It was the white of cocaine, it was the black of money, it was the age of cartels, it was the age of violence, it was the season of riches, it was the season of bloodshed, it was the spring of Medellín, it was the winter of Colombia.
In 1949, in the mountainous land of Antioquia, Colombia, a baby boy was born to humble farmer parents. They named him Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. Though Pablo came from simple roots, farming the green valleys beneath the Andes, he dreamed big. As a boy, Pablo saw the poverty around him in Medellín and longed to rise above his station. He would play ‘cops and robbers’ with the slum children, picturing himself as a famous bandido like his hero Lampeon.
Pablo left school at age 15, impatient to make his fortune. He started small, selling cigarettes and stolen tombstones with his cousin Gustavo. But Pablo was cunning and ruthless in pursuit of money and power. By his mid-20s, he was moving shipments of marijuana through Colombia, smuggling the sweet-scented contraband in old plane tires. Within a few short years, Pablo Escobar had already earned his first million American dollars.
But marijuana was just the beginning for Pablo’s plans of criminal glory. In the 1970s, a new white powder started flowing through Miami and Medellín — cocaine. As demand exploded in America, Pablo realized he was perfectly positioned to control the supply. He partnered with a chemist named George Jung to transport the white gold from Colombian jungles to the streets of California and beyond.
Pablo’s cocaine empire grew swiftly and massively. By the 1980s, he was shipping 15 tons per day to hungry American noses, earning $60 million a day. He spent this blood money building up Medellín into his personal fiefdom. He owned mansions, banks, helicopters, A 100-acre estate called Hacienda Nápoles complete with its own zoo and private bullfighting ring. Back in his old slum, he paid for food, housing and soccer fields to win the love of the people. The peasants saw Pablo as a Robin Hood who lifted up the poor.
But to his enemies, Pablo Escobar was a ruthless tyrant who brought terror and bombs. Rivals and DEA agents who got in Pablo’s way would get phone calls playing a chilling recording: “Somos extraditables o somos narco-guerilleros.” We extradite or we kidnap. Then a bloody payment would follow.
As the Colombian government tried to crack down on his cartel, Pablo struck back with waves of assassinations, kidnappings and terror attacks. Bombs detonated around Medellín, killing hundreds at a time. Pablo’s hitmen took down ministers, judges, rival traffickers. At the height of his power, Pablo was conducting 100 murders a month to stoke fear and obedience.
But even Pablo could not hold off the law forever. After the hitmen killed a leading presidential candidate, the state fought back hard. Allied with the DEA, they hunted Pablo block by block through Medellín until he was cornered. In his final hours in 1993, Pablo made one last phone call to his young son and daughter, begging their forgiveness. Then gunshots rang out atop a rooftop. Colombia’s King of Cocaine was dead at 44 years old.
In life Pablo Escobar trafficked enough cocaine into America to earn 30 billion dollars. He smuggled 15 tons daily, equivalent to the weight of 2 African bull elephants. His crimes brought so much blood and pain to Colombia. Yet still today, in the slums where Pablo built soccer fields, there remain those who see him as a hero. For better or worse, his name will be legend forever in the land of Medellín.
As the British philosopher Dickens wrote, it was the epoch of wisdom, it was the epoch of foolishness. Pablo Escobar’s rise and fall embodied both extremes of his age. He climbed from poverty to mountaintop riches by ruthlessly feeding the world’s vices. His story reveals the paradoxes of the human soul that lie beneath — both evil and good competing for mastery. As for Pablo, only the Almighty can judge which side he embraced in the end.
