At 7 a.m. on a Friday morning in early August, the streets of Colombia’s second largest city were a hive of activity. It made sense to be awake and alert early. Medellín is known as the city of eternal spring, but it already felt like summertime. I was in a well traveled Renault with the windows down on my way to Barrio Pablo Escobar, a humble neighborhood of 366 hillside homes built by Pablo Escobar, history’s most notorious drug trafficker. As my Uber driver slalomed up one of the city’s steep hills near the barrio, my driver cautioned me to put the window up or stow my iPhone. “Why are you going to Barrio Pablo Escobar?” he asked just before we arrived.
It was a reasonable question and I couldn’t remember the words for “just curious” in Spanish so I simply shrugged and smiled like a moron. Tourism is booming in Medellín and shows like Netflix’s Narcos and the reality show Dark Tourist, which featured a Pablo Escobar tour run by “Popeye,” one of his ex-hitmen, are helping fuel the increase in foreign visitors. But as I was to find out, Colombian officials are actively trying to discourage narco-tourism.
In September 2018, officials raided and subsequently shuttered a Pablo Escobar museum, run by the late drug kingpin’s brother, Roberto. Then in February, the city detonated the Monaco building, a luxury, eight story home where Escobar lived for several years. And the Benedictine monks who run a home for low-income seniors on the site of what was once La Catedral—the lavish prison Escobar was allowed to build and inhabit for 11 months as part of the terms for his surrender—are fighting back against the tide of narco-tourism.
Narco-tourism is indeed a seedy business but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to learn more about the late Colombian drug kingpin while in Medellín, the picturesque city he called home for many years.
I stepped out of the Renault in what passes for downtown Barrio PE: an intersection full of colorful murals glorifying Pablo. The largest mural features a depiction of a smiling Pablo next to what appears to be an angel at the gates of heaven with the words (in Spanish) “Welcome to Barrio Pablo Escobar” and “rest in peace.” On the other side of a steep staircase that leads to the humble hillside homes in the neighborhood, another large mural simply says, “PABLO.” A barber shop a few doors down called El Patron (The Boss, Pablo’s nickname) featured a mural with Pablo’s infamous prison mug shot, with a clever before and after haircut depiction.
As I pulled out my mobile phone to take a photo of the murals, a husky man sitting in a folding chair above me called out, beckoning me into what is advertised as the “Pablo Escobar Memories Museum.”
It felt like a classic tourist trap but there I was, the narco-tourist and I felt like I had to dutifully play my role, so I walked in. The room was filled with various photos and memorabilia of Pablo, including fake guns, a life-size likeness of the infamous thug holding a walkie-talkie. In the corner there was a display case with a host of Pablo-related souvenirs, including key chains and figurines bearing his likeness.
Andres guided me to a photo of a pudgy young child with Pablo. “This was me when I was a kid,” he said. “You knew Pablo?” I asked. “Of course. My family knew him.” “Was he a good guy?” “He was good for the people here,” he said. “He built all these houses.”
Andres was an odd character. As he spoke, he rarely looked me in the eye and he mumbled so it was hard to decipher what he was saying. He looked barely old enough to have crossed paths with Pablo..
Andres said that Pablo built 366 red brick and cement homes in the neighborhood, originally called “Medellín Sin Tugurios,” or Medellín Without Shanty Towns, for poor people, some of whom lived in a sprawling garbage dump where the neighborhood was built. (I checked his figure online and many other reports put the number of houses at 800 or more.)
I knew that I was expected to buy something from the Pablo souvenir stand—after all, this was my role as the narco-tourist and I had to play the part. There was no way I was buying anything with Pablo’s likeness on it, so I settled for a 15,000 peso ($4.75) keychain with the logo of the Atlético Nacional soccer club. Nacional was Pablo’s favorite club. He laundered drug money through the team, buying excellent players and reportedly bribing referees, or killing them if they didn’t cooperate.
In November 1989, Colombian referee Alvaro Ortega made a controversial call against Nacional and was assassinated shortly thereafter. Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, one of Pablo’s hit men who now runs Escobar tours and is better known as Popeye, says that Escobar ordered the hit. We had been to a Nacional game the night before and enjoyed the raucous atmosphere—the del sur section of the crowd sang and jumped and waved gigantic flags nonstop throughout a 4-1 win—so it seemed like the most innocuous souvenir I could find.
* * *
Barrio Pablo Escobar is an ordinary working class neighborhood, full of small, well kept homes built at a steep angle on the hill. I met a young man in a neat school uniform who told me he was a refugee from Venezuela. (My word choice, not his.) He knew nothing about Pablo but told me it was a nice place to live. I wandered the neighborhood, exchanging nods.
Within a minute or two, a young man who later introduced himself as Alejandro came by, pointed an index finger at me and said, “Tourist.” I couldn’t deny it so I sat there waiting for his pitch. He said that his grandmother, Ynez, was one of the neighborhood’s original residents. “You can take a tour of her house,” he said. It wasn’t yet 8 a.m. Who in their right mind would want a foreign tourist barging into their home at this hour? It seemed like a peculiar idea, but I had twenty minutes to kill, so I asked, “How much for the tour?” as though this young hustler’s grandmother’s home was a legitimate tourist attraction. “20,000,” he said. About $7. “I have 5,000,” I said, showing him the last bill in my wallet. He laughed and told me to follow him up the stairs to Ynez’s house. Alejandro had on a white Yamaha t-shirt that said, “Pablo” on the back.
Alejandro radiated a hustler vibe, but I respected his pluck—hell anyone who can sell tickets to their grandmother’s house deserves a Thanksgiving pie sized slice of credit, right? Ynez’s home was only a couple flights of stairs up from the museum. Alejandro walked in without knocking and I followed, shaking Ynez’s hand before taking a seat on her couch.
It was a tidy little home with two bedrooms and one bathroom. I felt like an intruder, but Ynez had a kind face with sad, perceptive eyes that welcomed conversation, so I asked her to tell me her story. In the early 80s, she was living with her mother and couldn’t work because she was very sick. “Did you ever meet Pablo?” I asked. “Of course,” she said. “A few times.”
I asked her how she was selected to receive an Escobar home and she said it was because she was sick at the time.
I read that the Oficina de Envigado, the crime syndicate founded by Escobar in the 1980s was still active in the neighborhood, but Ynez waived away any security concerns. “I have lived here for more than 30 years and there have never been problems here,” she said. “Do you think Pablo was a good person?” I asked, feeling a bit ridiculous. “He was good to me,” she said.
* * *
Our organized family Pablo Escobar tour began with an intense negotiation. We met Daniel, our stocky Colombian guide, who looked like he was auditioning for the role of mafia don number two in a pair of dark plastic sunglasses and an Escobar-esque white hat, on a sultry Tuesday morning in early August on a quiet side street in the city’s upscale Poblado neighborhood. I knew the price was $35 U.S. per person for the 5-6 hour tour, which is expensive by Colombian standards, but balked at paying the same price for my sons, James and Leo, who are 10 and 12. “You gotta talk to my boss about that,” Daniel said, handing me his mobile phone. “I’m not sure if the kids are even that interested in Pablo Escobar or if it’s suitable for kids,” I argued, angling for a discount. “No, no,” Daniel’s patron said, “It’s great for kids. Great for them to learn about the violence.”
I talked him down to about $90 for the group but we couldn’t depart until a pair of “muchachas” from Mexico who had booked the tour online turned up to accompany us in a three row Chevy SUV. The young women turned out to be a delightful pair of 19-year-old childhood friends, Valeria and Jacqueline, who were actually Americans from Colorado of Mexican descent. “You spoke such good Spanish on the phone, I thought you were Mexicans,” Daniel said when the girls explained that they were Americans.
As we took off for our first stop, the Las Olivas neighborhood where Pablo died, Daniel gave us an overview of the tour, which has been operating since 2004. “This guy was the most important drug trafficker of all time,” he said. He killed 46,000 people! Think about that! 46,000 people. From 1989-1993, he killed an average of ten or eleven people per day.”
The figure seemed on the high side to me, so I looked it up later and found that the Colombia government estimates that between 1983 and 1994, 46,612 people were murdered during the peak of Colombia’s drug violence. Medellín now has a homicide rate of 24 per 100,000 residents, which is lower than St. Louis, New Orleans or Baltimore, and is down from the peak of 375 per 100,000 residents in 1991.
Pablo ordered the killing of an estimated 4,000 people and the toll included judges, journalists, high-ranking government officials, four presidential candidates, more than 600 cops (he offered a 2,000,000 peso bounty for their heads), and plenty of innocent bystanders, like the 25 teenagers he killed when he ordered the bombing of a discotheque.
Daniel, who is 36, told us that he grew up in Pereira, in Colombia’s Zona Cafetera coffee region. “The violence was so bad when I was a little kid that we literally would stumble across dead bodies in the streets,” he said.
I asked Daniel if he thought Pablo was the most famous Colombian in history. “Most famous, I would say absolutely,” he said. “Most important? No.” Jen and the Colorado girls had all seen Narcos and someone asked Daniel what Colombians thought of the show. “Why did they use a Brazilian to play Pablo and a Mexican to play his wife?” he asked. “Right away there, with paisas, that’s what we call ourselves here in Antioquia, the show instantly lost its credibility.”
Nevertheless, he watched the show and had a grudging admiration for it. “When Pablo died, I actually felt sorry for him, even though I hate the guy,” he said.
We pulled up in front of our first stop, Pablo’s last: the one-time safe house where Pablo was killed after a rooftop chase with police in 1993 and got out of the car. The building where Pablo was killed is an unremarkable two-story building with a banner advertising it as a Spanish school in a solidly middle class neighborhood. According to Mark Bowden’s book, Killing Pablo, Escobar went down guns ablaze with two pistols on this rooftop, shooting and shouting “POLICE MOTHERFUCKERS!”.
As Daniel began to tell us how Pablo had been hiding out in this building when police intercepted a call he made, an old woman wearing an apron started sweeping up leaves and debris almost right at our feet. “I think she’s trying to sweep us right out of here,” he said.
I was distracted by graffiti depicting a blood-soaked scene with a numbered pig and the hashtag #turismoresponsable next door.
“It also said ‘narco-tourism’ but someone erased that part. Look, the government doesn’t like narco-tourism. They don’t want you to be here.”“I like this mural,” Daniel said. “I was here when the woman was making it recently. It also said ‘narco-tourism’ but someone erased that part. Look, the government doesn’t like narco-tourism. They don’t want you to be here.” “What about the artist?” I asked. “What was her point?” “I asked her that question. She thinks you guys are the pigs who are coming here to waste your money. The number inside the pig is Pablo’s prison number.” “What do you think of it?” I asked, as we stood there looking at it. “I like what she does. She’s showing you that the city doesn’t like this kind of tourism. It’s a sensitive subject here. Look, people honk their horns at us, threaten us, tell us to go fuck off. People here don’t like what we’re doing.”
Daniel told us that when Pablo’s mother came to the scene of his death, she saw the body of “Limon,” Pablo’s bodyguard, on the grass in front of the building and shouted, “”You fools! This is not my son! This is not Pablo Escobar! You have killed the wrong man!” But then the soldiers lowered a stretcher from the roof bearing the corpse of Pablo and she wept but then told a reporter, “At least now he is at rest.”
As a final gesture, members of the Colombian National Police team that hunted him down shaved off the ends of Escobar’s moustache to make him look like Hitler.
“It was a huge deal when he died,” Daniel recalled. “I was little but I remember hearing about it. If you look at the Fernando Botero paintings of Pablo’s death in the Antioquia Museum, you’ll see he looks bigger than the city of Medellín, because he was at that time.”
Thousands attended his funeral, with many chanting “long live Pablo” and fighting and jostling to get a hand on his casket as though he was a God.
Daniel said that after Pablo’s death the city gradually became safer—the level of violence now is far lower than in the 80s and 90s. But Colombia’s cocaine production hit a record level in 2018. “We are producing 80% of the world’s cocaine,” he said.
At this point, Daniel may have sensed that he was losing Leo and James, so he crouched down to their height and said, “So kids, here’s the thing. A lot of people, so many people died here in Colombia all because of drugs, which are terrible. Lots of people died in order to produce the drugs people will try to sell you. So stay away from drugs!” My kids nodded and as we hopped back in the car, asked if they could play a game on their tablets.
* * *
In 1993, Time magazine dubbed Medellín the “most dangerous city on earth.” Few neighborhoods were as ravaged by drug-related violence than Comuna 13, then one of the city’s most notorious barrios. Fast forward to today, the second stop of our Pablo Escobar tour. Throngs of tourists, some in large groups, others independent, crowd the narrow main street of this impoverished neighborhood. How did that happen? “The government tries to claim the neighborhood was transformed by these escalators,” he said. “The truth is that it’s the street art; all the colorful murals you see.”
In 2011, the Colombian government completed a series of escalators that rise 384 meters into this hillside neighborhood, sparing some residents from having to climb 28 stories worth of steps to get to their homes. This came on the heels of other important public transportation milestones that have helped transform the city: the completion of the Medellín metro in 1995, and the opening of metro cable (gondolas) to service many of the favela neighborhoods in 2004, 2008 and 2009.
Even though Daniel was having none of it, some believed that the escalators helped to transform the neighborhood and have created a model of development that could be used in poor hillside neighborhoods around the world. Bill Clinton rode on them and posed for photo-ops with locals in 2017 while in town to speak at a coffee industry conference. Afterward, one of his assistants tweeted the photo of Clinton with the caption, “the simple innovation (the escalators) is credited with helping to bring peace and pride to a community.”
“It was a big waste of money,” Daniel said of the escaleras electricas as we rode to the top, dodging a shocking number of tourists along the way. “They turn these escalators off at 7 p.m. every night! It’s a show for tourists. You stay on the main street here in the neighborhood and you’re fine. But believe me, you come back at night and you venture off this main strip…you’re asking for trouble.”
I felt more than a little bewildered by the crush of foreign tourists and the myriad of young people decked out in Comuna 13 hats and t-shirts offering neighborhood tours and Comuna 13 souvenirs. A dodgy neighborhood had turned its poverty and violent past into a marketable commodity, attractive to tourists using escalators one could find at a mall and graffiti branded as street art. Ingenuous.
The drive from Comuna 13 to our next stop, Jardin Montesacro Cemetery, Pablo’s final resting place, was a long hot slog south through gritty city streets. Daniel’s A/C was useless, so we had the windows open but with the traffic there was no breeze and my shorts and polo shirt were sopping wet mid-way through our tour.
We encountered a host of window washers at stoplights; Daniel told us that many are Venezuelans and he gave them a small tip for their efforts. More than 3 million Venezuelans have fled into Colombia in recent years as the country’s economy has tanked. Colombia has welcomed them but only some have received work permits; many others are out on the streets hustling.
Montesacro Cemetery is perched on a hillside twenty minutes south of the city. It’s a lovely setting but Pablo’s grave is a surprisingly modest affair. There are no pillars or statues, just a simple, flat tombstone that says (in Spanish), “You were a conquistador of impossible dreams beyond the legend you symbolize today; few know the true essence of your life.” There were some fresh flowers at the grave along with a smattering of tourists milling about, taking photos.
I thought about taking a family photo with the grave but thought better of it. Escobar is buried next to several of his relatives, including his mother, Hermilde, an elementary school teacher who died in 2006, and his brother, Luis Fernando, who apparently wasn’t a drug dealer but died in 1977 when an undercover cop interrupted a romantic liaison he was having with his wife and subsequently drove all three of them off a cliff in murky circumstances. Steps away from the grave there are two stone slabs that were taken from the Magdalena River, which was where Pablo liked to blow off steam on the weekends, after a long workweek of ordering bombings, executions and torture sessions.
I struck up a conversation with a pair of 21-year-olds, Luis and Alejandro, locals who were fans of Pablo. Alejandro was covered in tattoos, including a few with the logo Atlético Nacional, Pablo’s favorite football club. Daniel asked Alejandro why he liked Pablo. “Because he helped the club. We never would have won the (Copa Libertadores) championship in 1989 (a year when the league season was cancelled after referee Alvaro Ortega was assassinated after making a controversial call against Nacional) without Pablo’s help in getting the players.” “Yes, but you are aware of the history, how many people he killed, right?” Daniel asked. “Of course. Of course he killed people and that’s bad. But you have to remember that he did very good things too.”
As our little group walked off, Daniel said that Pablo’s motto was plato o plomo, silver or lead, cash or a bullet. “That’s how he lived,” he said.
One of the Colorado girls asked Daniel why Pablo chose to be buried in this place. “Pablo wanted to be remembered as a God, that’s why he’s buried here on this mountain.”
* * *
In 1989, Forbes estimated that Escobar was the world’s seventh richest person, but he was also under tremendous pressure following the 1989 assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, a popular Colombian politician who had denounced Pablo and was poised to become the country’s next president. Escobar was looking for a secluded hideout and scouted the lush mountainous area near a village called Catedral, south of Medellín. He appreciated the fog and the steep topography that would make it nearly impossible for the military or rival cartels to mount an air raid on his compound.
In 1991, after the Colombian government passed a law prohibiting the extradition of criminals to the United States—one of Pablo’s key demands—Pablo agreed to “surrender” with a sweetheart deal: he got to build his own prison on secluded Mount Catedral.
The road up to what remains of the place is steep and is full of switchbacks. Daniel was playing a BBC podcast on Escobar that detailed his blood-soaked career along with a segment on what the BBC referred to as the “lingering admiration” for Pablo in Medellín’s poorer neighborhoods.
The show mentioned that Pablo’s sister, Luz Maria, has a habit of leaving notes on the graves of Pablo’s victims, asking for forgiveness. It was a good listen but near the end of the episode, as our car twisted and turned its way toward the top of the mountain, the host blamed Pablo for something unexpected: the popularity of plastic surgery in Medellín.
Pablo was a notorious pedophile and womanizer who reportedly kept a gynecological chair in one of his homes, but are women heading into their breast augmentation surgeries thinking about him? “I’m all for blaming things on Pablo but that seems like a bit of a stretch to me,” I said. “Well, no one influenced our culture more than him,” Daniel said. “And I’d say 90% of the women in Medellín have had some kind of plastic surgery.”
We talked a bit about Pablo’s origins—Daniel said he “came from nothing” but I had read that by Colombian standards, Pablo’s parents were comfortable and the “humble origins” tales he told were essentially PR, intended to reinforce his bogus “man of the people” narrative. In Killing Pablo Mark Bowden confirmed that Pablo’s father had 12 hectares and six cows. The third of seven children, Pablo was born in Rionegro (Black River), a small city an hour east of Medellín, but later moved to Envigado, one of Medellín’s middle class suburbs. Pablo dropped out of school at 16 and starting his career of crime selling fake lottery tickets and stealing cars.
The winding road up the mountain was paved but wasn’t during the thirteen months Pablo resided at La Catedral. It still felt like a wild place—we passed signs warning of tigers and pumas, along with one welcoming us to the Valle de Miele, the Valley of Honey. I felt car sick from the heat and the curves and could understand why the peak of this mountain would be a wonderful place to run an illicit narco empire. According to Killing Pablo, Pablo’s henchmen buried guns around the compound before he moved in and they smuggled cash into his prison by squeezing tightly rolled wads of one hundred dollar American bills into milk cans. When the mountain fog provided enough cover, they would bury the cans, each containing a million dollars, or so the legend goes, in the dirt surrounding the compound. They also trained pigeons to communicate with the outside world, as they were certain the DEA was bugging their phones.
Pablo’s prison had a round bed that rotated 360 degrees, a state of the art gym, a billiards room, a bar, a disco where Escobar hosted rollicking parties, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a waterfall, big screen television sets, and a life-sized dollhouse for when Escobar’s daughter would visit. Members of the national soccer team frequently turned up to play pickup soccer matches on Pablo’s private pitch and he even flew Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona in for a pickup match on one occasion. Maradona recalled that the women invited to the after party were the most beautiful he had ever seen. People called Pablo’s prison the Hotel Escobar and Club Medellín but the good times did not last.
When the country’s Justice Minister was shown photos of the luxurious amenities that had been brought into the prison, he investigated and found that each item had been stamped and approved in efficient triplicate by his own Bureau of Prisons. He resolved to build a real prison for Pablo. But according to the terms of surrender, his only option was to build one on top of La Catedral.
On July 21, 1992, Colombia’s president gave the orders to move Escobar to a military base in Bogotá. During the ensuring raid, Escobar had his hit man Popeye take Eduardo Mendoza, Colombia’s Vice Minister of Justice, hostage.
A brigade of some 400 troops stormed the compound; Mendoza escaped in the ensuing chaos, but so did Escobar and nine of his men. A sergeant from the Directorate General of Prisons, Mina Olmedo, was shot and killed, and eleven other guards were badly injured.
In the years to follow, Colombians dismantled much of La Catedral, chipping and digging away in the hills to search for buried loot. Apparently no one found much of value, and in 2007, the government of Colombia decided to loan the 28,000 square meter compound to a group of hermetic Benedictine monks. The monks have taken in poor senior citizens, alcoholics and others in need of help. But as we quickly discovered, they’re not big fans of narco-tourism.
Daniel pointed at the ruins of some of the old Catedral prison buildings as we stood in the parking lot, admiring the view of the city. “Look over there, you have to imagine this is where they had the pool tables, the bar, all the parties. Can you imagine all the prostitution?” But I was distracted by a huge yellow banner the monks had draped across one of the buildings. It was in all CAPS LOCK in Spanish along with an interesting translation in English.
TOURIST, DO NOT LET YOU DECIEVE THE STRUCTURE YOU ARE SEEING, IT WAS BUILT BY THE FOUNDATION SANTA GERTRUDIS “THE MAGMA” FOR BENEFIT OF THE ELDERLY ADULTS WHO HERE…NO SPACE BELONGS TO THE OLD ‘JAIL’ OR WAS BUILT BY PABLO ESCOBAR. DO NOT LET THEM FELT WITH FALSE STORIES.
We wandered down toward the helipad where Pablo used to park his helicopter, past an old guard tower with a doll “standing guard” inside to find another large yellow banner in English and Spanish. This one instructed visitors and tour guides to “respect the facilities and we ask you to stop deceiving your customers. Here there is nothing of the dreadful time that we lived…Do not deceive them and hopefully they will not be fooled. PERMIT US TO REPEAT. These spaces are not part of “narco-tourism” please leave us alone…We are not responsible for any accidents, much less the attitudes of the different guardians of the neighboring properties that you, through a petty and morbid desire, go through the different properties jumping and damaging the fences.”
“The Administration” also went on to warn in this banner “please take care of the environment by not throwing or spilling garbage. Where is the culture that they preach so much in their countries?”
We asked Daniel about the banners and he maintained that the monks were wrong in insisting that none of the buildings we looked at were built by Pablo. And he said the monks were a little touchy because many “narco-tourists” were poorly behaved douchebags.
“I get people on my tours who are still drunk or hungover or high from the night before,” said Daniel, who worked at Avianca Airlines before quitting to do tours part time while also taking care of his children.“The monks obviously have a pretty low opinion of us,” I said. “I get people on my tours who are still drunk or hungover or high from the night before,” said Daniel, who worked at Avianca Airlines before quitting to do tours part time while also taking care of his children. “Just recently, my daughter, who is 5-years- old, she found a packet of cocaine that was left in the car by one of the people on the tour. A gram of coke is only $3 here.”
I drew the line at visiting Pablo’s Hacienda Napoles, a few hours to the east, where Pablo once had a zoo with lions, kangaroos, tigers, rhinos and hippos, who multiplied and now roam the area. The place has been turned into a “Jurassic Park”-style theme park with a water park, a guided safari attraction, aquariums and so on. I’ll leave that one for the advanced narco-tourists. I can understand why the monks and other Colombians want to discourage narco-tourism, but Daniel thought that learning more about this era in Colombia’s dark past was important. “Those who don’t understand the past are doomed to repeat it, right?” he said. Absolutely, we’re doing God’s work here I thought.
The tour inspired me to re-read Killing Pablo, and to read up on the Escobar family online. Among other interesting tidbits, I found out that Pablo’s widow, Victoria Henao, and his son, Juan Pablo Escobar, have lived since the 1990s in Argentina. In June 2018, an Argentine judge charged them with being intermediaries for the Colombian drug dealer José Piedrahita, who allegedly laundered money through real estate and a cafe known for its tango performances.
Henao released a memoir in 2019 titled Mrs. Escobar in which she detailed abuse that Pablo inflicted on her from the age of fourteen, when he forced her to have a back-alley abortion shortly after they met. She also insisted that he wasn’t all bad—he helped the poor and the sick, and she did love him. “He made me feel like a fairy princess and I was convinced he was my Prince Charming,” she wrote.
But Prince Charming Pablo also had a vengeful streak. She writes that he never forgot a rich neighbor who drove his children to school every day without ever giving Escobar or his brother a ride, as they walked “often in the rain, barefoot and malnourished” to school. Years later, Escobar ordered his bodyguards to torch his old neighbor’s car.
“If they buy another car the next day, burn that one too,” he said. “I want them to walk more than I did.”
As we began our long descent down the mountain, Valeria asked Daniel how he thought Pablo Escobar stacked up against the Mexican drug lord El Chapo for the most notorious drug trafficker of all time title. “Pablo for sure,” he said, betraying a hint of Colombian pride. “Pablo fought until the very end for what he believed in. He didn’t surrender. El Chapo is in prison. Case closed.”
Daniel mentioned the name of the current head of the Medellín cartel, which I immediately forgot, and I asked him if there will ever be another drug trafficker who would achieve the iconic status in pop culture that Pablo has. “No way,” he said. “None of them will ever be like Pablo. They have to keep a lower profile if they want to stay alive.”
Daniel offered to drop the girls at their hostel and us at our hotel, but on the way up a steep hill in Poblado, his car stalled out in what seemed like a fitting conclusion to our tour. Traffic snaked behind us and around the block as cars could not pass us. No one honked. Daniel threw up his hands and announced, “Shit. I think we’re out of gas.”
