Pablo Escobar

**Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria** (1 December, 1949 - 2 December, 1993) was a Colombian drug baron and narcoterrorist.

## Biography

### Early life

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1st, 1949, to Abel de Jesús Escobar Echeverri, and Hermilda Gaviria Berrío. Born into a modest family, Escobar maintained an ambition to rise from his humble beginnings and become rich and powerful. His life of crime started in his teenage years with him selling counterfeit high school diplomas. He also stole tombstones that he would sand the names from and resell as new tombstones. As time past his crimes got worse, first he would rob commercial businesses, using a knife or gun, then he would start stealing cars, and even have people pay protection, so their car wouldn’t get stolen, and if anyone owed him money, he would kidnap and then ransom them, sometimes he would kill them even if the ransom was paid, just to make people fear him. later, he would kidnap important or rich people, and ransom them. By the 1960s he was a small-time cannabis dealer, but realising the popularity of cocaine in the United States, he moved into the trafficking business. He would buy coca paste in Bolivia and Peru, refine it, then send it to the US for sale.

### Rise to power

In 1975 Fabio Restrepo, the most powerful drug dealer in Medellín, was murdered, probably on Escobar’s orders. With a power vacuum in the drug trade opening up, Escobar was determined to fill it, so he informed all of Restrepo’s men that they worked for Pablo now. Restrepo’s men were usually from the upper class, so they were terrified of Escobar, and his reputation for violence.

In May 1976, Escobar and some of his men were arrested after returning to Colombia from a drug run to Ecuador. They were discovered with 39 pounds of cocaine. Escobar was charged with drug trafficking. Throughout the case, Escobar tried to bribe judges but failed, so after many months of legal wrangling, he had the two arresting officers killed, and the case was later dropped.

As the demand for cocaine grew in the US, Escobar expanded his operations by organising more smuggling routes in Puerto Rico, California, and Florida. In a very short period of time, he made millions of dollars. Escobar bought an island called Norman’s Cay, where they would fly plains full of cocaine, store it in a refrigerated warehouse, then use small plains to ship it all around the US, where the cocaine was dropped off at remote airstrips or into the water, then high speed motorboats would do the rest. These shipments were about 400 kilos, and worth about $10,000,000. By 1981 Escobar was making $500,000 a day, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have competition, the biggest being the Ochoa brothers, and José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha or “the Mexican.” However, slowly these so-called “cowboy” drug dealers would start working together, they would mix shipments, so if someone got caught then the loss would be spread out, and easier to handle. This was the formation of the Medellín Cartel.

### Formation of MAS

One fateful day Martha Nieves Ochoa Vasquez, the sister of the Ochoa brothers was kidnapped by the left-wing guerrilla group, M-19, in an attempt to extort them. Out of fear of more kidnappings, all the members of the Medellín Cartel met and formed MAS which is short for Muerte a Secuestradores or Death to kidnappers in English. Soon M-19 and other Guerilla groups were being hunted down and brutally murdered. Escobar basically took control of MAS and with them he would become the de facto leader of the Medellín Cartel.

### Escobar in politics

Escobar also had longstanding political ambitions. When he was younger, he said he wanted to be president of Colombia, and with the amount of money he had made he would be able to take his first step towards this goal in 1982 when he ran for the Chamber of Representatives as a member of the Liberal Renewal Movement. But he had to leave due to strong opposition from Luis Carlos Galán, who the Liberal Renewal Movement supported for president. During the campaign, Escobar spent a lot of money on public works in the poorer neighborhoods of Medellín, including building low-income housing, hospitals, schools, and even 50 soccer pitches. This earned him the support of many of Medellín’s citizens who saw him as a Colombian Robin Hood. Even though he won, it turned out to be a massive mistake, because it caused Escobar to become much more well known, which if you’re a drug dealer is the last thing you want, but even worse was that it encouraged journalists from El Espectador to investigate the source of his wealth. After his crimes were exposed by the press, the then Justice Minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, launched an investigation that led to Escobar having his congressional seat revoked.

Escobar would have his revenge when he paid two gunmen $20,000 each, to kill Bonilla. This assassination caused a massive public backlash and a crackdown on cocaine by the Colombian government, but they didn’t get Escobar, because he was in Nicaragua.

### Expansion and Barry Seal

Escobar was using Nicaragua to smuggle drugs into the United States, and paying the Nicaraguan government off with massive amounts of money. While living there he was able to create many more drug routes through Panama, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Barry Seal was an airline pilot, who liked to live on the edge, so he decided to take up smuggling. He was an important figure in this new expansion, but even though Seal was one of the most successful drug smugglers of all time, Escobar knew very little about him, he didn’t even know his real name, which is why when Seal was arrested, he didn’t even know about it. I suppose Seal wasn’t as loyal as Escobar had hoped, because Seal flipped and became a spy for the CIA. He was supposed to deliver 18,000 lbs. of cocaine paste from Bolivia and Peru to a Nicaraguan military base every week, but when he delivered it, he took pictures. These pictures were not supposed to be disclosed to the public, yet somehow, they were leaked, which is bad news if you are Barry Seal because now Escobar knows you’ve flipped, Seal was eventually killed for helping the CIA, but it was too late for Escobar, Seal had made him an Internationally wanted criminal.

### Escobar's reign of terror

Now that Escobar had become a household name, it made his life considerably harder, because the one thing he feared the most was being extradited and facing justice in the United States, and that is what would happen to him if he got caught, because most of his drugs were being sold in the U.S., so it became his highest priority to eliminate extradition in Colombia. He did this by starting a campaign of terror across Colombia. Escobar backed the 1985 storming of the Colombian Supreme Court by M-19. He paid them to burn all the files pertaining to Los Extraditables, a group of cocaine smugglers who could be extradited to the United States, of whom Escobar was a member. The Palace of Justice siege lasted two days and led to the deaths of almost 100 people, including half of the Colombian supreme court, but Pablo got what he wanted, it would be much harder to extradite him now. Escobar would go to judges and offer them money, and if they didn’t take it, them and their family would be killed. Any journalists who wrote negative articles about him would be killed. El Espectador was car bombed twice, and their director, Guillermo Cano Isaza, was murdered for exposing Escobar’s criminal activity while he was in congress.

### Assassination of Luis Carlos Galán

In the middle of these violent times, the Colombian presidential election was happening, and one of the major questions was whether you supported or opposed an extradition treaty with the United States. This is where Luis Carlos Galán comes in. He was a vocal opponent of the Medellín Cartel, and the power it had in Colombia. He advocated a total crackdown on organized crime as one of his top priorities, and so he obviously supported extradition. All of this made him very popular with the Colombian people, and he seemed like a shoo-in for president, but unfortunately it also made him Escobar’s top target. Galán routinely received phone calls and letters threatening to kill or kidnap him and is family.

The first assassination attempt happened August 4, 1989. John Jairo Velasquez, AKA Popeye, was supposed to use a rocket, which he would drive to the University of Medellín, where Galán was giving a lecture. Popeye was ordered to buy a Mazda truck under the name of Elmer Pacho Herrera, who was working for the Cali cartel, in an attempt to incriminate Escobar’s enemies. The attack however, failed because a citizen saw Popeye acting suspiciously. When Popeye noticed the police, he pulled down his pants and pretended to be going to the bathroom on the sidewalk. When the police arrested him, he started crying and claiming innocence, and he was let go.

The second attempt happened on August 18, 1989, at a campaign rally in Soacha. Galán was to give a speech to 10,000 people when he was shot repeatedly by a gunman working for Pablo Escobar. In 2005 Popeye would give testimony that the assassination was an inside job. He said that along with Escobar and Gacha, it had been planned with the help of Alberto Santofimio, who was one of Galán’s political rivals, and four other congressmen.

The death of such a high-profile Colombian politician outraged the public and the government. By killing Galán, Escobar had turned him into a martyr. The Colombian government responded to the killing by redoubling the efforts to destroy the cartel. They also created an elite task force, called the Search Bloc, with the sole purpose of tracking down and capturing or killing, Escobar and his associates, with the support of the American government.

### Escalation of violence

Escobar, however, did not take this lying down, he brought Colombia to a point of virtual civil war. Where before, Escobar’s attacks were targeted at those who had wronged him, or as some sort of means to an end, now he didn’t care who or what he attacked, hoping to kill so many people that the government would relent. In the span of three months, over 100 government buildings and public spaces were bombed by Escobar. In an attempt to assassinate Galán’s successor, César Gaviria, Escobar bombed an airplane, that he believed Gaviria was flying on. The bombing killed all 107 people on board; however, Gaviria was not on board due to safety concerns, raised by his head of security. Only a week later, 63 people were killed and 500 injured in a bombing of the offices of the domestic security and intelligence agency, in an effort to kill its director, Miguel Alfredo Maza Márquez, but Márquez survived. Escobar even started offering a $2,000 to anyone who would kill a police officer.

Trying to end the war, Gaviria would try to negotiate a peace treaty with Escobar, but one of the major sticking points was extradition. Unsurprisingly, Escobar wanted to eliminate extradition, due to it being much harder to secure preferential treatment in a U.S. prison. In 1990, sick of the violence, the Colombian government conceded to his demands, and abolished extradition to the United States. They also offered reduced prison sentences, served in Colombia, to the Cartel bosses who handed themselves in voluntarily. Escobar decided not to take this offer, trying to pressure the government for a better deal, he did this by kidnapping important political officials, and their families. This tactic ultimately proved successful, because authorities allowed Escobar to serve a dramatically reduced sentence, in a prison designed and built by him.

### La Catedral

In 1991, Escobar set foot in his new prison, named La Catedral. While La Catedral was decorated to look like a normal prison, on the inside it was far from it. Escobar was housed with all his criminal associates, and all the prison guards were on his payroll, meaning he could basically continue his criminal operations, except now from inside of a prison. He also lived in quite nice conditions, such as having access to widescreen TVs, jacuzzis and pool tables.

While the prison was nice, it did have one downside, Escobar was no longer able to manage the Cartel’s day-to-day activities, he had to leave that to trusted associates on the outside, who would pay him large taxes monthly. The problem is that with Escobar being stuck in one place, he became paranoid the four of his supposed trusted lieutenants, were stealing from him. So, he tortured and murdered them, but this might not have been such a good idea, because the murders drew the attention of the media, and when they found out about the luxurious conditions he was living in, it caused such immense public outrage that the Colombian government decided to move Escobar to an actual prison. Escobar was not keen on this idea, and when the troops, who were supposed to move him, arrived, he refused to go, and demanded to see high-ranking government officials, but when the vice-minister of justice, Eduardo Mendoza, and the prisons director, Hernando Navas Rubio, arrived, they were taken hostage. President Gaviria ordered the army to storm the jail and free the hostages, and while they killed some of Escobar’s men, they didn’t get him because he had escaped by kicking down a plaster wall designed for just this scenario.

### Escobar on the run

Even though Escobar escaped, things were not business as usual. He tried to continue his war on the state, but the murder of his top lieutenants caused many other cartel members to worry for their safety from the increasingly paranoid Escobar, and many of them started joining the rival Cali Cartel. Aside from the Colombian government, that was now cracking down much harder on Escobar because people working for the government weren’t afraid of being killed en masse, and the U.S. government, which had been given more power to capture or kill Escobar since his escape, there was also Los Pepes, which stands for Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, in English. Los Pepes was a vigilante group determined to kill Escobar and his associates. However, Escobar’s long and lucrative career insured him a large number of safe houses, so for now he was safe.

### Death

On December 1, 1993, desperate to speak to his family, he ignored the risks and made a series of phone calls to them, but the Colombian government intercepted them, and they tracked him down to a safe house in Medellín, when the Search Bloc got there, he was still on the phone with his son. His last words were “I’ve gotta go now, something strange is going on here”. Escobar grabbed a weapon, and he and a bodyguard ran to the roof of the house in an effort to flee. Escobar was shot in the leg, the torso, and a fatal shot to his head, through his right ear. Pablo Escobar died in the early morning after his birthday, while a member of the Search Bloc shouted, “Viva Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar”.

## Cocaine hippos

Escobar’s estate remained abandoned for years, which led to a large population growth of hippos, that he had imported from Africa. With a population approximated 100, the Colombian government decided, in 2021, to sterilize all the hippos, so their population does not grow out of control.

## Relationship with the Williams family

Islwyn Williams finds Escobar and interesting figure to research, and he made video about him titled, Pablo Escobar: The Most Successful Criminal in History.

## Notes and references

1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBv2nw8JXjI