Pablo Escobar has gone down in history as the biggest drug trafficker in Colombia but he was also famous for his weight in the political history of his country and his many eccentricities, not to mention the more than 10,000 crimes attributed to him. Next in Overstory we explain the story of Pablo Escobar.
When we look for the name of Pablo Escobar in the history books or on Google, the first thing that always appears to us is his figure as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, drug trafficker of Colombina, but the truth is that he was also one of the the bloodiest criminals of the 20th century.
Pablo Escobar’s childhood
Born Pablo Escobar Gaviria (when he grew up, many would know him as the “Patron” in his adult life) on December 1, 1949 in Rionegro, in a small town less than 40 kilometers from Medellín (Colombia), was the third of seven children (three sisters and four brothers). His very religious family decides to call him one of the apostles of Jesus. He apparently was his mother’s favorite, and in fact it was known that as a child he was a spoiled child to the extreme.
From an early age he begins to demonstrate his leadership skills and his vision to earn money at all costs. As a child he managed to rent bicycles or old comics and thus be able to have their own “fortune”.
In their teens He associates with his cousin-brother Gustavo Gaviria to work in a tombstone factory. The two boys traveled from town to town trying to sell their product among relatives who had lost a loved one, although they soon found an illegal way to make the business prosper since they were dedicated to stealing marble tombstones from the San Pedro cemetery, where the rich families of Medellin had luxurious pantheons, and then sold them to recyclers.
His beginnings in drug trafficking
It is in 1972, at the age of 22, when Pablo Escobar begins to make a name for himself in Medellín. after putting himself at the head of a gang of thugs with whom he dedicated himself to looting cars as well as smuggling. We are at the dawn of the massive export of cocaine to the United States from Colombia and Escobar was set as a business of the future. He was not wrong and he started a business that ended up being very prosperous for him and those around him, since it generated much more money than he could ever have imagined.
He begins to work together with his cousin-brother, in the shadow of smuggler Alfredo Gómez López (nicknamed “The Godfather”) both being a kind of bodyguard for the large drug trucks that arrived in the city). Perhaps the success of his early years was his tenacity, his level of violence (exaggerated) despite the fact that he knew how to remain calm in extreme situations and above all, his refusal to be tempted by the merchandise with which he traded himself.
With the first years with Gómez López he becomes a “fly”person who stands in front of the caravan of vehicles loaded with drugs bribed the authorities so that his companions are not in danger).
Pablo Escobar in the formation of the Medellín Cartel
In 1974, two years after starting in the drug “empire”, he is already quite a name as a smuggler in part, because he himself is in charge of taking the cocaine consignments to US soil. In 1976 he expanded his business, by building their own cocaine processing laboratories. It is in that same year when the Medellín Cartel was formed, a criminal organization which he directs and which encompassed an infrastructure divided into: production, transport and sale.
An unstoppable period begins in which he manages to control 80% of the drug traffic that enters the United States. At 29 years old he is a completely rich man and thus fulfills the promise he had made to himself as a child (if at 25 he did not have a million pesos would commit suicide).
Pablo Escobar in politics
After becoming rich with drugs, he turns to politics as his next field of action. His goal was to legalize or “cover” his dirty business in some way. He is dedicated to doing good works of charity (such as building soccer fields in deprived areas or building buildings) but all this paid for with drug money.
His social measures, very popular with his relatives, the citizens and especially the inhabitants of the neighborhood in which La Paz grew up, are not well seen by his political rivals who accused him of being populist. In spite of everything, he achieves part of his goal by becoming, at the age of 32, a substitute congressman for the Liberal Alternative party.
Pablo Escobar’s “Hacienda Napoles”
With so much money and so much success in his business, Escobar becomes an eccentric who also generated a multitude of legends such as the fact that he once burned two million dollars to warm his son or that he wasted some 2,100 million dollars a month.
What was true, was the purchase of 7,400 acres in a town near Medellin paying about 50 million euros in order to build his house, the “Hacienda Napoles”.» and in which it even had a zoo.
The “Hacienda Napoles” became his “fortress”, but it was also a place where wild parties full of underage girls were held since Escobar was fond of having relationships with minors.
Despite this, Escobar he had married at the age of 25 with a teenager of only 15, but he did not repress himself and organized authentic orgies within the walls of his hacienda.
The lives that Pablo Escobar took
Pablo Escobar’s biography is relevant in itself, but also very black because all his success and wealth were comparable to his cruelty.
With his coming to power, turns Colombia into a place marked by drug terrorism against judges, prosecutors, police, military and politicians. Anyone who opposed his reign of cocaine was eliminated by some “parrillero” (as people who accompany a motorcycle are called in South America) with a submachine gun.
“Hágale” was apparently the word used by Escobar to have someone executed. A practice that increased when Escobar was expelled from politics, when Colombian Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla managed to demonstrate his direct relationship with drug trafficking and that he financed himself through drugs.
Lara Bonilla proved her reason, but it cost her her life: she died in 1984, machine-gunned inside her car.
The violence shown by Escobar had no limit, although it culminated in 1989 when he ordered the explosion of half a kilo of dynamite near the building of the Administrative Department of Security. A total of 70 people lost their lives and the wounded numbered more than 500.
That same year, “El Patron” blew up an “Avianca” plane in mid-flight, believing that the presidential candidate César Gaviria was traveling on it, who had finally stayed on the ground. 110 people died.
It is at that time when justice attributes (directly or indirectly) the authorship of the death of more than 10,000 people, a figure that earned him a multitude of unpleasant names among his enemies.
Pablo Escobar’s entrance in “The Cathedral”
The DEA of the United States has had in Pablo Escobar one of its most difficult criminals against whom it has fought. In 1979 they requested that Colombian criminals who had acted on their borders be extradited and tried in their country. Despite the fact that the norm was accepted in principle, the great wave of attacks perpetrated later by Escobar himself makes the South American government take the measure back, although the president reached an agreement with the drug trafficker: they would only revoke the law if he turned himself in to the local authorities and ended up behind bars. The capo accepted, although he made one condition: the prison would be built by him.
June 19, 1991Pablo Escobar entered “La Catedral” a building built for the capo’s imprisonment but that it was anything but a jail. A gym, a soccer field, several game rooms and even a natural waterfall were some of the “comforts” that he had and he was not really locked up if we take into account that he came in, went out and the parties continued to be celebrated as in his hacienda. . The press discovered the story and the government had no choice but to make public that it was going to transfer “El Patron” to a real cell, so he escaped on July 21, 1992.
The end of Escobar’s life
After escaping, the government creates a special group with more than 500 men known as the «Search Bloc to find and end his life. After months of incessant surveillance, on December 1, 1993 (one day after Escobar’s birthday), the authorities prepare a special operation in order to catch him definitively.
It was not until December 3, when Escobar contacted his son. The authorities then discover that he is hidden in a semi-detached house in a middle-class urbanization in Medellín, where they go to arrest him together with Álvaro de Jesús Agudelo (alias “El Limón ») one of his best-known bodyguards.
Escobar did not give himself up easily, he tried to escape through the roof but the policemen covering the back of the house shot at them with R15 rifles. The death of Pablo Escobar was mourned by many in Medellín.