like no other prison on earth. 19:29 It featured a football pitch, jacuzzi and bar. 19:32 The prison guards were all employees of Pablo. 19:34 The prison cells were more like hotel suites and the food that Pablo and his fellow inmates 19:38 ate was prepared by chefs who were brought in from fine restaurants. 19:42 After a few months, accounts began to reach official channels that Pablo was continuing 19:46 to pursue his criminal activities from La Catedral. 19:49 This was a violation of the surrender agreement and moves were put in place to seize him and 19:54 move him to a regular prison. 19:55 Pablo’s connections enabled him to get wind of the plan and he escaped before the authorities 20:00 could get to him. 20:05 Fugitive The hunt for Pablo was back on. 20:12 But now the US and Colombian authorities were joined by a vigilante group known as Los Pepes, 20:18 which stood for ‘People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.’ 20:21 Los Pepes carried out a ruthless campaign, killing as many as three hundred people who 20:26 were connected to Pablo and his organization. 20:28 Following his escape from La Catedral, Pablo was constantly on the run. 20:31 Most of his closest associates were dead and his organization was falling apart. 20:36 He was spending nights sleeping in the jungle, afraid to speak on the radio or to answer 20:40 the phone. 20:41 Fate finally caught up with Pablo Escobar on December 2nd, 1993. 20:46 Members of a Colombian Search Bloc team had tracked him down to house in the barrio of 20:49 Los Olivos in Medellin via radio intercepts. 20:52 The Search Bloc team smashed through the heavy steel door with a sledgehammer, whereupon 20:56 six of them rushed into the house. 20:57 It was then that the shooting started. 20:59 In the house with Pablo was his most loyal bodyguard, known as Limon. 21:03 They both bolted from the front room and made their way up onto the roof. 21:06 The six Search Bloc members, along with others outside poured a massive barrage of gunfire 21:11 at their targets. 21:12 Limon was hit several times in the back and toppled to the ground below. 21:15 Then Pablo went down. 21:16 He was struck several times in the leg and torso but the fatal shot penetrated his skull. 21:21 On confirming his target, the leader of the operation spoke excitedly into his radio . . . ‘Viva 21:26 la Colombia – we have just killed Pablo Escobar!’ 21:29 But had they? 21:31 Pablo had always told his family that, if cornered he would commit suicide by placing 21:35 a bullet in his skull. 21:37 Many people believe that he did so, once more escaping the clutches of the Colombian authorities.

— This post was previously published on YouTube. — Photo credit: Screenshot from video.

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Biographics will provide video biographies about fascinating people four times per week. Co-owned by Simon Whistler & Shell Harris (co-founded with TopTenzNet - https://www.youtube.com/user/toptenznet) this biography channel will introduce you to people who changed the world for better and for worse. Website: Biographics.org

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The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar

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When Roberto Escobar was the head accountant for the Medellín cartel, in the nineteen-eighties, he handled billions of dollars a year—so much cash that he sometimes resorted to stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it in the countryside. Known as El Osito, or Little Bear, he was the older brother of the narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar, who was then among the richest men in the world, responsible for a drug-smuggling empire that extended from Colombia to a dozen other countries. Although Roberto was never as extravagant as his brother, he was accustomed to flying on private jets, and sent his children to a Swiss boarding school. Once, during an extended hike through the forest to elude capture, he threw a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars into a river, because it was heavy.

These days, Roberto Escobar, having served fourteen years in prison, earns money by leading tourists around one of his family’s former safe houses. The house, a bungalow of white painted brick, can be reached by a gated driveway off a steep mountain road, roughly halfway between the Envigado plateau, where Pablo Escobar grew up, and the middle-class neighborhood in Medellín where he was gunned down by Colombian police, in 1993. One recent morning, a group of visitors from the United States and Europe arrived in a chauffeured van—part of a growing influx of narcoturistas, who come to see the places where Pablo Escobar lived and worked. Roberto, seventy-one, still looked like an accountant; he wore khakis, a blue short-sleeved shirt, and thick-rimmed spectacles. While he was in prison, a letter bomb delivered to his cell exploded, leaving him blind in his right eye and deaf in his right ear. His damaged eye was a milky blue, and he periodically squirted drops of medicine into it.

Roberto was a gruff tour guide, hustling guests from room to room, but his visitors seemed too awestruck to complain. An exterior wall was speckled with ragged bullet holes, the result of a kidnapping attempt. Inside, a Jet Ski—supposedly one that Roger Moore used in a James Bond film—sat near a photograph of Escobar driving it across bright-blue water. Beneath a writing desk in the living room, Escobar lifted a plank to reveal a hidden compartment. “We could fit two million dollars there,” he said, then peremptorily dropped the plank. In the dining room, he pointed to an oil painting of a brown stallion, a racehorse named Earthquake. Angrily, he recounted how enemies had stolen the horse from him and returned it castrated. Shaking his head, he said, “No act of violence is justified.”

In 2014, Roberto founded a holding company, Escobar, Inc., to license the family name. But he is a minor player in a growing industry. An increasing number of people who knew Pablo Escobar—employees, relatives, and enemies—are trying to sell versions of his epic life and death, encouraging a cottage industry of books, television shows, and documentaries. Along with the narcotours that operate out of Medellín, there are souvenir venders selling Escobar baseball caps, ashtrays, mugs, and key rings; Escobar T-shirts are displayed next to soccer jerseys and Pope Francis memorabilia.

In the past few years, Hollywood has examined his story in a series of films: “ Escobar: Paradise Lost ” (Benicio Del Toro; innocent surfer drawn into drug web), “ The Infiltrator ” (Bryan Cranston; double agent), “Loving Pablo” (Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; clandestine romance with kingpin), and “ American Made ” (Tom Cruise; pilot turns Escobar crony turns informant). The depiction most responsible for the tourist boom is the Netflix series “Narcos,” in which the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura plays Escobar as both psychopath and doting family man—a Latin American Tony Soprano. Netflix does not disclose viewership numbers, but the audience for the show, which will launch its fourth season this year, has been estimated at three million. In 2016, Escobar, Inc., sent a letter to Netflix, demanding reparations for appropriating the family story; in a subsequent interview with the Hollywood Reporter , Roberto said that if he wasn’t paid a billion dollars he would “close their little show.” (Escobar and Netflix declined to comment on the possibility of a settlement.)

No one disputes that Pablo Escobar was a murderer, a torturer, and a kidnapper. But he was loved by many in Medellín, and, increasingly, he is an object of fascination abroad. At his zenith, he was the most notorious outlaw on the planet, with control of some eighty per cent of the cocaine entering the U.S. and of a fortune estimated at three billion dollars. In many respects, he remains Colombia’s most famous citizen, a charismatic entrepreneur of boundless ambition who delighted in his Robin Hood image, even as he killed thousands of people to subvert the government. In Colombia, his legacy touches nearly everyone, but few people agree on whether his story should be seen as entertainment or as a cautionary tale.

At the end of the tour, Roberto posed for selfies with visitors and autographed photos of Escobar, along with copies of his memoir, a slim volume titled “My Brother Pablo.” (“My mother still recalls that, from the time he was a little boy, Pablo used to tell her, ‘I want to be a lawyer and have a good car.’ ”) The tourists handed payments to a group of wolfish young men who served as Roberto’s assistants. Before I left, I asked him why his brother continued to inspire people around the world. “It’s because Pablo helped the poorest people of this country,” he replied. It was a kind of catechism; he did not explain further. When I asked if his brother was a good man, he shrugged and said, “To me he was.”

In the old city center of Medellín is a street of funeral parlors. On a bright morning, I went there to meet Jesús Correa, an employee at one of the funeral homes and one of the first people to appreciate the mythic quality of Escobar’s life.

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Correa, an amiable man of sixty-three, was bald and corpulent, and dressed in a gray suit, a pink shirt, and a burgundy tie. He took me for a walk, and, two blocks from the funeral home, we came to an open-air café, painted bright yellow and orange, where men sat drinking beer and watching soccer on television. “Here is where it all began,” Correa said. In the early seventies, the café was called Las Dos Tortugas—the Two Turtles—and it was a favored meeting place for robbers and smugglers. A dropout from Medellín’s Universidad Autónoma, Escobar had gone into business selling stolen tombstones and contraband American cigarettes. He began hanging out with the crowd at Las Dos Tortugas, coming and going on a Lambretta motorbike. Colombia’s drug trade was flourishing, although in those days it was mostly marijuana, which the locals called marimba. Escobar found his niche as the U.S. cocaine market began to take off.

Correa ran his own hustle out of the funeral home, which was owned by a friend: he bought contraband French perfume from a contact in Panama, then sold it in Medellín. One day, one of Escobar’s pistoleros—low-level shooters—summoned him to Las Dos Tortugas and asked if he could get Cartier and Chanel. When Correa assured him he could, the pistolero gave him an order. After that, the gangsters started buying perfume for their girlfriends, and Correa became known as El Perfumero.

Correa took pleasure in associating with men who had monikers like Filth and Spider. The cartel’s sicarios, or hit men, operated out of an oil-change shop not far from the funeral home; a group of more than a hundred gathered there to plot killings, kidnappings, and bombings. Some were policemen, who came to change out of their uniforms and then attack their colleagues. Correa was fascinated, and gradually he became a welcome visitor. “Why did I do it?” he said. “Out of prurient interest, I think, pure and simple. As a boy, I read a book about the Untouchables of Eliot Ness, and I was magnetized by the Chicago gangsters of the time—Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly. With the criminals I was getting to know here, I thought, One day I’ll write a book. My friends warned me that I would be dead within six months.”

One day, he recalled, some Escobar men began discussing a murder they were planning. “I got up, as if to leave the room, but one of them said, ‘Stay. We trust you.’ I stayed.” Correa realized that he had crossed a line. “I’m a big reader of World War Two histories,” he said. “And something I’ve always noticed is that, for those who were in the concentration camps, a moment comes when they became accustomed to everything going on around them.” Correa waved to the streets around us. “I mean, I suffered over what was happening, the violence. But the morbid curiosity—you know, it was like Alka-Seltzer. I felt something here, inside me.” Correa made an itching motion with his fingers around his stomach, and smiled.

When Escobar began to establish himself as a public figure, in the early eighties, he found other people willing to tell his story without judgment. In April, 1983, the weekly magazine Semana published an article titled “Un Robin Hood Paisa.” ( Paisa is the local term for the people of Antioquia province, which contains Medellín.) Semana described Escobar as a politically ambitious and civic-minded thirty-three-year-old businessman who owned an immense private ranch and a fleet of helicopters and airplanes. The magazine evaded questions about the origin of Escobar’s fortune, saying only that it was “the subject of widespread speculation.”

Escobar had recently mounted a campaign for Congress, in which he spent freely in Medellín’s poorer neighborhoods. He had initially tried to join a branch of Colombia’s mainstream Liberal Party, led by a popular young politician named Luis Carlos Galán, but he was thwarted when Galán denounced him as a mafioso. Escobar, undaunted, joined a different branch of the Party, with the help of a powerful, corrupt senator named Alberto Santofimio.

Escobar made it to Congress, and began working to build a political constituency in and around Medellín. “His civic vocation seems to know no limits,” Semana gushed. “His civic works include entire neighborhoods, football fields, lighting systems, reforestation programs, donations of tractors, bulldozers, etc. At the moment he is moving forward with a program to build a thousand homes on a giant lot he owns. He bought it with the idea of building a neighborhood to relocate hundreds of poor families from the slums of Medellín, and he’s already given jobs to some in his construction firm.”

For anyone looking, though, the real reasons for Escobar’s interest in politics were clear. “His main political preoccupation right now is the extradition of Colombians,” Semana said. “For him, this treaty, whereby Colombians who reside in their own country but who have issues in the United States can be handed over to the authorities of that country, constitutes ‘a violation of national sovereignty.’ ”

His electoral ambitions did not go very far. He was soon denounced as a gangster by Colombia’s justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Escobar fought back, falsely accusing the minister of being in the pocket of narcos. But then an influential newspaper editor named Guillermo Cano dug up an old news story showing that Escobar had been arrested, seven years before, for the possession of thirty-nine pounds of cocaine. Escobar was ejected from Congress, and the F.B.I. began investigating him. He went underground, and a long hunt began.

In March, 1984, Colombian and American agents raided the cartel’s headquarters. Known as Tranquilandia, it was a huge complex that contained at least seven laboratories, various airstrips, and more than a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine. A month later, Escobar had his revenge, when two of his men, riding a motorbike, ambushed Lara Bonilla’s car in Bogotá, killing him instantly.

Escobar spent seven years as a fugitive, but his concern was less the Colombian justice system than the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. To force the state to withdraw from its extradition treaty with the U.S., he and his partners offered bounties on judges and prosecutors, in warnings that were signed “The Extraditables.” The cartel’s sicarios killed thousands of people, including more than two hundred and fifty policemen in Medellín. In 1986, his men murdered Cano, and they machine-gunned his old political enemy Luis Carlos Galán at a Presidential-campaign appearance in 1989. Many civilians were also killed, including the hundred and seven passengers and crew of an Avianca plane that Escobar had ordered blown up, in 1989, because he believed—wrongly, it turned out—that another uncoöperative politician was on board. To force the government to negotiate, he abducted prominent Colombians, many of them journalists, including the daughter of a former President. Escobar’s guiding principle was plata o plomo , meaning silver or lead—either you took his money or you got a bullet.

Another Netflix series, the sixty-part “Surviving Escobar,” is based on a memoir by Jhon Jairo (Popeye) Velásquez, one of Escobar’s top sicarios. Since completing a twenty-three-year prison sentence, in 2014, Popeye has taken advantage of Escobar’s resurgent glamour. In addition to the Netflix series, he has a YouTube show, “Repentant Popeye,” in which he films himself telling stories from the old days, commenting on the news, insulting his enemies (“despicable rats!”), and haranguing soccer managers who don’t meet his expectations. Despite the show’s name, Popeye doesn’t seem very repentant. He frequently expresses admiration for Escobar, whom he calls El Patrón, and cheerfully acknowledges his crimes; he admits to having murdered more than two hundred and fifty people, including several leading politicians, and to having helped orchestrate the killings of some three thousand more. For the many Colombians who are ashamed to be associated with Escobar’s memory, Popeye’s brazenness is infuriating. His fans love it. The YouTube show has some six hundred thousand subscribers, mostly young, right-wing men.

I met Popeye at his apartment, on the top floor of a newly built red brick tower, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Medellín. A slim, youthful man in his mid-fifties, with short-cropped silver hair and a camera-ready smile, he wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and his neck and arms were tattooed. Both of his forearms bore the phrase “El General de la Mafia,” surrounded by skeletons and death’s heads.

The apartment had the feeling of a studio set. In the living room, a large window looked out on an adjacent apartment tower, and a camera on a tripod was placed near it. On the walls, an oil painting showed two cocks fighting against a black backdrop; another depicted an army of sperm breaking into eggs. Between them hung a number of masks, of the kind used in sadomasochistic rituals, including a replica of the one that Hannibal Lecter wore in “ The Silence of the Lambs .” Popeye explained that he liked them because they reminded him of death, and “death is part of life.”

The narcoturistas are coming to Colombia in part because the country is experiencing unusual stability, after decades of vicious fighting. In 2016, the government, led by President Juan Manuel Santos, signed a peace treaty with the Marxist guerrilla army known as the FARC , ending a half-century insurgency. Popeye wanted no part of it. “There’ll never be peace here in Colombia,” he said. In his view, Santos was “a professional traitor,” and the treaty threatened Colombia’s integrity by allowing Communists to run for office.

Popeye was not opposed to violence. He was happy to acknowledge that Escobar, trying to cultivate allies to fight against rival criminal groups, had helped form a string of brutal right-wing paramilitaries; he spoke warmly of the former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has frequently been accused of aiding the paramilitaries’ work. (In a declassified 1991 Defense Intelligence document, Uribe also was named as a collaborator of Escobar’s. Uribe denies the accusations. However, his brother is on trial for leading a terror group, and numerous associates of his have been imprisoned for similar crimes.) “We need an ultra-right-wing government here to stop Colombia from succumbing to Communism,” Popeye declared. He gestured toward the mountains ringing Medellín—a stronghold of paramilitaries—and said, “There are already fifteen thousand armed men in these mountains. The day the FARC takes power, we’ll become two hundred thousand, and, if we include the cities, altogether we’ll be five hundred thousand. It’ll be financed by industrialists, and the combustible ingredient to all of this will be cocaine.” He saw himself as a key player in this future war, calling himself “the most experienced Colombian” in matters of violence.

He had killed innocent people, he said, and cut victims into pieces, but had done so because his enemies had done that to his people, too. Anyway, in those days it had been his job. He had been fighting what he thought was a war against a corrupt state and its extradition treaty with the United States. How did he sleep at night? By getting in bed, pulling up the covers, and closing his eyes. He didn’t have time, he said, to andar con maricadas —to mess around with fairy shit.

Popeye complained that he had done his time and had helped prosecutors with investigations, but still the authorities interfered with his efforts to make a living, through his books and films. On his YouTube show, he claims that the police frequently stop him to ask questions about being involved in the cocaine trade. “Look around,” he said. “I live simply. My apartment is nothing fancy, and my car is ordinary.”

In December, 2016, he appeared in a video wielding a semi-automatic pistol and telling his followers, “Hello, warriors. I’m here in the streets of my beloved Medellín. I found my beautiful 9-millimetre Pietro Beretta. We’re testing it—we’re firing it. It’s a doll, a beauty.” Popeye complained that Medellín’s mayor had made a fuss, despite the fact that it was a stunt gun. Popeye stood and retrieved the gun, and, holding it by the barrel, he handed it to me. It was heavy, and looked real. “See?” he said. Understanding that he meant to demonstrate that the gun was fake, I pointed the pistol at his cockfight painting and pulled the trigger. The apartment exploded with the bang. Popeye looked startled, and went to the door and opened it. The hallway was empty. “Where are the neighbors?” he said. “Not a soul. I could be murdered here and nobody would come.” I told him that I didn’t entirely blame his neighbors. Popeye laughed.

Before I left, Popeye took a moment to endorse his latest production: an Internet-only film called “X Sicario Professional,” about a man who is released from prison and has to return to his city and take out the mafia don. He autographed a DVD copy for me. Knowing that I planned to see the mayor, he dedicated another to him, and asked me to give it to him on his behalf.

Since becoming mayor, in 2016, Federico Gutiérrez has waged a campaign to reject what he calls “the past”—the legacy of narcotrafficking and violence. At the peak of Escobar’s rampage, Medellín was the murder capital of the world, with more than six thousand homicides in 1991. In the past two decades, it has transformed itself, with significant investments in public transport, including a cable car that links the hillside slums to the city center, and a revamped downtown, with a botanical garden, a concert area, and an interactive science museum for children. Many of the city’s slums, called comunas, are still controlled by gangs, but security has improved; last year, there were five hundred and seventy-seven murders. For the Mayor, understandably, Popeye represents a public-relations problem.

Gutiérrez met me at his office downtown. A slender man of forty-three, he wears his hair long, in the manner of a soccer player, and favors jeans and dress shirts with the top button loose. Politically, he is right of center. Gutiérrez grimaced when I told him I had met Popeye, and said, “Everything we are doing today to fight against narcotrafficking is because of what they did in the eighties.” He had grown up during the violence, and still marvelled at the turnaround. “This is no longer the city of Pablo Escobar,” Gutiérrez declared. “This is the city Pablo Escobar tried, but failed, to destroy.” When I gave Gutiérrez his dedicated copy of “X Sicario,” he looked disgusted and handed it back to me, holding it with two fingers as if it were contagious. “I can’t accept this,” he said. “Seeing Popeye back on the street is an offense to society and to his victims. But these are the laws.”

Last March, the American rapper Wiz Khalifa, in Medellín for a concert, visited Escobar’s grave; later, he posted on Instagram images of himself smoking a joint at the tomb, along with the message “Smokin wit Pablo.” Gutiérrez had gone on television to call the rapper a sinverguenza —a shameless ruffian—and to say that he should have brought flowers to Escobar’s victims instead. Later, Wiz Khalifa posted an apology on Instagram, saying, “Didn’t mean to offend anyone with my personal activities. . . . Peace and love.” Still, Gutiérrez could barely contain himself at the memory. “We have to stop the narcoculture,” he said. “Wiz Khalifa thought he could come here and make an apologia for crime but found out that he couldn’t.”

Gutiérrez told me that he and his team were fighting to reclaim Medellín’s story. “If you don’t tell your history yourself, others will tell it for you,” he said. Soon he would be inaugurating a new exhibit at the city’s Museum of Memory, “to show the victims’ side of the story,” Gutiérrez said. “We’re not going to conceal the true history, but we don’t want those who did so much harm to be able to show themselves off as heroes. The real heroes are their victims. We want to be a symbol of what happened—a city that collapsed but got to its feet again.” When I mentioned that I had been on Roberto Escobar’s tour, Gutiérrez blanched, and said, “We’ll also do a tour—an official tour.”

The unofficial tours frequently stop at the Monaco Building, an eight-story brutalist apartment tower of reinforced concrete, in the affluent Poblado district, that Escobar built for his family. In 1988, his rivals in the Cali drug cartel placed a powerful car bomb outside the Monaco; Escobar’s mother, wife, and children were inside the tower, and though they sustained no serious injuries, they fled and did not return. Gutiérrez said that he planned to demolish the building and create a park in its place. He’d needed to win over the Medellín police, who had wanted to refurbish it as an intelligence headquarters. Gutiérrez told me that he was waiting for one last signature. When he got it, he said, he would invite me to watch the demolition.

In a gruesome scene from the first season of “Narcos,” Escobar murders two trafficking partners, whom he suspects of withholding money. He kills the first one by beating him to death with a pool cue; when he is finished, his face and clothing spattered with blood, his men beat the other one to death. The story on which the scene is based is hardly less gruesome. According to Popeye’s testimony, the two victims, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, were shot, cut into pieces, and incinerated in a fire pit.

Both the imagined scene and the real killings took place in La Catedral, the prison where Escobar was held after striking a deal to turn himself in, in 1991. An unused drug-rehabilitation center that was renovated to house Escobar, La Catedral occupied a secluded spot on the forested edges of the Envigado plateau, with spectacular views of Medellín. In the deal, Escobar agreed to spend a few years there, in exchange for the government’s commitment not to extradite him to the United States. The prison did little to restrain him; his sicarios served as guards, and he remained involved in the cocaine trade. The key intermediary for his surrender was Rafael García Herreros, an octogenarian priest who had previously accepted Escobar’s gift of a “very beautiful hacienda” on behalf of his church, and had gone on television to insist that he had done nothing wrong. “When one fulfills the will of God, there is no corruption,” he said.

The road to La Catedral is winding and steep, full of switchbacks and narrow bridges that hang over mountain streams. On the morning of my visit, clouds obscured the valley, and everything was damp. La Catedral, at the top, is now a charitable home for elderly people, run by a Benedictine abbot, Elkin Ramiro Vélez García. On the exterior wall, a billboard-size photograph shows the place as it was in Escobar’s day; a picture of him, wearing a Russian fur hat, bears the caption “He who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it.”

In the main plaza—a parklike area with naïve mosaic murals—several dozen residents warmed themselves in the morning sun. Others drank coffee in a cheerful mess hall, adorned with mounted bull’s heads and old Coca-Cola advertisements. The visible remnants of the prison were set back, at the edges of the forest. There was what remained of Escobar’s bedroom—a concrete pad, overgrown with jungle—and two guard towers. A large brick structure, once a video arcade for Escobar’s men, had been repurposed as an administration building. The plaza had once been a soccer field, where Escobar played with his men.

Father Elkin, a clean-shaven man in his early fifties, wearing a black soutane and a large crucifix, waved me into his office next to the mess hall. He said that Escobar—Pablo, as he called him—had chosen the site for his prison because he knew it well: it was an area where he used to have people killed and their bodies disposed of. “He did many, many, many bad things here,” Father Elkin said. “But he also did wonderful things.” This was a tendentious view but not an uncommon one, especially in Escobar’s early years. The Semana story had spoken of his “desire to be the country’s number one benefactor.” Old comrades told me that they were attracted by his professed commitment to building a “Medellín without slums.” Popeye insisted that Escobar “was really a socialist—he just had a different kind of socialism in mind, where everyone would have his own little car, his own little house.” He had paid for the construction of a neighborhood that became known as Barrio Pablo Escobar: five hundred houses and several soccer fields.

After he was pushed out of Congress, though, his largesse became a more direct exchange of money for influence. His bribes went to police officers and judges, but also to residents of the comunas. Father Elkin recalled that once, on a soccer field in a nearby community called El Dorado, he’d watched Escobar hand out money to the poor. “He did many things for those who were helped by no one else, and he did so always in the company of the Church. The priest would go to see Pablo and always leave with his briefcase full. Was this evil? We would have to define evil to decide that.” He raised his voice, as if speaking from the pulpit: “The Church has also done bad, bad things in the name of God! It will be God who judges us.”

Father Elkin said that Popeye—“a very good friend of mine”—came frequently to La Catedral, bringing tourists and a crew of bodyguards. Most of the narcotours were “pure silliness,” he said. “The guides tell the tourists anything that comes into their heads. For instance, I made an outdoor oven to incinerate the diapers of the old folks. Then I found out the guides were telling their tourists that it was where Pablo burned people!” He shook his head. “Popeye, on the other hand, tells his tourists the truth. For example, he talks about the asado de los Moncada”—the Moncada barbecue. When Escobar’s men burned the bodies of Moncada and Galeano, they arranged to have a barbecue the same evening, to disguise the smoke and the smell.

The killings, it turned out, helped dislodge Escobar from his comfortable imprisonment. When the visitors did not return from La Catedral, rumors spread that Escobar had killed them. A few weeks later, in July, 1992, the government attempted to move Escobar to a more secure facility, and he escaped in the process. For more than a year, he was pursued by a coalition of his enemies: the D.E.A. and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command; a Colombian police team called the Search Bloc; and a death squad of criminal rivals that called itself Los Pepes—short for People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.

On December 2, 1993, police traced a phone call between Escobar and his son, Juan Pablo, to a safe house in the Los Pinos neighborhood of Medellín. Colombian special forces swooped in. Escobar was killed at the house, felled by three bullets as he stood on its red tiled roof. He was bearded and barefoot, in jeans; a photograph circulated of him lying face down, his belly spilling out of a blue polo shirt. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero, noted for his fleshy, whimsical portrayals of people and animals, reimagined the scene in a heroic oil painting. “The Death of Pablo Escobar” shows him standing on the rooftop with gun in hand, while bullets whiz around him, like insects pestering a giant. It hangs in the Museo de Antioquia, in downtown Medellín.

It is an item of faith among Escobar’s family members that he killed himself before the authorities could get to him. Father Elkin wasn’t even convinced that Escobar had really died. “If you ask me whether Pablo is dead, I would say I don’t believe he is,” he said. “He was a sagacious, astute man.” He waved his arms around, as if to suggest that Escobar could be anywhere, still in hiding. He said that Popeye had told him that there were still bodies buried around La Catedral, in graves dug on his orders. (Popeye denies this.) Some of the elderly residents believed that La Catedral was haunted, Father Elkin said. They had seen and heard things. “Ghosts?” I asked. “Not ghosts—spirits,” he clarified. They had appeared to him, too. Sometimes they tapped him on the shoulder.

In Medellín’s Montesacro cemetery, I found a fresh bouquet of pastel-colored flowers in a vase next to Escobar’s tomb. The family plot is situated in a prominent spot next to the chapel, and flanked by graceful cypresses. On a slab of black marble, gold script spelled out “Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, December 1, 1949–December 2, 1993.” El Patrón had turned forty-four the day before his death. His parents were buried alongside him, as was his bodyguard Limón, who was with him when he died.

Two young men stood quietly in front of Escobar’s tomb, occasionally murmuring in French. At last, one of them walked to a marble bench opposite the tomb and sat in a pose of reverent contemplation. I was reminded of a YouTube video of Popeye paying homage to Escobar after he got out of prison. He knelt in front of the tomb, his eyes closed, like a choirboy about to receive the Sacrament.

Colombians have spent decades trying to reconcile the ecstatic remembrances of Escobar with the mayhem he produced. In 1993, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez began grappling with his legacy in “News of a Kidnapping.” The book told the stories of the Colombians Escobar had abducted, as he tried to force the government to disallow his extradition. García Márquez described Escobar as a monstrous Pied Piper: “At the height of his splendor, people put up altars with his picture and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellín. It was believed he could perform miracles. No Colombian in history ever possessed or exercised a talent like his for shaping public opinion. And none had a greater power to corrupt. The most unsettling and dangerous aspect of his personality was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil.”

After Escobar’s death, the journalist Alonso Salazar set out to write a biography that would deflate the legend. In 2001, after several years of interviews with Escobar’s relatives, friends, and enemies, he published “The Pablo Parable.” Where García Márquez had suggested that Escobar had subjected Colombia to a kind of national hypnosis, Salazar suggested that he had merely been a conduit for the country’s bigotry and violent impulses. “The Escobar story calls into question Colombia’s entire society—its political and economic elites, and the armed forces—as to the coherence of our state and our capacity to build a nation where it is possible for everyone to live dignified lives,” he wrote. “It’s also a questioning of the international community, especially the United States, for its deceit in maintaining a war, the so-called war against drugs, which has . . . created criminality and destruction of life and nature that is beyond any precedent.”

Salazar later entered politics, serving as mayor of Medellín from 2008 to 2011, and was involved in many of the city’s recent reforms. One evening, I met him at his home to discuss Escobar’s legacy. “There is a resurrection of Escobar,” he lamented, and he wondered if he had been partly to blame. His book about Escobar had been adapted for a television series, “El Patrón del Mal,” which began airing in 2012 and attracted obsessive fans across Latin America. “The series is balanced,” he said. “It shows the victims, too, and the generals who fought Escobar. But I don’t think that’s what the public watched it for. They watched it to see Escobar.”

When Salazar signed over the rights, he felt confident that the producers would not glamorize Escobar. One of them, Camilo Cano, was the son of the murdered newspaper editor; the other, Juana Uribe, was the daughter of a former Escobar hostage and a niece of a murdered politician. Still, the portrait of Escobar was ambivalent, and some viewers were offended. At a panel discussion in 2013, Uribe recalled, “A woman once asked me, ‘Why did you portray Pablo Escobar as loving with his children?’ And I told her, ‘Because that’s how psychopaths are: loving with their kids—and murderers.’ And we need to understand that, if we’re going to stop falling in love with psychopaths.” She insisted that she had not wanted to make Escobar a hero. “Escobar kidnapped my mother, killed my uncle.” But, she said, “a person that was able to do what Escobar did has also a normal face. And people have to learn that that’s the way people are, they have two sides.”

Uribe bemoaned the appeal of antiheroes: “People love bandits, no matter what we do.” (As if to confirm her point, Popeye told me about his youthful fascination with “Scarface,” in which Al Pacino plays a Cuban immigrant who becomes a cocaine kingpin. “That was the life we wanted to live!” he exclaimed.) But “El Patrón del Mal” made it clear that, in a profoundly unequal country, Escobar represented a form of economic mobility. “When there are no regular paths to get out of where you are, the bandit is the one who makes it—the one who can jump ahead,” Uribe said. He also appealed to a perverse sense of patriotism. The oath of Los Extraditables—“Better a tomb in Colombia than a cell in the United States”—resonated with Latin Americans sensitive about Yankee intervention.

“El Patrón del Mal” joined a wave of narconovelas—soap operas featuring drug traffickers—that are notably less concerned with ethical implications. One of the first, “Without Tits, You Don’t Get to Heaven,” revolves around a young woman, Catalina, who tries to make her way out of poverty by becoming a prostitute for narcos, getting breast implants to make herself more desirable. Despite the hand-wringing of politicians and journalists, the shows have resonated with people who have little faith in the state. As the Fordham anthropologist O. Hugo Benavides has written, “Narconovelas set up an alternative moral political structure in which the state, government, politicians, law enforcement, bureaucrats, and soldiers are seldom portrayed as the good guys. The heroes are always either Lone Ranger types or misunderstood (and sometimes conflicted) drug dealers.”

“Narcos” avoids questions of culpability by narrating everything from the American perspective: the protagonist is not Escobar but the D.E.A. agents pursuing him. During the first season, Omar Rincón, a professor of media studies at Bogotá’s University of the Andes, wrote a scornful review. The show, he said, presented a discomfitingly American vision of Colombians, “something like what Trump thinks we are: the good ones are the gringos in the D.E.A. And the narcos are comic misfits and tasteless throwbacks.” Even the accents weren’t right, he complained. For Colombians, he said, it was impossible to identify with the narrative. “The story makes heroes of those that Latin Americans consider villains: the D.E.A. agents. Which, in addition to being silly, goes against reality. Gentlemen of Netflix: know that the villains are the ones in the D.E.A.”

Escobar’s death ended the second season of “Narcos,” but the show has continued; the third season followed the Cali cartel, and the fourth has moved to Mexico, which is now even more afflicted by drug violence than Colombia is. In September, a location scout named Carlos Muñoz Portal was found shot dead in his car outside Mexico City. It was unclear whether Muñoz’s murder was a coincidence or a drug cartel’s warning not to film in its territory; in any case, Netflix announced its intention to proceed with the production. Roberto Escobar suggested a solution to the producers: hire hit men to provide security.

On the twentieth anniversary of Escobar’s death, a group of mourners wearing white shirts gathered at his tomb. They were there to attend a “forgiveness Mass” arranged by his sister Luz María. After Escobar’s death, his wife and children immigrated to Argentina, but Luz María stayed, and, in the coming years, she organized several Masses to reconcile the Escobars with victims and their families. This one was a success. She handed each of the mourners a symbolic seed—to help them “let forgiveness enter and grow in their hearts,” she said. A teen-age girl left a note at Escobar’s graveside: “I was told you did good things and bad things, but it doesn’t matter now. Rest in peace.”

One evening, I spoke to Luz María, in the food court of a luxury mall (near, as it happens, a restaurant where Popeye once arranged to have his own girlfriend murdered, on Pablo’s orders). She told me, “I have a slogan I always try and tell the media: ‘No to drugs, no to narcotrafficking, no to violence, and yes to forgiveness.” In Colombia, which is nearly eighty per cent Catholic, the rhetoric of contrition can be potent. Father Elkin described Escobar as a profoundly devout man who was led astray by his ambitions. But when I asked Roberto Escobar whether he felt repentant for his crimes he said no. “It’s not important to be repentant,” he said. “I’m a believer.” (After the letter bomb, he said, he’d experienced a particularly convincing vision of Christ.) Luz María told me that she still hoped Popeye would find his way. She had bumped into him after his release, offered him a blessing, and told him that God had given him a second chance. Father Elkin was more resigned about Popeye’s prospects: “He comes to confess, and I take his confession. If he doesn’t comply with his confession, that’s his business.”

In 2009, Escobar’s son, Juan Pablo, appeared in a documentary called “ Sins of My Father ,” in which he contacted victims of his father and apologized on behalf of his family. He has also reckoned with his father’s memory in two memoirs, “ Pablo Escobar: My Father ,” from 2014, and the untranslated “Pablo Escobar in Flagrante: The Things My Father Never Told Me,” which was released in 2016. Just before Christmas, I had lunch with him in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he was promoting his latest book. Juan Pablo, who was sixteen years old when Escobar was killed, is now forty-one, a brooding, heavyset man with an unmistakable resemblance to his father; the image on the jacket of “In Flagrante” seamlessly melds their faces. He told me that he learned the truth about his family when he was seven, and Pablo Escobar told him bluntly, “I’m an outlaw.” From then on, they had a morning ritual in which his father read the newspaper and pointed out murders that had been attributed to him. Juan Pablo recalled, “He’d say, ‘I didn’t do that one,’ and then, ‘I did that one.’ ”

In Argentina, Juan Pablo worked as an architect, but in recent years he has made a second career of rehabilitating the family’s reputation. His new book offers a twenty-eight-point list of what he calls falsehoods propagated by “Narcos.” (“My father did not personally kill the person who is called Colonel ‘Carrillo’ in the series.”) Over lunch, Juan Pablo told me about his work as a speaker, in which Mexican officials hire him to warn youngsters about the dangers of a criminal life style. He also owns a clothing line, Escobar Henao, whose mission statement declares, “Our garments are banners of peace.” (One T-shirt includes the family name and the phrase “Enough will never be enough.”) Alonso Salazar, the journalist and politician, told me, “He’s very clever, and clearly he’s been pondering the opportunities offered by this resurrection. He’s living off the image of the father but realizes that he needs to be critical.” At the restaurant, Juan Pablo excused himself to speak briefly with a producer about a movie project.

Before the family fled Colombia, Juan Pablo opened a phone book and selected a new name, Sebastián Marroquín, which he maintained until 1999, when an Argentine police investigation into allegations of money-laundering revealed his identity. (He was held for six weeks, then released for lack of evidence.) When I asked which name he preferred, he shrugged and said it didn’t matter. He would always be Pablo Escobar’s son. “I live with permanent suspicion—I was born guilty,” he complained. He noted bitterly that the United States government had refused him a visa for twenty-four years. “I want to be recognized as an individual,” he said. “I know about everything my father did, and I will go to each and every one of the families of his victims to ask forgiveness. But I’m not legally culpable. My personal slogan is ‘I inherited a mountain of shit. So what am I supposed to do with it?’ ”

Alonso Salazar told me that Pablo Escobar’s legacy had profoundly altered political and social life. “Narcotrafficking came along and just overwhelmed everything,” he said. “Escobar débuted the instruments of terror, and afterward everyone used them.”

The Medellín cartel’s ascent coincided with the collapse of Communism in Europe, which in turn helped end most of the socialist revolution in the hemisphere. After Escobar, the idea of rebellion based on ideology was largely supplanted by the remorseless pursuit of profit and power. In places along his supply chain—including Mexico and in Central America—the remnants of his operation have grown into insurgent gangs, and states have succumbed to corruption and internal conflict.

Escobar’s cartel died with him, but, despite a U.S.-assisted war on narcotrafficking that has cost thousands of lives and more than nine billion dollars, international consumption has spread enormously, and the drug economy remains strong; last year, the United Nations reported that Colombia was the world’s largest producer of cocaine. Five of the world’s most dangerous cities are in Latin America, with much of the violence linked to the drug trade.

Father Elkin suggested that Escobar’s greatest legacy was his story. “The country likes to say that it has forgotten Pablo Escobar, but it’s not true,” he told me. “Today’s youth still see narcotrafficking as a way to make quick money. Society doesn’t change, really. And those with the greatest responsibility for this—excuse me—are those in the media, with their television series and their books.”

Omar Rincón, the media-studies professor, once wrote, “We live the culture of drug trafficking, in aesthetics, values, and references. We are a nation that took on the narco idea that anything goes if it will get you out of poverty: some tits, a weapon, corruption, trafficking coca, being a guerrilla or a paramilitary fighter, or being in government.” He was careful to note that the narco aesthetic was not merely bad taste. It was a way of life “among the dispossessed communities that look to modernity and have found in money the only way to exist in the world.”

For a generation of traffickers, Escobar left behind a model of success: build support among the disenfranchised by providing them with money and power they would not otherwise have; in return, they will be your loyalists, your spies, and your gunmen. For the middle class, use your wealth to corrupt policemen, generals, judges, and politicians.

The criminals who emulate him are no less ruthless, but they have learned not to seek political power, or much recognition. The Oficina de Envigado—the closest successor to the Medellín cartel—was run, until recently, by Juan Carlos Mesa, alias Tom, a shadowy figure who almost never appeared in public. Colombian special forces pursued him for years, without success. Then, in early December, police raided Tom’s fiftieth-birthday celebration. (They were tipped off to the party by informants, who noticed unusually generous purchases of twenty-one-year-old Chivas.) There were some fifteen guests at the party, and, to the authorities’ surprise, Popeye was among them. Despite an unconvincing alibi—he just happened to be in the area, handing out copies of his memoir, and had stumbled upon the party—Popeye was released, for lack of evidence. Even so, the incident triggered calls for him to be returned to prison, including one from Colombia’s President, Juan Manuel Santos.

Popeye’s response was characteristically defiant. He fired off a flurry of tweets, saying, “It isn’t a crime to go to a party,” and calling his opponents “miserable rats.” In a subsequent tweet, he sent a warning: “If I have to go to prison, I’ll go. Very soon I will again be attacking this damned government.”

At the height of Escobar’s power, he built himself a paradise: La Hacienda Nápoles, a seven-thousand-acre estate three hours from Medellín. Escobar spent years converting the property from an isolated wilderness to a refuge, with paved roads, artificial lakes, and a private zoo stocked with zebras, hippopotamuses, and giraffes, as well as a series of life-size dinosaur sculptures. Guests had the use of swimming pools, a party house, stables, a bullring, a vintage-car collection, and a fleet of speedboats. In a characteristic flourish, Escobar adorned the arch over the entrance with a single-engine Piper Cub, a replica of the airplane that had carried his first load of coke to the United States.

After Escobar’s death, the compound was abandoned, its structures ransacked by memento seekers and by treasure hunters pursuing rumors that Escobar had hidden millions of dollars in cash on the property. After being repossessed by the state, Hacienda Nápoles was reopened in 2007, as a theme park with a zoo, a water park, and several family-friendly hotels. Escobar’s hippopotamuses are a main attraction. The herd, which began with three females and a male bought from a California zoo, is now believed to contain as many as fifty, making it the largest herd living freely outside Africa. As the estate fell into disrepair, several of them wandered off and found new habitat. One of the hippos was discovered in the nearby town of Doradal. As it lumbered down the street, children dodged around it, shrieking; the locals joked about making the hippo a mascot. Several family groups have migrated into the nearby Magdalena River system. Colombian authorities suggested a hunt to cull the hippos before they upset the local ecosystem or become a danger to humans, but after a public outcry the matter was dropped.

I visited the Hacienda Nápoles one day with Edgar Jiménez, who had been Escobar’s personal photographer and a friend of his since grade school. “Pablo said I was the only photographer who could take his photo,” Jiménez told me. “I did all their family events, like birthdays, weddings, and first Communions.” Like everyone else, he cherished the stories. Once, he said, he was summoned to the hacienda to find Escobar hosting one of his cartel partners, the German-Colombian Carlos Lehder Rivas. An avid neo-Nazi and frequent cocaine user, Lehder had become unstable. After a soccer match that evening, he fatally shot one of Escobar’s men; Lehder was jealous because his girlfriend was “making eyes” at the man. Escobar calmly asked Lehder to leave the next morning and, according to Jiménez, made sure that authorities knew his whereabouts. Soon after, Lehder became the first Colombian narcotrafficker to be extradited to the United States.

I asked Jiménez if he felt any qualms about his relationship with Escobar. “I wasn’t in agreement with the violence,” he said. “But I was just the photographer, remember? And it has to be understood that this violent relationship Pablo had with the state was the product of the rejection he felt by Colombian society. Everyone had profited from him, and later they had betrayed him.”

At the entrance to Hacienda Nápoles, Jiménez was thrilled to see Escobar’s plane still hanging over the gate, with a new paint job of black-and-white zebra stripes. Inside the compound, though, we found that Escobar’s main house had been torn down, and his vintage-car collection had been torched, leaving a carport full of rusting hulks. But the outlines of the old swimming pool were still there, on the lawn. (In a video game that spun out of “Narcos,” the pool provides a backdrop for a gun battle between Escobar and the D.E.A.) Where the clinic for Escobar’s employees had been was a food court, overlooking a huge swimming pool with slides and fountains and bridges; in one section of the pool, a gigantic sculpture of an octopus spread its tentacles, and kids swam back and forth underneath. Jiménez was delighted, and said that he’d like to return with his grandson. Before we left, he asked for a brochure that listed package deals for family weekends. ♦

Juan Pablo Escobar appeared in the documentary “Sins of My Father.” He did not create it.

How Did Pablo Escobar Die? Inside The Rooftop Shootout That Ended El Patrón

Gunned down in medellín on december 2, 1993, "the king of cocaine" allegedly was shot by colombian police. but who really killed pablo escobar.

“I would rather have a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S.”

Pablo Escobar’s words, spoken out of spite for United States law enforcement, would become a reality sooner than the drug kingpin anticipated.

Wikimedia Commons Pablo Escobar, drug kingpin of the Medellin cartel.

On December 2, 1993, Pablo Escobar was shot in the head as he attempted to flee across the rooftops of the barrio Los Olivos in his hometown of Medellín, where he had been hiding out.

The Search Bloc, a task force made up of Colombian National Police that was dedicated to locating and taking down Escobar, had been looking for the drug lord for 16 months ever since he had escaped from La Catedral prison. Finally, a Colombian electronic surveillance team intercepted a call coming from a middle-class barrio in Medellín.

The force immediately knew it was Escobar as the call had been made to his son, Juan Pablo Escobar . And, it seemed that Escobar knew they were on to him as the call was cut short.

As authorities closed in, Escobar and his bodyguard Alvaro de Jesus Agudelo, known as “El Limón,” fled across the rooftops.

JESUS ABAD-EL COLOMBIANO/AFP/Getty Images Colombian police and military forces storm the rooftop where drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot dead just moments earlier during an exchange of gunfire between security forces and Escobar and his bodyguard.

Their goal was a side street behind the row of houses, but they never made it. As they ran, the Search Bloc opened fire, shooting El Limón and Escobar as their backs were turned. In the end, Pablo Escobar was killed by gunshots to the leg, torso, and a fatal shot through the ear.

“Viva Colombia!” a Search Bloc soldier screamed as the gunshots subsided. “We have just killed Pablo Escobar!”

The gory aftermath was captured in an image that’s been imprinted on history. A group of smiling Colombian police officials along with members of the Search Bloc stand over the bloody, limp body of Pablo Escobar splayed across the barrio rooftop.

Wikimedia Commons Pablo Escobar’s death was captured in this now infamous image.

The Search Bloc party immediately celebrated widely and took credit for Pablo Escobar’s death. Yet, there were rumors that Los Pepes , a vigilante group made up of enemies of Escobar, had contributed to the final showdown.

According to CIA documents released in 2008, General Miguel Antonio Gomez Padilla, the Colombian National Police director general, had worked with Fidel Castano, the paramilitary leader of Los Pepes and rival to Escobar, in a matter of intelligence collection.

However, there were also rumors that the drug lord had shot himself. Escobar’s family , in particular, refused to believe that Pablo had been brought down by the Colombian police, insisting that if he knew he was going out, he would have made sure it was on his own terms.

Escobar’s two brothers insisted that his death had been a suicide, claiming that the location of his fatal wound was proof it had been self-inflicted.

“During all the years they went after him,” one brother said . “He would say to me every day that if he was really cornered without a way out, he would ‘shoot himself through the ear.'”

Whether the Colombian Police didn’t want to admit Pablo Escobar’s death could have been a suicide or they were simply happy he was gone, the actual origin of the shot that killed him has never been determined. The country settled for the peace that came with knowing he was gone, rather than the potential media storm that could brew if the public found out he died like he lived — on his own terms.

After learning about how Pablo Escobar died, read about what happened to Manuela Escobar after her father’s death. Then, check out these interesting Pablo Escobar facts .

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The Truth About Pablo Escobar's Death

For many, Pablo Escobar was a ruthless drug kingpin and a murderer. For others, he was a savior — a Robin Hood figure that stole from the rich and gave to the poor. As Crime+Investigation UK explains, opinions on Escobar are still divided. On one hand, he would brutally eliminate anyone who threatened him. On the other, Escobar donated to charity, built schools, and was overall liked by impoverished Columbians. Per CNN , his own son, Sebastián Marroquín, has stated that he has to live with "both truths." Nevertheless, Escobar was undoubtedly seen as an innovator as he ultimately changed the game for both drug traffickers and organized crime.

In 1991, Escobar surrendered himself to the Colombian government and built a luxury prison called "La Catedral" that came with a spa, casino, and nightclub (via Biography ). He called it a "sacrifice for peace" (per NBC News ). When authorities tried to move Escobar to a standard prison, he escaped, and a 16-month manhunt ensued. On December 2, 1993, Colombian troops stormed his hiding spot in a middle-class Medellin neighborhood. Escobar and his bodyguard fled to the rooftop, where he was fatally shot.

According to Insider , a bullet entered Escobar's right ear, killing him instantly. What no one is certain about, however, is who fired the shot that killed the wealthiest drug lord the world had seen. In the confusion and excitement, no one saw who pulled the trigger. Although many take responsibility for his death, the exact details still remain a mystery.

Pablo Escobar's life and crimes

Born in 1949, Britannica writes that Escobar came from humble beginnings. In his teens, he began committing petty theft, which included stealing stereos and tombstones. His crimes would eventually escalate to drug trafficking, and in 1975, Escobar formed what would later be known as the Medellín Cartel (via Biography ). By 1980, InSight Crime reports that he supplied over 80% of cocaine sent to the U.S. This would make Escobar one of the world's richest men. Despite his immense wealth, he struggled to be accepted into Colombia's elite.

Escobar had always dreamt of being president and thought his money would give him political gain. When he realized that he had no chance, he sought revenge. Escobar ordered hits on journalists, judges, and political candidates. Associated Press reports that he even hired people to specifically target police officers. Amongst his worst crimes is the explosion of Avianca Flight 203 — 107 people on board died because Escobar believed a political rival was on the flight (per Noiser ).

In addition, Escober had a presidential candidate that promised the extradition of drug traffickers to the U.S. assassinated. Escobar's biggest fear was reportedly dying "in an American jail cell" (via All That's Interesting ), and he did everything in his power to prevent it from happening. Per  StMU Research Scholars , he referred to his violent policy as "plata o ploma," which translates into "silver or lead." Ultimately, Escobar's bloodthirsty actions turned Medellín into the murder capital of the world.

Who killed Pablo Escobar?

In 1989, the Colombian government created the Search Bloc (a special police unit) to deal with Escobar and the cartel. With the help of the CIA, the DEA, and more, they hunted Escobar down with a hail of gunfire on a Medellin rooftop and officially became the party responsible for his death (via Insider ). However, soon after, reports emerged that Escobar had fired the gun himself. His son, Sebastián Marroquín, backs this up in his book " Pablo Escobar: My Father. " There, he details that his father told him he would shoot himself in his right ear to avoid being captured. Others, including Escobar's wife and mother, agree that the gunshot that caused his death was self-inflicted.

Los Pepes, a group made up of Escobar's rivals and enemies, also takes responsibility for his death. It is said that they, too, participated and accompanied the Search Bloc on the raid that killed Escobar. Although those details remain murky, a Los Pepes member claims to be the one who fired the shot with an M-16. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Los Pepes were working with the Search Bloc, nothing has ever been officially confirmed.

According to All That's Interesting , Escobar was shot in the legs and torso, but it was a shot in the ear that caused his death. That being said, it seems no one will ever truly know who killed Pablo Escobar, a man who was responsible for the death of over 1,000 police officers and whose net worth was at one time $30 billion (per  Biography ).

El Patrón: The Rise and Ruin of Pablo EscobarStep into the opulent and bloody world of Pablo Escobar, the infamous "King of Cocaine," in this riveting podcast. From the jungles of Medellín to the halls of power, we explore: From hustler to kingpin: Witness Escobar's meteoric rise, crafting a cocaine empire that flooded America and fueled chaos.Terror under the Medellín Cartel: Experience the reign of violence and corruption that gripped Colombia in the 1980s.Billion-dollar playgrounds and Robin Hood myths: Unravel the contradictions of a man feared for brutality yet celebrated for Robin Hood-esque largesse.The hunt for El Patrón: Join the DEA agents and Colombian forces on the relentless pursuit to bring him down.A fiery demise and enduring legacy: Learn about his dramatic last stand and the ongoing impact of his cartel on Colombia and the global drug trade.This immersive narrative exposes the truth behind the myths of Pablo Escobar.Subscribe now and dive into the captivating saga of El Patrón. Keywords: Pablo Escobar, Medellín Cartel, cocaine, Colombia, violence, Robin Hood, DEA, biography, true crime, podcast

Pablo Escobar Audio Biography Biography

• Society & Culture
• JAN 30, 2024

El Patrón: The Rise and Ruin of Pablo Escobar

El Patrón: The Rise and Ruin of Pablo Escobar Step into the opulent and bloody world of Pablo Escobar, the infamous "King of Cocaine," in this riveting podcast. From the jungles of Medellín to the halls of power, we explore:From hustler to kingpin: Witness Escobar's meteoric rise, crafting a cocaine empire that flooded America and fueled chaos.Terror under the Medellín Cartel: Experience the reign of violence and corruption that gripped Colombia in the 1980s.Billion-dollar playgrounds and Robin Hood myths: Unravel the contradictions of a man feared for brutality yet celebrated for Robin Hood-esque largesse.The hunt for El Patrón: Join the DEA agents and Colombian forces on the relentless pursuit to bring him down.A fiery demise and enduring legacy: Learn about his dramatic last stand and the ongoing impact of his cartel on Colombia and the global drug trade.This immersive narrative exposes the truth behind the myths of Pablo Escobar.Subscribe now and dive into the captivating saga of El Patrón.

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Colombia’s congress considers ban on Pablo Escobar souvenirs

FILE - Tourists buy souvenirs of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, featured as a statue with a sign that says one will be charged for taking photos inside a store in Doradal, Colombia, Feb. 5, 2021. Souvenirs depicting the Escobar could be banned in Colombia if legislators approve a bill introduced the week of Aug. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)

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BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Souvenirs depicting the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar could be banned in Colombia if legislators approve a bill introduced this week in the nation’s congress. The proposal is criticized by vendors who sell his merchandise to tourists from around the world, but backed by those who believe the country should shed its image of mafia bosses.

The bill proposes fines of up to $170 for vendors who sell merchandise that depicts Escobar and other convicted criminals, and would also enable police to fine those who wear t-shirts, hats and other garments that “exalt” the infamous drug lord.

“These items are revictimizing people who were victims of murderers,” said Cristian Avendaño, a representative from Colombia’s Green Party who drafted the bill.

“We must protect the right of the victims to recover...and find other symbols for our country.”

The proposal has been widely covered by newspapers in Colombia, where Escobar is seen as a murderous figure, linked to one of the most violent periods in the nation’s history.

At the same time, the drug trafficker’s image is also heavily commercialized by locals who are eager to cash in on the growing fascination with the drug lord , among some tourists from North America, Europe and other Latin American countries.

Souvenir vendors in Bogota’s historic La Candelaria neighborhood said they were opposed to the initiative, which has been criticized for attempting to limit freedom of speech.

“I think it’s a dumb law,” said Rafael Nieto, a street vendor who sells magnets, and t-shirts with Pablo Escobar’s face on them, as well as more traditional souvenirs.

Nieto said he would stop selling Escobar merchandise if the bill is approved, to “avoid problems” with police. But he added that members of Colombia’s Congress should instead focus their energies on lowering the city’s crime rate, and let him carry on with his business.

“Many people make a living from this” Nieto said pointing at a t-shirt that shows a copy of Pablo Escobar’s Colombian ID card.

“It’s not a trend that I came up with” Nieto added. “The Mexicans, the Costa Ricans, the Americans, are always asking me for Escobar” merchandise.

Another street vendor, who asked to be identified only as Lorena, said that she has also stocked up on items that depict the drug dealer, such as shot glasses, and magnets, because it is what international tourists are demanding, along with souvenirs depicting coca leaves.

“When you work as a vendor, you try to sell what is most popular,” Lorena said. “Everyone has their own personality, and if there are people who like a murderer, or a drug trafficker, well, that’s their choice.”

Escobar ordered the murders of an estimated 4000 people in the 1980s and early 1990s, as he established the powerful Medellin cartel and amassed a $3 billion fortune that made him one of the world’s richest people at the time.

The drug lord was gunned down in 1993 on a rooftop in Medellin, as he tried to escape from the search block, a unit of more than 300 police officers backed by DEA agents that was dedicated exclusively to capture him.

Escobar’s exploits and his crimes are well known in Colombia. But in recent years, his global fame has resurfaced thanks to a Colombian soap opera and a Netflix series that depicts the drug lord as a ruthless, but shrewd mafioso, who defies corrupt American and Colombian authorities trying to close in on him.

Merchandise bearing the drug dealer’s face, his ID Card, or famous slogans that are attributed to Escobar sells frequently at souvenir stands across the country, while in his hometown of Medellin, agencies lead visitors on historical tours that stop at sites related to Escobar’s life.

Representative Avendaño, said it was time for Colombia to shed its image as a country of mafia bosses.

“We cannot continue to praise these people, and act as if their crimes were acceptable,” Avandaño said. “There are other ways for businesses to grow and other ways to sell Colombia to the world.”

Avendaño’s said that his bill will call on the Colombian government to investigate how many people make a living from selling Escobar merchandise, and how much the market is worth.

The bill must go through four debates to be approved by Congress, Avendaño explained, adding that if the legislation passes, there will be a “transition period” where government officials work with souvenir vendors to find new ways to market Colombia.

Last year the South American nation refused a request to trademark the Pablo Escobar name, filed by his widow and children, to sell what they described as educational and leisure products.

In its decision, Colombia’s Superintendency for Commerce said that a Pablo Escobar brand would be “permissive of violence, and threaten public order.”

The General Court of the European Union also denied a similar trademark request by Escobar’s family earlier this year, arguing that it went against “public policy and accepted principles of morality.”

This story has been updated to correct Escobar’s year of death from 1993 to 1994.

One law for megarich provocateur Elon Musk, another for the poor idiots who follow

The eejits who get caught have been hooked by addictive algorithms engineered by social media companies such as x.

One law for the megarich provocateur, another for the poor idiots who follow his lead. The idea of two-tier policing – the false allegation that immigrants are allowed to get away with everything while white “patriots” get punished for expressing their righteous outrage – is one of the memes of the far-right insurrection across these islands. The irony is that it is true in an entirely different sense.

The stupid nobodies will feel the full weight of the law. The most powerful spreader of disinformation, Elon Musk , basks in the reassurance of his own impunity. This two-tier policing fatally undermines the efforts of democracies to defend themselves.

Last week in England, a 55-year-old woman was arrested over an online post inaccurately “identifying” the suspect accused of killing three young girls. Chief supt Alison Ross said this was “a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy”. She added that “we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person”.

On Friday, two young men were jailed – one for 20 months, the other for more than three years – for provocative posts. One of them was so thick he posted under his own name while boasting that he had “watched enough CSI programmes” to ensure he would “categorically not be arrested”.

Migration and emigration

Ireland has gone from an emigrant society to an immigrant-emigrant society

With all the confidence of a hostage in a ransom video, Catherine Martin began dismantling RTÉ

We’re going to see a lot more of this – including in Ireland. Far-right groups in the Republic are closely intertwined with their mentors in Northern Ireland and Britain. They share an information – or rather a disinformation – space.

Responses to online provocations will therefore have to be aligned too. There will be more prosecutions of individuals who share fake stories that feed into violent attacks on immigrants, religious minorities and asylum seekers.

But the eejits who get caught are low-hanging fruit. Typically, they’ve been hooked by the algorithms engineered by the social media companies to mimic addictive drugs. Their brains have been rewired by constant exposure to conspiracy theories and hate content.

Thus, the war on disinformation begins to look very like the war on drugs. One of the great social disasters of the contemporary world was the policy of arresting and imprisoning drug users. It caused immense harm to individuals, families and communities while doing nothing to stop ruthless suppliers from creating an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

The Pablo Escobar of toxic disinformation is Elon Musk. His lying is a fully integrated business. He simultaneously produces, consumes and distributes disinformation.

Last week, at the height of the far-right violence in England and Northern Ireland, Musk chose to amplify the propaganda of the insurrectionists. He repeated the “two-tier policing” conspiracy meme, calling Keir Starmer “two-tier Kier”. He encouraged his followers to inhale apocalyptic hysteria: “civil war is inevitable”. And he shared what purported to be a news article from the Telegraph (actually created by the fascist Britain First party) claiming that Starmer was considering sending rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.

These interventions were specific and purposeful. Musk was acting as a fascist provocateur. And doing so through a platform ( X ) he personally controls and on which he has 193 million followers. A platform, moreover, he has deliberately and knowingly opened up to fellow far-right agitators.

Musk has aligned himself quite openly with the English fascist Tommy Robinson , bringing him back on to X last November, responding favourably to one of his posts and publishing on X a “documentary” made by Robinson that has been judged to be in contempt of court. Thanks to Musk, Robinson’s tweets over the weekend when the rioting broke out were (according to analysis by the Tortoise website) read more than 160 million times.

Musk isn’t doing this only because incendiary content has become a big driver of X’s business model. He is sincerely committed to far-right provocation.

As time has gone on, Musk has become more and more like his father, a full-on, down-the-rabbit hole conspiracy theorist. In his biography of Musk , Walter Issacson quotes one of the father’s emails to his son suggesting that in Musk’s native South Africa “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees” and calling Joe Biden a “freak, criminal, paedophile president”.

[  Elon Musk’s biographer: ‘He has an epic sense of himself, as if he’s a comic book character’ Opens in new window  ]

Musk has inherited his father’s taste for labelling anyone he doesn’t like a paedophile. His attitude to violence perpetrated against elected politicians and their families was revealed when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by an intruder to the family home . Musk directed his followers to a far-right conspiracy website that suggested (falsely) that Paul Pelosi might have been injured “in a dispute with a male prostitute”. Musk winked: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye”.

Last week’s interventions show that Musk has now become completely disinhibited. He is fully committed to the far-right creed that civil wars between patriots and globalists have already begun. As he put it in one of his tweets about the riots in England, “if incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable”. Attacks on Muslim shopkeepers are, in other words, the fault of the Muslims for not becoming white and Christian.

What are democracies going to do about this? The only political entity that has shown any real appetite for taking Musk on is the EU Commission, which last month made a preliminary finding that X is in breach of the Digital Services Act because its “verified accounts” are deceptive, its promotion of advertising is not transparent and it refuses to provide real-time data to allow action against disinformation.

This is welcome, but even if X is eventually found guilty, it will face financial penalties, not criminal sanctions. Musk, as we know, is quite happy to lose money in the promotion of far-right causes.

What has to happen is that Musk is held personally to the same standards of criminal justice as random idiots who join his chorus. He is, he says, against two-tier policing. Take him at his word.

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Colombia's congress considers ban on Pablo Escobar souvenirs

Souvenirs depicting the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar could be banned in Colombia if legislators approve a bill introduced this week in the nation’s congress

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Souvenirs depicting the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar could be banned in Colombia if legislators approve a bill introduced this week in the nation’s congress. The proposal is criticized by vendors who sell his merchandise to tourists from around the world, but backed by those who believe the country should shed its image of mafia bosses.

The bill proposes fines of up to $170 for vendors who sell merchandise that depicts Escobar and other convicted criminals, and would also enable police to fine those who wear t-shirts, hats and other garments that “exalt” the infamous drug lord.

“These items are revictimizing people who were victims of murderers,” said Cristian Avendaño, a representative from Colombia’s Green Party who drafted the bill.

“We must protect the right of the victims to recover...and find other symbols for our country.”

The proposal has been widely covered by newspapers in Colombia, where Escobar is seen as a murderous figure, linked to one of the most violent periods in the nation’s history.

At the same time, the drug trafficker’s image is also heavily commercialized by locals who are eager to cash in on the growing fascination with the drug lord , among some tourists from North America, Europe and other Latin American countries.

Souvenir vendors in Bogota’s historic La Candelaria neighborhood said they were opposed to the initiative, which has been criticized for attempting to limit freedom of speech.

“I think it’s a dumb law,” said Rafael Nieto, a street vendor who sells magnets, and t-shirts with Pablo Escobar’s face on them, as well as more traditional souvenirs.

Nieto said he would stop selling Escobar merchandise if the bill is approved, to “avoid problems” with police. But he added that members of Colombia's Congress should instead focus their energies on lowering the city’s crime rate, and let him carry on with his business.

“Many people make a living from this” Nieto said pointing at a t-shirt that shows a copy of Pablo Escobar’s Colombian ID card.

“It’s not a trend that I came up with” Nieto added. “The Mexicans, the Costa Ricans, the Americans, are always asking me for Escobar” merchandise.

Another street vendor, who asked to be identified only as Lorena, said that she has also stocked up on items that depict the drug dealer, such as shot glasses, and magnets, because it is what international tourists are demanding, along with souvenirs depicting coca leaves.

“When you work as a vendor, you try to sell what is most popular,” Lorena said. “Everyone has their own personality, and if there are people who like a murderer, or a drug trafficker, well, that’s their choice.”

Escobar ordered the murders of an estimated 4000 people in the 1980s and early 1990s, as he established the powerful Medellin cartel and amassed a $3 billion fortune that made him one of the world’s richest people at the time.

The drug lord was gunned down in 1993 on a rooftop in Medellin, as he tried to escape from the search block, a unit of more than 300 police officers backed by DEA agents that was dedicated exclusively to capture him.

Escobar’s exploits and his crimes are well known in Colombia. But in recent years, his global fame has resurfaced thanks to a Colombian soap opera and a Netflix series that depicts the drug lord as a ruthless, but shrewd mafioso, who defies corrupt American and Colombian authorities trying to close in on him.

Merchandise bearing the drug dealer’s face, his ID Card, or famous slogans that are attributed to Escobar sells frequently at souvenir stands across the country, while in his hometown of Medellin, agencies lead visitors on historical tours that stop at sites related to Escobar’s life.

Representative Avendaño, said it was time for Colombia to shed its image as a country of mafia bosses.

“We cannot continue to praise these people, and act as if their crimes were acceptable,” Avandaño said. “There are other ways for businesses to grow and other ways to sell Colombia to the world.”

Avendaño’s said that his bill will call on the Colombian government to investigate how many people make a living from selling Escobar merchandise, and how much the market is worth.

The bill must go through four debates to be approved by Congress, Avendaño explained, adding that if the legislation passes, there will be a “transition period” where government officials work with souvenir vendors to find new ways to market Colombia.

Last year the South American nation refused a request to trademark the Pablo Escobar name, filed by his widow and children, to sell what they described as educational and leisure products.

In its decision, Colombia’s Superintendency for Commerce said that a Pablo Escobar brand would be “permissive of violence, and threaten public order.”

The General Court of the European Union also denied a similar trademark request by Escobar’s family earlier this year, arguing that it went against “public policy and accepted principles of morality."

This story has been updated to correct Escobar’s year of death from 1993 to 1994.

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