10 ominous facts about Pablo Escobar, considered by many to be Colombian Robin Hood

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Pablo Escobar is a cocaine king and godfather who was an extremely controversial person. On the one hand, he was loved (and feared) by many Colombians, as Pablo sympathized with and often helped those who, in his opinion, were infringed upon by the government. However, there are other facts that tell a very different story - he was a cold-blooded killer who stopped at nothing to make his billions.

1. First money and stolen gravestones

For Escobar, business has always been above morality, and he adhered to this rule from the very beginning. He was born on December 1, 1949 in Rionegro, Colombia and raised in nearby Medellin. Pablo was the child of the era known as La Violencia, 10 years of armed conflict, political unrest and poverty. It is not surprising that Escobar wanted a different life, so he was ready to do anything to get out of poverty, regardless of any moral principles. One of his first illegal occupations was that an enterprising young man stole tombstones from local cemeteries, filed the names off them and sold the "clean" tombstones to Panamanian smugglers. Escobar himself once said that by the age of 22 he would be a millionaire, and he never even had any doubts about it. In the early 1970s, Escobar had a rather versatile criminal career. But like many aspiring drug lords, he wanted to become the leader of the cartel, and it took a lot of bloodshed to get there.

2. The rise of a career and hired killers

In order for Escobar to rise to the top of the Colombian drug business, he had to kill many of his "colleagues". But personally, there was almost no blood on his hands; instead, Pablo Escobar controlled a network of assassins. His best hitman was John Jairo Velazquez, also known as Popeye. One of Popeye's most notable orders was the assassination of presidential candidate and violent drug fighter Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. After being convicted of this, Popeye confessed to 300 murders and to the fact that he ordered his subordinates to kill 3,000 more people. Popeye told Bocas magazine: “I even had to kill the bus driver. The mother of a friend of Pablo Escobar was riding this bus, and when she got off, she got hit by the wheels and died. Her son asked Pablo Escobar to help him get revenge. I found the driver and killed him. At the same time, I did not feel anything, it was just an order. " In 1992, Popeye was sentenced to 52 years in prison, but despite his staggering track record, he was released in 2014.

3. The image of "Robin Hood"

It is incredible that, despite his bloody terror, ordinary people considered Escobar to be something like Robin Hood. He built schools and sports fields for local communities, donated large sums of money to charities, financed medical treatment, and built homes for the poor. Its “neighborhoods” for the poor, popularly known as “Barrio Pablo Escobar,” still exist today, and more than 12,000 people live in these 2,800 houses. At the entrance to these neighborhoods, there are even posters with a picture of a drug lord and the signature: “Welcome to Barrio Pablo Escobar. Here you breathe peace. " He never missed a PR opportunity and dreamed of one day becoming president of Colombia. Javier Pena, a former DEA agent who tracked down Escobar, said: “People loved him and that often got in our way. Many in Colombia considered him almost God, but he was just a master manipulator."

4. Medellin - the murder capital of Colombia

In 1989, Medellin had the highest homicide rate in Colombia. In just one year, more than 2,600 people were brutally murdered in a city of two million. According to Charles Anthony Gillespie, who was the US ambassador to Colombia from 1985 to 1988, said the city was under the complete control of the drug empire and there were daily killings. He also said that a whole social class of murderers appeared in Colombia, who were called sicarii ("contract killers" in Spanish). These were children, often raised on the street, who were mostly raised in small gangs where they were taught to kill people. Then each such child was tested. He was handed a pistol, sat in the back seat of a motorcycle and sent to the city streets. The point was that the motorcycle braked next to the car, and the young Sicarius shot through its window at the head of the driver or passenger.

5. Death of 107 people on board

In 1989, 101 passengers and a crew of six were killed in an explosion on Avianca Flight 203, en route from Bogota to Cali. A Boeing 727 crashed near Bogotá, making it the deadliest crime in Colombia in decades. Escobar carried out this attack to kill the presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. However, Trujillo canceled the flight at the last moment and eventually became President of Colombia. The explosion also killed two Americans, prompting the Bush administration to start a real hunt for Escobar.

6. Death of children

In early 1993, another bomb by Pablo Escobar killed 20 people, including 4 children, and injured about 70 other victims. During rush hour, a car filled with 100 kg of dynamite exploded in a shopping area in northern Bogota near a bookstore where young children were buying school supplies. Escobar, who was on the run at the time, warned the Colombian government that he would cause massive panic if he was not given the same political rights as the country's “leftist” guerrillas. President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo said the following about the attack: "Intelligence information indicates that the drug terrorist Pablo Escobar and the remnants of his murder organization are responsible for this terrible act."

7. Teenage girls

In 1976, before starting his "career" in the cartel, 26-year-old Pablo Escobar married 15-year-old Maria Victoria Eneo. And during the marriage, Escobar did not give up his passion for young girls. Minor girls from poor neighborhoods were gathered on the streets by a group of his people called Los Senuelos, and then they were brought to parties. The Colombian magazine Semana published an article describing how, after one of Escobar's depraved orgies, the police found the bodies of 24 young girls, the oldest of whom was 19 years old. In 1991, he built his own luxury prison, La Catedral, where he could serve his sentence after surrendering, by agreement with the authorities. However, he continued to engage in illegal activities. Even the Colombian police were not allowed closer than 5 kilometers to La Catedral. It was also reported that Escobaru continued to bring young girls to his luxurious prison.

8. His family had to "go through hell"

Even after Escobar's death, his wife and son had to move to Argentina, where they lived in exile. His wife Maria Genao changed her name to Maria Santos Caballero, and his son Juan Pablo became Juan Sebastian Marrokin Santos. In 2000, they were arrested for money laundering and sentenced to 15 months in prison, but were soon released due to lack of evidence. Escobar's wife said: “I am a prisoner in Argentina only because I am Colombian. They want to fight the ghost of Pablo Escobar just to show that Argentina is fighting drug trafficking."

9. Bribery of the Colombian government

Escobar was so feared that he was able to bribe even the most senior politicians, officials and judges. His motto was the phrase "Plata o plomo", which means "silver or lead" - a reference to the fact that those who could not be bribed with money were killed. Mark Bowden, author of The Murder of Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Criminal, wrote that between 1976 and 1980, bank deposits in four major cities in Colombia more than doubled. So many illegal American dollars were poured into the country that the country's elite began to look for ways to get their share of it without breaking the law. President Alfonso López Michelsen's administration authorized what the central bank called "opening a side window." It consisted in converting an unlimited amount of dollars into Colombian pesos.

10. His own brother went against Escobar

Escobar's murder essentially involved his own brother, former accountant Roberto Escobar. Juan Sebastian Marroquin Santos, son of Pablo, wrote in his book Pablo Escobar: My Father: “My uncle Roberto Escobar was an official DEA informant and actively helped Pablo's enemies. And this was done not only by Roberto, but also by his brothers, sisters, and even his own mother. I am not proud of this story, but, unfortunately, it was so. " The paramilitary group Los PEPES, the Cali cartel, the US and Colombian governments, and Roberto eventually managed to split the Medellin cartel and make the people closest to Escobar his enemies. On December 2, 1993, after 16 months of persecution of Escobar, he was tracked down by a phone call (the drug lord called his son) and shot on the roof of a house in Medellin. More than 25,000 local residents held a funeral procession for Pablo. After his death, the New York Daily News reported that "the locals wept and groaned, grieving over the death of the drug lord, who was considered the savior of the poor."