Pablo Escobar - The Colombian Cartel King Documentary

The man known to history as Pablo Escobar was born on the 1st of December 1949 as Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria in the city of Rionegro in the Antioquia department of Colombia. His father was Abel de Jesus Dari Escobar Echeverri, a poor farmer who often worked as a farmhand on the allotments of others to make ends meet for his large family of seven children, of which Pablo was the third. Pablo’s mother was Hermilda de Los Dolores Gaviria Berrio, who along with raising their seven children also worked as a teacher in a local elementary school. Although he

was born in Rionegro, when Pablo was still quite young the family relocated to the city of Medellin. It is worth reflecting on the development of this Colombian city, with which Pablo would become so intrinsically associated. The site was settled as early as the 1610s by the Spanish who oversaw the development of a mixed race village here. It grew steadily over the two centuries that followed, so much so that when the Republic of Gran Colombia, a region consisting of modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, declared its independence from Spain in 1819, Medellin was already a regional

capital in the north-west of Colombia in the Aburrá Valley next to the Andes Mountains. As Latin America developed economically and demographically in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century so too did Medellin. The population increased from some 60,000 people in 1905 to over 300,000 by the time Pablo was born, driven by Medellin’s development as a centre of industry. And this growth did not stop there. By the time Pablo entered his early twenties, the population of the city had increased to over one million people. Medellin was now the industrial capital of the country and the

second largest as he became involved in the rampant criminal enterprises which had sprung up all over Medellin in the midst of the urban poverty which prevailed in the city. By the time he was fourteen he was involved in a gang and he was soon kicked out of school, while he was also involved in several incidents with other gang members. One of these involved him in a fight with Julio Tulio Garces, a fight which he lost, but Pablo was not deterred. The next time he found himself in an altercation, with a certain Julio Gaviria, Pablo pulled

out a gun and shot him in the foot, an incident which was reported to the police, and saw Pablo spend his first few nights in a Colombian prison. In addition to this, he and several of his friends were involved in various acts of petty crime in their teenage years. Certain versions of events have them stealing gravestones and sanding down the front with the names on them to resell them as new. Others suggest Pablo was running a racket to sell fake high school and university diplomas. It is hard to say where truth ends and fiction begins

in these versions of his early life. The subsequent chequered life of Pablo Escobar has to be considered in light of the history of Colombia in the twentieth century and the development of the drugs trade there. In some senses politics and narcotics cannot be disentangled in modern Colombia. The country’s politics has been dominated by a Liberal and a Conservative faction, and has always been scrutinised and interfered in by the United States of America. Early on, this interventionism, replicated elsewhere in Latin America as a result of the Monroe Doctrine, which regarded all of the Americas as a

sphere of US influence, was concerned with American access to the Isthmus of Panama, but once Panama broke away from Colombia in the early twentieth century, this became a lesser concern. And often during these decades, conservative politicians would side with American business interests, which sought to control the trade in coffee, bananas and other products throughout Central and South America. The result of this was a country with a backwards economy and endemic poverty. But shortly before Pablo’s birth, the country had entered into a period of populist rule as the Liberal faction looked to alleviate the country’s economic

woes and redistribute Colombia’s wealth more evenly. Modern Colombia’s political instability can largely be traced to 1948, the year before Pablo was born, when the populist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated, causing a major rift between the Liberals and the Conservatives in Colombia. A decade of civil war known as ‘La Violencia’ or The Violence followed, in which over 200,000 people were killed countrywide, before the two groups agreed to form an uneasy coalition where the two parties would hold power alternately within the framework of a National Front. And this new government, with the covert support and encouragement

of the United States, began cracking down in the years that followed on the more left-leaning elements within Colombia’s politics, specifically Leninist-Marxist Communist groups, in order to prevent Colombia becoming a Russian ally within the Americas in much the same way which the island of Cuba had recently. The result, beginning in 1964, was the outbreak of a guerrilla war which has lasted in one shape or another down to the present day, between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC as they are more widely known, and the Colombian government, while other paramilitary organisations operating in rural

areas of Colombia also involved themselves in the so-called ‘Colombian Conflict’. The FARC and other groups were soon effectively in charge of large parts of rural Colombia. All of this was happening as worldwide demand for illegal narcotics, particularly in the United States and Europe, was surging in the 1960s and into the 1970s. At first the drug of choice was marijuana, but increasingly the real money in producing and transporting narcotics into America was made from cocaine, the refined and processed powder produced from the leaves of the coca plant. The environment in Colombia is ideal for the production

of coca plants and the country’s sprawling rural jungles and increasing lawlessness in the 1960s quickly made it the global centre of cocaine production. And while organisations such as the FARC were not initially directly involved in the production and exportation of cocaine, they did allow such activities to be carried out in the territories they controlled in Colombia and they also taxed the producers, an income which became vital for their ability to maintain their civil war against the government by buying arms and other supplies. Much later the FARC and other groups would even begin to engage in

production themselves. Thus, the production of cocaine in Colombia during the period of Pablo’s ascendancy and at his height cannot be separated from the political circumstances of the country during the second half of the twentieth century. This was the world into which Pablo Escobar was emerging in the late 1960s. By the time he was in his later teens the man who would subsequently proclaim that he was simply, quote, “a decent man who exports flowers,” was already involved in organised crime, albeit on a low level in Medellin. Working in association with Oscar Benel Aguirre he was selling

contraband cigarettes and engaging in ‘grand theft auto.’ The pair and their associates also conducted a number of high-profile kidnappings and collected large sums of money as ransoms. And Escobar was more ambitious still. He wanted to become rich, and to do so quickly, and so, to that end he was willing to engage in all manner of crime to acquire money. By the early 1970s this included smuggling marijuana, and it was only a change of cargo from there to cocaine later on. As a result many viewed him as a man marked. When Pablo met and began courting

Maria Victoria Henao, who was a teenager, around this time, her mother is said to have warned her that she should forget about him unless she was willing to spend much of her life visiting him in prison. Maria was undeterred and eventually they married in 1976 when he was 26 and she was just 15. They would have two children, Juan and Manuela. It was in the mid-1970s, shortly before his marriage to Maria, that Pablo first became involved in the growing cocaine trade when he was brought into the business by another smuggler named Griselda Blanco. Cocaine had

been something of a niche drug in the United States in the 1960s, with other narcotics such as marijuana, LSD and heroin proliferating to a much greater extent. However, in the 1970s the use of cocaine exploded across the country, particularly as the disco scene in cities such as New York and Miami expanded. As a result the market for cocaine in Latin America and in particular in Colombia expanded exponentially. This was the situation which allowed drug cartels and small operators such as Pablo was to begin with, to get into the business in the first place in Colombia

in the mid-1970s. His first engagement was with some established smugglers in Medellin who hired Pablo to deliver consignments of coca paste to processing facilities around Medellin and the wider area, so it could be fully processed into powdered cocaine. Before long Pablo was cutting out some of the intermediaries and developing his own operations to fly large consignments of fully processed cocaine out of Colombia and into the United States using various routes. And little did they know it at the time, that Pablo and his associates had fashioned the beginnings of what became known as the Medellin Cartel.

The Medellin Cartel was almost over before it ever really got going. In May 1976 Pablo and several others were arrested on the way to Medellin with a large consignment of 18 kilograms of coca paste. Pablo’s first instinct was to try to bribe those who had arrested him and subsequently the judges themselves in Medellin. This did not work, so Pablo then tried to have the arresting officers murdered to stop them from testifying at his trial. Evidently the possible risks which were now associated with trying to pursue Escobar were such that the authorities ultimately decided to drop

the case. He walked free, but the manner in which he had made the charges disappear was symptomatic of Pablo’s approach for the next fifteen or so years. Escobar was always willing to use violence if it could win him an edge over his competitors or keep the authorities from catching up with him. And this is important to remember in any assessment of Pablo Escobar. He would continuously in the years to come try to depict himself as a humble trader of drugs which he believed would someday be legalised anyway, but behind such self-serving depictions was someone who

ordered thousands of deaths over the years. Escobar and the Medellin Cartel’s business exploded in the late 1970s, not just owing to the expansion of the market for cocaine in the United States, but because the Cartel developed a number of highly effective methods for importing the drug into America. Shortly after they had been released from prison in Connecticut in 1976, two mid-level drug smugglers by the names of Carlos Lehder, a German-Colombian, and George Jung, an American from Massachusetts, had come into the employ of Escobar. Lehder had ended up in Danbury Prison in Connecticut for smuggling marijuana

and selling stolen cars, while Jung had been running an operation to bring marijuana to California from Mexico, and then shipping it across the country to New England where it fetched an enormous price compared to what it had been bought for at source. However, at Danbury they conceived of a plan to move into the now growing cocaine trade. Consequently when they were released they began smuggling cocaine from Colombia through the Caribbean and onwards into America, principally through Florida and the city of Miami in particular. Initially Escobar hired the pair to begin facilitating the expansion of his

business by bringing in ever greater consignments of cocaine to the United States. But this would soon expand. In 1978 Carlos Lehder began buying up property on the Bahamian island called Norman’s Cay with the intention of converting it effectively into a cocaine depot between Colombia and America. In the months that followed he intimidated local landowners into selling their properties, including murdering some of the residents. Lehder, a paranoid and volatile figure, also largely pushed Jung out of the operation at this time. Thus, within a few months he had virtually converted the island into a personal fiefdom and

then he invested millions of dollars to build a runway and warehouses. For the next several years Norman’s Cay acted as the Medellin Cartel’s personal airport in the Caribbean, off the coast of the United States and in close proximity to the world’s largest cocaine market. Large aircraft would bring in huge consignments of Escobar’s cocaine to the island and it would then be offloaded and reloaded onto smaller aircraft which could fly into the United States undetected. At the height of activities there, over 300 kilograms of cocaine were arriving at Norman’s Cay every day, making Escobar and Lehder

and their associates billionaires. Lehder became so wealthy that he twice offered to pay off the Colombian national debt as a way of avoiding prosecution for his crimes. Another prominent associate during this time was Barry Seal. Seal was an airline pilot from Baton Rouge in the southern American state of Louisiana. Like Jung, he had first become involved in drug trafficking in the mid-1970s by bringing in consignments of marijuana from Mexico, but like Jung and Lehder he had quickly realised that there were far greater profits to be made in bringing in the more valuable and more compact

cocaine. By 1981 he had established connections with Escobar and the Medellin Cartel and had a systematic operation in place. Seal used over a dozen small aircraft which could fly low and avoid radar detection in American airspace. These would fly in over the Gulf of Mexico to Louisiana airspace where they would then drop the packages out of the plane into agreed upon sites in a rural area. Seal then had a ground team collect the packages, before they were shipped off towards Florida and delivered into the wider Medellin Cartel’s distribution network on the East Coast. However, Seal’s

work for Escobar became double-edged. He was indicted by the DEA, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, in America in 1983 and by early 1984 he was working as a US government informant who provided extensive information about Escobar and his operation. This was eventually discovered by Escobar who had Seal killed in February 1986. While Norman’s Cay was becoming a private fiefdom of Lehder’s as an offshoot of the Medellin Cartel, and Seal was dropping his packages over Louisiana, Escobar was also establishing his own private kingdom in Colombia. With some of the proceeds from his operations Pablo bought

some 20 square kilometres of land around Puerto Triunfo, approximately 150 kilometres to the east of Medellin. Here he developed the Hacienda Napoles, or Naples Estate, a vast complex for him and his family. This included a Spanish colonial house, a sculpture park and even a zoo complete with exotic animals which Escobar had imported into Colombia, including zebras, hippos, antelopes, elephants, giraffes, ostriches and ponies. Escobar was particularly fond of hippos and many of these were brought into the Hacienda, a decision which has led to a population of wild and feral hippos inhabiting this part of Colombia to

the present day. Pablo Escobar also amassed a large collection of vintage and luxury cars and motorcycles, and even installed a kart racing track and a bullring. There was also an airport at the Hacienda, though this was for visitors, rather than being part of the Medellin Cartel’s business operations. Escobar had even intended to construct an Ancient Greek-style citadel or acropolis here, but in the end this plan went unrealised. Nor was this the only major property which Pablo acquired. Incredibly, despite his status as one of the biggest importers of cocaine into the United States, he was able

to also acquire a massive pink coloured mansion on Miami Beach in Florida in the late 1970s which was registered in his own name, a result of Escobar not being a notorious drug lord at this time, although the same property would be seized by the US government in subsequent years. Elsewhere Escobar acquired a huge estate in the Caribbean on the island of Isla Grande, the Great Island. This is the largest of the chain of islands which make up the Islas del Rosario, a significant island archipelago which lies just over twenty miles off the north coast of

Colombia. As with the Hacienda Napoles, Escobar developed a grand estate here, complete with a mansion, additional apartments, imported animals, swimming pools and a helicopter landing pad for easy access in and out. And these were only the most extravagant of the Escobar properties acquired as a result of the illicit gains from the Colombian drug trade, as the Medellin Cartel also had hundreds of properties throughout the country which were often used solely for the purpose of hiding its money in highly elaborate fashions. Pablo’s operations continued to grow unhindered throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s.

At this stage he benefited from his relative anonymity by comparison with his later infamy as the King of Cocaine or El Patron, ‘the Boss’. As a result the Medellin Cartel which he headed continued to grow exponentially and delivered more and more cocaine into the United States, as well as smuggling significant quantities into other countries such as Spain which acted as an entry point for the European drug market in much the same way as Florida did for the American market. The methods used to move the drugs became ever more elaborate, including using boats which towed small

submarines loaded with the powder. Soon Escobar’s operation was responsible for smuggling several tonnes of cocaine into America and Europe every week, resulting in profits of as much as $60 million dollars a day and upwards of $20 billion annually. Consequently operations expanded beyond Colombia and by the early 1980s the Cartel was acquiring coca paste from plantations which were established in neighbouring countries such as Peru and Bolivia. The operation had created an industry throughout South America. The Cartel was now generating so much money that it could not be spent, and even the acts of laundering it and

hiding it had become highly problematic. Much of it was laundered through Panama, often by buying gold and then melting it down into forms which could then be converted into clean money in other countries. But even these methods had their limitations. And so instead of spending the money, huge tranches of it were hidden in properties across the country where few would suspect it of being located. Also incredibly, the Cartel acquired a mansion in which a retractable Jacuzzi was installed. This had a secret compartment underneath it, in which tens of millions of dollars were stored. A poor

Colombian family were then given the house to live in, without being told about the compartment, the only catch being that they had to occasionally leave the premises whenever money was taken from the compartment or added to it. Unsurprisingly some of this money is still being found today. In 2020 Nicolás Escobar, Pablo’s nephew, found $18 million dollars hidden in the wall of one of Pablo’s former residences. It is far from the only time that huge sums of money have been discovered inadvertently in some of Escobar’s and the Cartel’s former properties. With ever increasing profits, there also

came an ever greater risk of getting caught. One of the greatest fears for Escobar and other members of the Cartel was extradition. In September 1979 the Colombian government had signed an extradition treaty with the administration of US President Jimmy Carter, whereby Colombian drug smugglers who imported large quantities of cocaine into the United States could be sent to the US to face criminal prosecution for their crimes there. This treaty came into effect in March 1982 and posed a grave risk to Escobar. If he were arrested and sentenced in Colombia, the corruption which prevailed in the country

would allow him to either escape conviction or a jail sentence would follow under very comfortable terms. However, if he was extradited to the United States and was convicted there he would almost certainly face life in prison in a maximum security facility. In response to this threat in the early to mid-1980s Escobar and several associates began a terrorist campaign of kidnappings, murders and bombings of individuals within Colombian politics, policing and the judiciary in an attempt to make them row back on the extradition treaty. But it did not have the desired effect and throughout the 1980s the

fear of extradition remained omnipresent for traffickers such as Escobar in Colombia. To counteract the risk of extradition Pablo attempted to gain popular support throughout Colombia. Much of Escobar’s mystique was born of a self-created image of himself as a Colombian Robin Hood. In the initial years there was a perception that Pablo and the Cartel’s activities were doing little to harm ordinary Colombians. Any social damage which their actions engendered occurred far away in the United States, a country which many Colombians viewed as an imperial aggressor in Latin America. To soften his image further Pablo gave away substantial

amounts of the vast sums of money which were arriving into the Cartel’s coffers every week. This he distributed as free cash giveaways to the people of Medellin in some instances, while he also spent large sums of money on building projects both in Medellin and the wider country. These included soccer stadiums, parks and civic amenities, while for a time he even opened the zoo at Hacienda Napoles to the public, charging no entry fee. One of the most significant investments was in improving the road network around Medellin. The city had developed very quickly in the twentieth century

and was now plagued by traffic jams which Pablo’s money went some way towards remedying. Finally, at Christmas Escobar dressed as Santa Claus and would give out expensive presents in the poorer neighbourhoods. In this way he bought the adulation of many of Medellin’s and wider Colombia’s citizens. Despite such efforts to soften his image, by the early 1980s Pablo was well known as the head of the infamous Medellin Cartel and was a marked man. So he responded in a novel way. He courted even further notoriety. In 1982 he decided to enter Colombian politics and stood as a

candidate for the Colombian Liberal Party. Here he focused his campaigning on the extradition treaty which was just coming into effect between Colombia and the United States, with Pablo arguing that the Colombian president, Julio Cesar Turbay, was effectively ceding away some of Colombia’s sovereignty to the United States by allowing Washington to extradite Colombian citizens to its own country and prosecute them there. Yet Pablo had his own critics throughout the campaign as well, some of whom were silenced with bullets. At a debate in Medellin one vocal dissenter accused Escobar of entering politics for his own ends. The

man was detained by the Medellin police shortly afterwards, elements of which were in the Cartel’s employ. Thereafter he was handed over to Escobar’s henchmen before showing up days later dead on the streets of Medellin, his body riddled with bullets. Thus, through a mixture of intimidation and his populism Escobar managed to win election to the Colombian Chamber of Representatives in March 1982. Pablo’s entry into Colombian politics was a debateable strategy. While it provided something of a smokescreen for his illicit activities and allowed him to challenge the extradition treaty from within parliament, it generated an awful lot

of unnecessary attention for him. More significantly it provoked the conservative political establishment in Colombia to begin attempting to bring him down. Before, he had been one of many drug traffickers in the country, albeit the most successful. Now he was deliberately trying to undermine the country’s political establishment. In particular the newly elected Conservative president, Belisario Betancur, was determined to oust Escobar from Colombia’s politics. To that end in the summer of 1983 Betancur initiated a campaign against Pablo. Firstly, he appointed Rodrigo Lara Bonilla as the minister of justice to take a much more active stance in prosecuting

Colombia’s drug traffickers, Pablo being chief amongst them. Simultaneously a media campaign was launched against Escobar with a lengthy article appearing in the El Espectador newspaper assessing Pablo’s earlier arrest in 1976. This provided extensive details of what had happened and the subsequent efforts by Escobar to cover up his arrest and the methods used to avoid prosecution. Pablo was now the subject of unwanted media scrutiny as he became the face of illegal drug trafficking in Colombia. His initial reaction was his usual one, to such unwanted attention. He considered having the editor of El Espectador murdered, while also

ordering members of the Cartel to try to purchase as many copies of the edition of the newspaper as possible to limit its readership. However, within days further stories began to break which extended the problem beyond what was appearing in the pages of El Espectador. Some of these homed in on his private life and provided details on how Pablo had begun an affair with a well-known Colombian television presenter named Virginia Vallejo. Vallejo had recently become the first journalist to undertake a one on one interview with Escobar and their relationship had developed from there. The result was

a crisis at home as well as in public for the trafficker, as his wife Maria temporarily kicked him out of the family home and threatened to divorce him, a situation which was only remedied after much pleading, though Pablo’s affair with Vallejo continued on and off for several further years and only ended in 1987. Pablo was now generating far too much attention and late in 1983 the superior judge of Medellin, Gustavo Zuluaga, decided to reopen the investigation relating to Pablo’s arrest in 1976. Simultaneously the United States embassy in Bogota cancelled Escobar’s American visa, while the Colombian

Congress voted in favour of revoking Pablo’s special immunity as a member of the parliament. As a result he decided to step back from the political arena, aware that his plan to try to acquire greater protection from prosecution by entering politics had actually had the opposite impact. And on the 20th of January 1984 he resigned his seat in the Colombian Chamber of Representatives in a letter which stated that “I will continue to fight against oligarchies and injustices, and against backroom deal making, which continues to nurture a blatant disregard for the people’s needs, and especially against demagogues

and dirty politicians, who remain indolent in the face of the people’s suffering but are always on the alert when it comes to divvying up official power.” It was a defiant exit and as the years ahead would prove Escobar was now determined to confront the Colombian government in other, more aggressive, ways. On the 30th of April 1984, three months after Pablo’s resignation from the Colombian parliament, the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who had made it his goal to prosecute Escobar and Colombia’s other main traffickers was sitting in his car in traffic in the streets of Bogota

when a Yamaha motorcycle pulled up next to the vehicle. There were two men on it. One was driving, but the back passenger, Ivan Dario Guisado, quickly pulled out an Uzi sub-machine gun and opened fire on Bonilla’s car. The justice minister was hit with multiple bullets and died instantly. Guisado, who was killed moments later as Bonilla’s bodyguards returned fire, and the driver, Byron Velasquez, had acted on Escobar’s orders in an act which was effectively a declaration of war by Pablo on the Colombian government. And it was viewed as such by the authorities which now moved to

fully implement the extradition treaty with the United States. Meanwhile, Pablo temporarily left Colombia with his family, settling in Panama to the north and then spending a brief interval in Nicaragua, a country enduring a full blown civil war in the mid-1980s. When he finally returned to Colombia late in 1984 Pablo was determined to escalate his conflict with the government. He now opened contacts with the 19th of April Movement, or M-19, a Colombian guerrilla organisation which had emerged in the 1970s and had become the second largest paramilitary organisation in Colombia next to the FARC. Now, with Pablo’s

encouragement and financial and logistical support, M-19 began preparing to attack the Colombian government head-on in response to the implementation of the extradition treaty with the United States, a development which the group saw as a blatant infringement of Colombia’s national sovereignty. Thus, on the 6th of November 1985 some three dozen M-19 guerrilla fighters stormed the Palace of Justice, the seat of the Colombian Supreme Court in Bogota, taking over 300 individuals hostage, including most of the supreme court judges. Then demands were issued calling for the renouncement of the extradition treaty and for President Betancur to step down

and face charges. Meanwhile the Colombian army had surrounded the Palace and was making preparations to storm the building if needed. Pablo had instigated a full blown military conflict in the centre of the Colombian capital. While the M-19 fighters’ demands in the Palace of Justice of course could not be granted on any level, on the morning of the 7th of November, the day after the attack began, there seemed to be room for negotiation. The paramilitary fighters within agreed to release a prominent hostage, a state councillor named Reynaldo Arciniegas early that morning. But in the hours that

followed the mood soured. Then, just after lunchtime, at 2pm General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, the commander of the army divisions outside, ordered the storming of the building. In the hours that followed nearly one hundred people were killed inside the Palace, including nearly all of the M-19 fighters and half of the two dozen justices of the Colombian Supreme Court. However, for Pablo the incident had provided an unexpected benefit. Large tranches of documentation and evidence on Colombia’s leading traffickers was destroyed in the attack on the palace. It was believed that these had been deliberately burned by the

M-19 fighters within to aid Escobar in escaping charges, but it now seems more likely that these had accidentally been destroyed by a fire which broke out as a result of the explosives which were used by the army to break into the building. The bloodbath had proved unexpectedly beneficial for the drug lord and meanwhile Betancur’s government was coming under sustained criticism for its handling of the incident which had led to the death of half of Colombia’s senior judges and dozens of others. In the aftermath of the attack on the Palace of Justice, Colombia’s politics began to

shift in ways which would have implications for Escobar, his family, the Medellin Cartel and indeed the drug traffickers throughout Colombia. Betancur was badly damaged by the handling of the siege and in August 1986 Virgilio Barco won a comfortable election victory to replace him as Colombia’s 27th President. And the Barco government adopted an even tougher stance against Escobar and the cartels than that of Betancur. An indication of this was given in January 1987, months after coming into office, when police units intercepted a convoy of Escobar’s cars and jeeps moving from Hacienda Napoles to a safe-house in

Medellin. Pablo was travelling separately to his wife and children, so he was not apprehended, but Maria and the children, Juan and Manuela, were arrested and held in a cell for several hours until Pablo’s lawyers were mustered to have them released. It was an indication of the new government’s willingness to strike at Escobar in any way they could and a symptom of the intensification of the conflict between the trafficker and the Colombian government. The Colombian government was not Escobar’s only antagonist in the mid-to-late 1980s. In the late 1970s, just as the Medellin Cartel was developing under

Pablo’s auspices, a separate cartel had emerged in the city of Cali in south-western Colombia, run by the Orejuela brothers, Gilberto and Miguel, José Londono and Hélmer ‘Pacho’ Herrera. At first the two cartels collaborated with each other, often acting in shared interest to circumvent any legal problems in Colombia and to launder their money abroad, while there were agreements put in place to divide up certain parts of the cocaine market within the United States. However, tensions escalated in the mid-1980s, in part brought about by efforts by Rodriguez Gacha, one of the senior members of the Medellin Cartel,

to muscle his way into the New York City market, an area which Medellin had typically ceded to Cali. By late 1987 an open war was in effect between Medellin and Cali, with rampant murders and numerous bombings. One of the latter in 1988 even succeeded in detonating a car bomb outside Escobar’s house. All of this just added to the array of problems facing Escobar in the late 1980s and the war with the Cali Cartel would continue in varying levels of intensity for the remainder of Pablo’s life. Despite the war with Cali and the government’s ongoing efforts

to arrest him or extradite him, the Medellin Cartel reached the peak of its wealth and power in the mid-to-late 1980s, fuelled by the ever-increasing demand for cocaine in the United States. By this stage the Cartel was generating revenues of approximately $70 million dollars per day or about $25 billion dollars annually, a sum which would amount to over $70 billion dollars in today’s money when adjusted for inflation, all the result of a trafficking network which was managing to import over a dozen tonnes of cocaine on average into the US on a daily basis. As later recounted

by Pablo’s brother, Roberto, who oversaw much of the finances and logistics of the Cartel, the organisation was spending $1,000 a week on rubber-bands to divide the money they had coming in, into stacks. There was so much profit that perhaps as much as 10% of the Cartel’s money was being lost or destroyed before it could ever be spent. The Cartel controlled approximately 80% of the world’s cocaine trade at this time and Pablo himself was estimated to be one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires, though estimates of his actual accumulated wealth vary considerably. And Pablo continued to use

this money to buoy up his reputation within Colombia itself. In particular Escobar was aware of the value of using sport for his own propaganda purposes. Beginning in the early 1980s he had begun offering extensive financial support to Medellin’s football team, Atletico Nacional. In a few short years the club was transformed from a mid-table performer in the Colombian national league to title contenders. Foreign players were brought in on high paying contracts and some of Colombia’s best footballers played here in the 1980s. Thus, the club finished second in the championship in 1988, a result which qualified them

for the Copa Libertadores, the pan-South American football cup in 1989. Progressing to the final, Nacional beat Paraguay’s Club Olimpia in a penalty shoot-out to become the first ever Colombian team to win the Copa. For Pablo investment in the club had multiple benefits. It won him huge numbers of supporters in Medellin and Colombia more broadly, but it also allowed him to launder significant sums of money through betting rings. Even this avenue of business was closed out as well eventually, as the footballing authorities began to crack down on the Cartel’s influence in Colombian football. Colombian teams, for

instance, were banned from the Copa Libertadores for a time in the early 1990s. Whatever the vagaries of the Cartel’s wealth and the sporting success of Atletico Nacional were, Escobar’s trafficking operations were having a frightening impact on the city of Medellin itself. By the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s Medellin had become statistically the most dangerous city on Earth to live in, when measured according to violent incidents and the number of homicides being committed. In 1991 alone, for instance, there were 7,237 murders committed in the city, an average of about 18 homicides per

day or a rate of 266 people out of every 100,000 people each year, the city’s population having expanded again significantly to more than one and a half million people by this time. More broadly Colombia, plagued by the government’s clashes with the FARC and other guerrillas and the wars and conflicts between the various cartels, had become the most dangerous country in the world. In 1991 there were over 25,000 violent deaths recorded here, a figure which increased to over 27,000 in 1992. This was an average of 70 violent deaths per day, or about one person every twenty

minutes. According to most standard measurements of such things Colombia was effectively a failed state by the late 1980s and early 1990s, a development which was in no small way owing to Escobar’s and the Medellin Cartel’s activities. It was not simply the case that Escobar’s trafficking activity and the wider political problems of Colombia were causing all this bloodshed, Pablo was also capable of engaging in acts of indiscriminate mass murder. Some of the most notorious incidents came in the early winter of 1989. On the 27th of November, Avianca Flight 203, a Colombian domestic passenger flight from Bogota

to Cali, exploded in the sky five minutes after taking off from the Colombian capital killing all 107 passengers and three others on the ground. Pablo had orchestrated the bombing in the lead up to the 1990 presidential election in a failed effort to kill César Gaviria Trujilo, a candidate in the election whom it was clear would take a particularly tough stance on the cartels if elected. Then, just two weeks later, a truck bomb exploded outside the Administrative Department of Security building in Bogota. On this occasion Escobar’s target was General Miguel Alfredo Marquez, the director of the

Department. The truck had been filled with half a tonne of dynamite and the explosion was so big that it killed 57 people and injured over 2,000 more in the building and the surrounding area. Thus, for all his efforts to portray himself as a Colombian Robin Hood, Escobar was overseeing acts of indiscriminate mass murder throughout Colombia in the late 1980s. Escobar’s efforts to assassinate César Gaviria Trujilo had been foiled in November 1989 as the contender for the office of president of Colombia had not boarded Avianca Flight 203. Trujilo had emerged as a candidate following the assassination

of Luis Carlos Galan. Galan was a long standing nemesis of Escobar’s who had decided to run for the presidency in 1990. By August 1989 he was well ahead in the national polls, but then on the 18th of that month he was gunned down in Soacha in the outskirts of Bogota. And there is no doubt that Escobar had ordered his assassination. Trujilo had stepped into the void created by Galan’s assassination and there was now no doubt but that Pablo had to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible by the new Colombian government when Trujilo duly won

the election to become president in 1990. However, just months later a new obstacle was introduced into the situation when a new constitution was promulgated for Colombia in 1991, but with the stipulation that it would not honour the extradition treaty with the United States. Many contemporaries and most analysts since have concluded that a broad range of individuals connected to the cartels and Escobar most especially had bribed dozens of members of the National Assembly to ensure that the extradition treaty was not to be included in the new constitution. With the fear of extradition to the United States

temporarily removed and with the difficulties of his position mounting, a situation in which he was simultaneously at war with the Cali Cartel and the Colombian government, Pablo now decided on another radically different course of action. He began to negotiate with elements within Trujilo’s administration about how he could offer to serve a limited jail sentence in order to bring to an end his conflict with the state and make himself a relatively free man at the end of the process. This was an arrangement which could have benefits for both sides. For Escobar it would mean a relatively

clean slate within Colombia itself, while for the Colombian government it offered the possibility that the constant attacks on politicians and judges which Escobar had overseen for the better part of a decade might finally be brought to an end. It would not be the most honourable of deals, but for a country which was mired in so many problems by the early 1990s, including a civil war in the rural parts of the country, it presented the possibility of temporarily abating one problem. As a result in 1991 Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin Cartel voluntarily surrendered himself

to Colombian law enforcement. There was just one catch. He had requested that he be allowed to build his own jail. La Catedral, or The Cathedral, was not exactly the typical idea that one has of a prison. Where in many jurisdictions prisons are built to separate the incarcerated individual from their old life, in this instance Escobar was able to negotiate the terms of his surrender which included the ability to build his own prison. The Cathedral was accordingly constructed on a hilltop overlooking the city of Medellin, so that Pablo’s associates and family could easily visit him. The

set up was not exactly onerous for the Colombian drug lord. For instance, the prison featured a football pitch, a Jacuzzi and even its own bar, replete with a waterfall. Escobar had even had his own private telephone line and a telescope set up so that he could get a bird’s eye view of what was occurring in the city below. Effectively this was a purpose built mansion for Escobar in which he was under a kind of voluntary house arrest. For this reason the ‘prison’ became known colloquially as ‘Hotel Escobar’ as an indication of exactly how lax the

terms of Pablo’s prison sentence actually were. Moreover, it was constructed with defence in mind. Built on a hill top which was often shrouded in fog the Cathedral acted more as a fortress to prevent anybody outside trying to get at Escobar rather than a prison in which Pablo was confined. The terms of Pablo’s sentence had been that he would spend no more than five years imprisoned at La Catedral and in return the Colombian government had agreed to forego any efforts to extradite him to the United States. Escobar would effectively be allowed to continue to oversee his

trafficking activities from on top of the hill overlooking Medellin, while the government would be able to save face and say that it had finally managed to impose some form of punishment on the drug lord. However, the subterfuge did not last for very long. By early 1992 reports were circulating in the Colombian media that Pablo was continuing to effectively run the Medellin Cartel from La Catedral, as well as exposés of the very comfortable surroundings he enjoyed there. Under pressure the Colombian government decided to try to move Escobar to a more conventional Colombian jail in July 1992.

Yet word of this easily reached Pablo in advance at the hilltop prison and with little genuine restrictions to his movements in place Escobar was able to leave La Catedral unhindered. A false wall which he had had built over an escape tunnel was removed and Escobar was able to leave quite easily through an escape route that he had installed when his own prison was built to house him. Pablo’s flight from La Catedral ushered in the last dramatic episode of his life. He had escaped from being sent to a much tougher prison, but he was now firmly

opposed by Trujilo’s government, which was entirely willing to call on the United States and allow America secret services to operate freely on Colombian soil to try to apprehend, detain or kill Escobar. By the early 1990s a division of the US Joint Special Operations Command, commonly known as SEAL Team Six, was in operation in Colombia with the express purpose of apprehending Escobar and if possible extraditing him to the United States where he would certainly face a life sentence in a maximum security prison. And these were joined and aided by Search Bloc, a special operations unit of

the National Police of Colombia which had been assembled as early as 1986 by the Barco administration, but which had been given additional resources in the early 1990s as the drive to apprehend Escobar intensified. And these were also joined by a broad coalition of Escobar’s other enemies, notably the Cali Cartel and a vigilante group known as Los Pepes, an organisation which ostensibly represented people who had lost loved ones owing to Escobar’s campaign of violence and bombings since the 1980s. The US and Colombian special forces collaborated with Los Pepes in the aftermath of Escobar’s flight from La

Catedral. The manhunt commenced as soon as Escobar fled the prison in July 1992. Pablo had inflamed the situation immediately by giving an interview with a local radio station as soon as he had established himself at a safe-house. In this he taunted the government and his opponents by outlining details of how he had escaped, but there was certainly an element of caution here too. Escobar made it clear in the interview that he was willing to come back into custody if certain conditions could be met, specifically that he would be allowed serve out the remainder of the

agreed sentence at La Catedral. But the government had had enough. No new terms were offered and the manhunt was stepped up. The collaboration between Search Bloc and the American Delta Force and special operations units was now openly to be seen on the streets of Medellin and Bogota as units made house to house searches and attempted to track down Escobar’s closest associates. In December 1992 they came very close to apprehending the drug lord when they raided a safe-house he was using. Pablo had only moved from it hours earlier. But progress was being made in other ways

as many of Escobar’s supporters and facilitators began to turn their back on an individual who they now saw as doomed to be apprehended eventually and as the price of remaining loyal became ever higher. A clear indication of these shifting fortunes was seen when Pablo’s brother-in-law was killed by Los Pepes. In the end Escobar managed to evade the authorities for nearly a year and a half after his flight from La Catedral. He was finally caught owing to a surveillance operation which managed to trace his cell phone transmissions in the early winter of 1993. As a result

Search Bloc and US operatives determined that Escobar was holed up in another safe-house in Los Olivos, a middle-class neighbourhood in Medellin. They moved on the 2nd of December 1993. A unit of eight burst through the door, following which Escobar and his bodyguard that day, Alvaro de Jesus Agudelo, or El Limon as he was known, ran out onto the roof of the building and made an effort to escape across the rooves of the adjoining houses. It is not 100% clear what happened next. Gunfire was exchanged and moments later Pablo was lying dead on the rooftop, bullets

having hit him in his leg, torso and ear. The shot to the ear entered his head and killed him, but there is a suspicion that Escobar delivered this bullet himself, having determined some time earlier that he would commit suicide before ever facing the possibility of being extradited to the United States. Pablo’s brother and close confidante, Roberto, later claimed Pablo had always asserted he would shoot himself through the ear if cornered in this fashion. Whatever the truth of it, the result was the same. On the 2nd of December 1993, just one day after his 44th birthday

and seventeen or so years after the emergence of the Medellin Cartel, the man known as ‘El Patron’, ‘the Boss’, was killed in Medellin. Despite the violence he had unleashed, the Robin Hood image Escobar had cultivated for himself remained strong. Over 25,000 mourners turned out for his funeral. In the aftermath of Escobar’s death the Cali Cartel for a time moved to become the biggest manufacturer and trafficker of cocaine in Colombia. However, it faced stiff competition from a new organisation, the Norte del Valle Cartel, or North Valley Cartel, which had first emerged in the final years of

Pablo’s life in the Valle del Cauca region. Both outfits were increasingly looking to transport their cocaine north to Mexico, which became the new entry point into the United States as the Caribbean routes to Florida and the East Coast became ever more difficult to traffic through in the 1990s. And eventually the Cali Cartel too would largely be dismantled and fragmented in the mid-1990s and further successor syndicates appeared, notably the North Coast Cartel based out of the northern city of Baranquilla and with a particular focus on supplying networks to the east in Europe, while also rejuvenating some

of Pablo’s older supply lines north to the East Coast cities of the United States. All of these others in their own time have come and gone and been replaced by newer organisations, each with a determination to use ever more violent methods to establish themselves. Today Colombia is a country which is gradually recovering from the drug cartels and the political conflicts which ripped it apart in the second half of the twentieth century and allowed figures such as Escobar to flourish. In 2016 an historic ceasefire agreement was introduced between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, offering

the possibility of an end being brought to half a century of paramilitary violence in the country. And the city of Medellin has prospered since Escobar’s demise. Crime rates in the city decreased rapidly in the aftermath of the collapse of the Medellin Cartel in the mid-1990s and the city has benefited from investment and the development of a major transport infrastructure which has seen it become a hub of industry and business within Colombia once again in the early twenty-first century. Today the city is internationally acclaimed for its development of an environmental and innovative public transport system, a

far cry from its position thirty years ago as the homicide capital of the world under Escobar’s auspices. Other signs of Escobar’s influence are still visible. La Catedral was left abandoned for many years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but in 2007 a group of Benedictine monks took it over and turned it into a religious site complete with a library and other amenities. Meanwhile, the hippos have increased in number and are still wandering around the grounds of the Hacienda Napoles. Pablo Escobar was something of an enigmatic figure. He grew up in the urban squalor of

Medellin, a place which had developed from a small town into a city of over one million people during the course of the half century between the 1920s and the 1970s. Moreover, he emerged as a drug trafficker at a time when Colombia was in the midst of mass political violence, effectively a civil war, and as the country also became the global capital of the production of cocaine. Consequently, it is easy to imagine that if Escobar had not emerged as the head of the Medellin Cartel somebody else would have come to prominence in the Colombian drug trade

anyway, whether in Medellin, Cali or elsewhere. It could also be argued that he did much to help the poor and disenfranchised, particularly in his home town at a time when Colombia was suffering from appalling poverty and many people had effectively been abandoned by the government in Bogota. Pablo gave handouts to the poor, created jobs and developed Medellin’s infrastructure. He even allowed people free access to his zoo at Hacienda Napoles and buoyed people’s spirits by funding Atletico Nacional football team to such an extent that they won the Copa Libertadores in 1989. This was the Robin Hood-type

image of himself which Escobar attempted to cultivate. The reality is far grimmer though. Escobar was a mass murderer who sank Colombia and Medellin in particular into levels of violence and bloodshed which were unprecedented. It is certainly true that the country had many, many problems which were not of his making, but it was his increasingly determined efforts to wage war on the Colombian government and rivals such as the Cali Cartel from the mid-1980s onwards which saw the country reach the point where over 25,000 violent deaths were occurring every year, nearly one-third of them alone in Medellin.

Moreover, Escobar might have been willing to give away much of his wealth, most of which could not be used by the Cartel anyway by the mid-to-late 1980s, but he was equally willing to murder scores or even hundreds of innocent bystanders at a time in efforts to kill his enemies, such as occurred with Avianca Flight 203 and the Department of Security bombings in November and December 1989. Once his malevolent influence was removed in the mid-1990s Medellin and Colombia gradually started to make some progress towards reforming the city and the country. Consequently, while Escobar might have claimed

that he was simply “a decent man who sells flowers,” the reality was far different. What do you think of Pablo Escobar? Was he the Colombian Robin Hood type figure he tried to portray himself as, or was he simply a ruthless mass murderer and a profiteer? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.