Pablo Escobar - Colombian Drug Lord

Medellin, Colombia, December 1993. In a quiet middle-class suburb  of Colombia's second city there is suddenly a commotion. A police team is raiding a house and two men have exited across the rooftops. They both fight and run at the same time, trying to get away while shooting at the police. It is over in seconds, both men are killed in the firefight. One of the two dead men lies on his side on a roof. His big stomach is on show and his round face with its full moustache gives him the look of a  well-to-do Mexican businessman.

This is Pablo Escobar Gaviria, a billionaire and the richest gangster who has ever lived. At the height of his power, his gang exported fifteen  tons of cocaine to the U.S.A. – every day. He travelled around Colombia  in an armoured helicopter with two other, heavily armed ones as escorts. If he ordered his assassins to kill someone, that person would usually be dead by the end of the day. And he had given many orders to kill.

In 1948, Colombia had exploded into civil war, left wing against right wing. The country fell into shocking violence and anarchy for nearly twenty years. People formed private republics protected by their own armies, groups attacked each other to protect what they saw as their interests and the government of the country was weak, too weak to stop these terrible things. Power came from the gun and only the strong survived. If you wanted something, you took it, killing all those who stood in your way. You would have life and money and the respect of those around you. The weak got crushed.

Pablo Escobar, born in 1949, grew up through these times, learning the hard lessons that Colombia taught. He was from Envigado, a town about an hour from Medellin, the capital of the province of Antioquia, Colombia's biggest, landlocked in the heart of the country. The people of Antioquia and  Medellin are called 'Paisas', the descendants of peasants from the dry hills of western Spain, most of them from Jewish families who had converted to Catholicism on the sea passage from Spain.

Proud of their white skin in a land full of brown and black people, the Paisas have a reputation for trade and retail. Almost every Paisa wants to make it in business, men and women alike, and many do. The Paisas believe they have a reputation for fairness and honesty, although other Colombians may not agree.

Just as Pablo Escobar, the son of poor Paisa peasants, was reaching adulthood, Colombia was going into one of its brief periods of peace and stability, from 1968 until trouble started again in the early 'eighties. The country, so long at war with itself, was now safe to travel again and was open to visitors and outside influences.

The 1970s was a golden age in many ways. Both young tourists backpacking in Colombia and Colombians going to  the U.S.A. to study or work soon came to two conclusions. First, that Colombia produced some of the finest marijuana in the world. And, second, affluent young North Americans would pay the highest prices for it. All you had to do was get it to the U.S.A.

Colombians have a long tradition of gold, coffee and emerald smuggling and of planting hidden crops deep in the country's huge interior. In no time, students across North America were smoking Santa Marta Gold, the Colombian marijuana. Growers, dealers and smugglers all made a fortune. There was something for everyone  in the Santa Marta region and times were good.

Then greed led to disaster: as demand rose sharply for the Santa Marta marijuana, the growers and sellers found it hard to satisfy all their customers. They could have raised the prices, they might have rationed sales. They didn't. Instead they stuffed the loads  with grass or old newspapers to get the right weight for the deal. When they saw this, the North American gangsters never went back. They found other sources and the marijuana boom on  Colombia's Caribbean coast stopped even more suddenly than it had started. It was like an omen of the cocaine boom that was just about to rip across all of Colombia like a storm.

While the Santa Marta boom was happening from the late 'sixties and on into the 'seventies, Pablo Escobar had started to establish himself as a leader in organised crime – on a small scale. Still in his early twenties, he had a gang that operated out of Envigado, his home town, and in the regional capital, Medellin. They stole cars, repainted them and sold them on. They had a sideline in forged lottery tickets; and, once, they had kidnapped a successful local businessman and received a very attractive $100,000 to let him go again. It was this money that financed  the first big cocaine deal. The gang was starting to gain a reputation; they even had a little money.

And it was at this point that the cocaine boom just happened. For some reason, cocaine suddenly became very  fashionable in the U.S.A. for the first time since the 1920s and, if you could get the stuff to them, Americans would pay top prices in hard currency for your product. It wasn't hard for Escobar. The stuff was much easier  to smuggle than marijuana, with a far higher profit margin. You bribed a few people, threatened a few others, maybe killed one or two and, if your delivery of cocaine  got all the way to the U.S.A., you were rich, enormously rich, from just one export run. Pablo Escobar soon had a number  of smuggling routes operating. The money simply poured in. Bribery got easier and went higher up the system. People wanted to be Pablo's friend.

Escobar soon controlled the trade in his entire region and beyond. He also controlled the Colombian police and much of the national government. His only real enemies in Colombia were the Rodriguez-Orejuela, a crime family in Cali, the country's other big city.

In the meantime, the cocaine boom had had  all sorts of strange social and economic effects in Colombia. Payments for deliveries of cocaine were in cash, usually dollars, which made it easy to spend but hard to invest or bank. So, very little of any real  worth was bought or built. Spending in bars and discos and throughout the entertainment sector was at an all-time high. Luxury cars could be seen everywhere, some driven by schoolgirls who were popular as girlfriends for gangsters. If a boy at school annoyed one of these girls, they might ask their gangster  boyfriend to kill him and he would. The murder rate went to shocking levels and drug use of all kinds increased. All over Colombia the same  story was being repeated. The guerrilla war had also started again.

Escobar and the other drug traffickers thrived on the confusion and violence. But, there were careful politics as well. Escobar always kept well  in with the Catholic Church and its senior priests were always happy to accept his generous donations, knowing very well where the money came from.

He built blocks of homes for the elderly and sports grounds for the young. He made a lot of friends. They knew the ugly kind of  things he did to make his money but it was an awful lot of money and he gave so much of it to the poor, after all. Escobar was beginning to build quite a loyal political  following based in Medellin. At least loyal while the money lasted. And, while it did, Escobar decided to take advantage and launch himself into national politics.

He had two strong reasons for doing this. First, he was ambitious to be 'somebody', a congressman or a senator, maybe, one day, president. He didn't say it but it was there. Everyone could sense it. The other reason was the threat that would shadow Escobar  until it drove him to his death at the age of 44: 'extradition'. His legal removal to another country to be tried in court for serious crimes there. The other country would be  the United States of America.

It was his worst nightmare. In Colombia, he could buy whoever he liked or, if necessary, have them killed. He would never, could never, be successfully tried, found guilty and kept in prison to serve his sentence. When he did, on one occasion, agree to serve time in prison in Colombia he built the prison as he wanted it and included escape tunnels which he later used.

This would not be the way in America. There he would face incorruptible police, judges and juries. The U.S. government would make sure of it. And when they found him guilty, he would get fifty or a hundred years as his sentence in a hard, cruel U.S. high security jail where he would probably be killed. He would certainly be forgotten – except, of course, by the police accountants who would slowly find and take away all his money. None of that could be allowed to happen. Escobar would show that he  was ready to do anything, anything at all, to prevent it.

For the time being, he hoped that his new role  as an elected politician would bring him protection from any legal process. He was happy to let his lawyers argue the point at length in Colombia's notoriously slow courts. But the possibility of extradition arose again and Escobar went on the run. This time it seemed as though he was at war with the Colombian state. He even paid a bounty of $1,000 to anyone who killed a police officer. Independent, two-man assassination teams roamed the streets of Medellin looking for police to murder on the spot. Two or three police were dying every day.

Pablo Escobar's carefully constructed popularity as a 'Robin Hood' figure for Colombia started to fade. Then, with one single act of violence, it disappeared. A flight from the capital, Bogota, to Cali, a regional centre, blew up in mid-air, killing all aboard. Dozens of men, women and  children had been killed because, on board with them, and protected by detectives, was a key witness to the extradition case against Pablo Escobar. His men had made plans to kill just the witness, maybe some of his guards, but they had all come to nothing because the security was so tight. In the end, Escobar ordered his men to go ahead and blow up a whole plane full of people in order to kill just one person. Colombia, a country that  has seen the worst horrors, was shocked by this act.

Any support Escobar had had disappeared. Members of his organization  started to leave or, worse, to talk to the police. He was spending millions of dollars hiding and making war on the state, and not making money. All his criminal operations had been suspended. Slowly, the special police team hunting him had him trapped in the city of Medellin. Patiently, slowly, they tracked him down with electronic equipment and informants' tips. Then, the day after his birthday, they surprised Escobar and his bodyguard at one of their many hiding places.

And so it ended. One question remains: did the fatal head-shot through the ears come from Escobar himself? There is evidence that it did and he had always said that  he would commit suicide before he surrendered to his enemies.