Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian criminal kingpin most renowned for his leading role in smuggling cocaine to the USA. At the height of his power, Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel were smuggling 15 tons of cocaine to the USA each day, accounting for about 80% of all cocaine consumed in the USA and valued at some half a billion dollars per day. From humble beginnings, Pablo worked his way up to become one of the richest men in the world, and was eventually gunned down on a Colombian rooftop by a huge team of USA funded and CIA controlled men deployed to track him down.
Pablo was born 1 December 1949, the third of seven children to a farmer and school teacher parents. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Pablo answered that he wanted to be a millionaire. As a teenager he began his criminal career reselling stolen gravestones, stealing cars, smuggling contraband cigarettes and even assisting in the kidnapping of a business executive. At the age of 25 he got into the business of cocaine in earnest. After a rival dealer was murdered, ostensibly by Pablo, all his men were told that they now work for Pablo. The following year Pablo was caught in possession of 18 kgs of cocaine after returning from Ecuador. While his attempts to bribe the judge were unsuccessful, after less than 2 months in prison he was eventually able to bribe the arresting police officers, and the case was dropped. This pattern of corruption and intimidation characterised Pablo´s manner of dealing with problems. As Pablo once said, ¨Everyone has a price, the important thing is to find out what it is.¨ Bribing was the first choice, but Pablo was not afraid to take more dramatic actions if necessary. He once said, ¨Sometimes I am God. If I say a man dies, he dies that same day.¨ This policy became to be known as ¨Plata o plomo¨ meaning ´silver or lead´.
While Pablo Escobar was the most well known member of the Medellin cartel, he was not the boss and held an equal, or perhaps only a somewhat greater, share to about 10 other senior members. However, over 10% of a cartel that at its prime smuggled 80% of the USA cocaine supply made him an exceedingly wealthy man. Indeed, by 1983 his fortune was loosely estimated at US$20 Billion, making him the 7th richest person according to Forbes Magazine rich list. As cash was the primary mode of transaction, stashes of millions of dollars continue to be found hidden in the walls of country villas and warehouses across Colombia.
The cartel was mainly a smuggling operation, with most of the cocaine coming from Peru and Bolivia. After is was further refined, it was transported to the USA via other Caribbean countries, mainly the Bahamas, where the cartel bought an island as a smuggling headquarters. They had a fleet of planes, helicopters, boats and even submarines at their disposal, and Pablo, unlike most of the other cartel leaders, famously piloted some deliveries. There were jetliners that could carry 11 tonnes of cocaine per flight and a record delivery of 23 tonnes in a cargo ship.
But controlling so much money has its costs. In addition to constant fighting with rival cartels involving frequent bombing and counter-bombing of cartel owned properties, they were also at war with the US-backed Colombian Government. In a rare offer of peace, Pablo and the cartel offered to pay off the entire national debt of some US$13 billion in exchange for immunity for cartel leaders. The government said ´no´ and confiscated nearly 1000 cartel owned properties. They then signed an extradition treaty with the US whereby Colombian drug criminals could be imprisoned in the US. As Pablo famously said, `I would prefer to be in the grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.` The cartel responded with violence. A presidential candidate was gunned down, banks, newspapers and a Government building in Bogota were car bombed and a commercial flight on which the President was supposed to be was bombed, leaving 107 dead. It was also alleged that Escobar financed an attack on the Colombian Supreme Court in 1985 by a guerrilla group which left have of the Supreme Court judges dead. With so much conflict, Medellin became the murder capital of the world, with over 25,000 violent deaths within the city in 1991 and over 27,000 in 1992. A portion of this high murder rate was attributable to the cartel´s offer of US$1000 for every police officer killed. Over 600 officers were killed in this way in only a few years.
After a period of relative peace, when a new president rescinded the extradition treaty and Pablo was voluntarily imprisoned in a luxury house he built for himself, the position was changed again under pressure from the USA. The war was back on, and Pablo let himself out from his prison and was on the run again. Throughout all these periods of different levels of violence, the rate of cocaine trafficking never faltered.
It took a US funded and CIA controlled team of 1500 men 499 days to track down the escaped Pablo. Using radio triangulation technology provided by the US, Pablo was tracked down to a middle-class neighbourhood in Medellin while talking to his son on the phone. As forces moved in Pablo and his one remaining bodyguard, who had been by his side since almost the beginning, fled the building rooftop to rooftop before they were eventually gunned down. It was 2 December 1993, the day after Pablo´s birthday. There is some controversy about how he actually died. Some claim it was the CIA, who have photos with the body moments later, while others claim it was a vigilante group called Los Pepes who had been pursuing Pablo for over a decade and had captured and killed his cousin earlier that day. Other´s claimed that Pablo shot himself and assured his wish to end up in a Colombian grave rather than a US prison.
While seen as an enemy of the US and Colombian Governments, Pablo was a hero to many Colombians, especially the poor. He built many hospitals, schools and houses in Colombia, most notably a 500 residence housing project in a poor area of Medellin that he gave to the locals. He was also patron of football, building sports centres, sponsoring children´s football teams and paying for about half of the Colombian national team. He did however, have umpires assassinated on a couple of occasions when he did not agree with a decision. He also built a massive zoo on his private country residence. It was abandoned upon his death and there are now some 300 wild hippos roaming the Colombian mountains.
Since 1995 Pablo´s widow and two children have lived in Buenos Aires Argentina, under different names. Pablo said that his wife was the only person he was ever scared of, and other than being unfaithful was actually a good husband and father. While the family could only get away with a small fraction of Pablo´s wealthy, they still live a very comfortable life.
Now days, about 90% of cocaine used in the USA still comes from Colombia, usually via an intermediary Mexican cartel. The murder capital on the world is now Juarez, on the Mexican border with the US. In the post Escobar era supply and production of cocaine has not dropped, but now it is a collection of guerrilla and paramilitary groups in power operating from the jungle regions of Colombia. It is though that 50-300 thousand hectares of virgin Amazonian rainforest are cleared each year for the production of cocaine. But the situation in Colombian cities and highways has improved dramatically. Medellin is now a growing city with a perpetual spring-like climate, streets lined by mango trees and more beautiful women with breast and arse implants than you could poke a scalpel at. Once the murder capital of the world, this fun, safe and progressive cosmopolitan is now leaving many Western cities for dead. However, some bombed cartel buildings, including a highrise tower used as the cartel´s headquarters and the house of Pablo himself, remain unrepaired and vacant, serving as a constant reminder for the still too recent pasts.
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