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The Cocaine King Is Back
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (Spanish: Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria), was born on December 1, 1949, in the town of Envigado, 40 km from Medellin and was shot on December 2, 1993, in the city of Bogota, in the Los Olibos district.
He was the third child in the family, his father was a poor peasant, his mother was a school teacher.
Like most of his peers, Pablo liked to listen to heroic stories about the legendary Colombian "banditos", about how they robbed the rich and helped the needy.
As a child, he decided that when he grew up, he would become the same "banditos".
Who would have thought then that the innocent romantic dreams of a fragile, tender boy would take the form of a nightmare in a couple of decades.
At Pablo's school, he studied among children from poorer families, among students who were dominated by extreme left wing political views, He and his new schoolmates openly supported the Cuban Revolution that had taken place a few years before.
Soon he became addicted to marijuana, and at the age of 16 he was kicked out of school.
From that age, Pablo began to commit crimes.
Pablo began to spend most of his time in the criminal quarters of Medellin, which was a real hotbed of crime.
At first, he began to steal tombstones from the local cemetery and, erasing the inscriptions, resell them again.
Soon he created a small criminal gang of his associates and began to engage in a more sophisticated criminal trade - stealing expensive cars for sale for spare parts.
Then Pablo Escobar came up with another "brilliant" idea - to offer potential victims of theft their "protection".
Those who refused to pay his gang, sooner or later lost their cars.
This was already a real racket.
At the age of 21, he already had quite a lot of adherents.
At the same time, Escobar's crimes became even more sophisticated and cruel.
From the usual carjackings and racketeering, he started kidnapping people.
In 1971, the people of Pablo Escobar kidnapped a rich Colombian latifundist industrialist Diego Echevario, who was killed after prolonged torture.
This murder was never solved.
The murdered Diego Echevario aroused outright hatred among the local poor peasantry, and Pablo Escobar openly declared his involvement in the abduction and murder.
The poor of Medellin celebrated the death of Diego Echevario, and as a sign of gratitude to Escobar, they began to respectfully call him “El Doctor".
Pablo Escobar, began to " feed” the local poor, building them new cheap houses.
He understood that sooner or later they would become a kind of protective buffer between him and the authorities, and his popularity in Medellin grew day by day.
In 1972, Pablo Escobar was already the most famous criminal boss of Medellin.
His criminal group was engaged in car theft, smuggling and kidnapping.
Soon his gang went beyond the borders of Medellin.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the new generation of Americans of the 70s was no longer content with just one marijuana, he needed a stronger high, and soon a new drug appeared on the American streets – cocaine.
On this, Pablo Escobar began to build his criminal business.
At first, he bought cocaine from manufacturers and resold it to smugglers, who then transported it to the United States.
The absolute absence of any” brakes", his willingness to torture and kill, put him out of competition.
When he heard rumors about some lucrative criminal case, he simply seized it by force without unnecessary ceremony.
Anyone who got in his way or could somehow threaten him, immediately disappeared without a trace.
Soon Escobar was running almost the entire cocaine industry in Colombia.
In March 1976, Pablo Escobar married his 15 - year old girlfriend, Maria Victoria Eneo Viejo, who had previously been in his entourage.
A month later, their son Juan Pablo was born, and three and a half years later, their daughter Manuella was born.
Pablo Escobar's drug business was growing rapidly throughout South America.
Soon, he himself began to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
One of Escobar's confidants, a certain Carlos Leder, who was responsible for transporting cocaine, organized a real transshipment point in the Bahamas.
The service was delivered at the highest level.
A large pier, a number of gas stations and a modern hotel with all amenities were built.
No drug dealer could take cocaine outside of Colombia without the permission of Pablo Escobar.
He removed the so called 35% tax from each batch of drugs and ensured its delivery.
Escobar's criminal career was more than successful, he was literally swimming in dollars.
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In the summer of 1977, he and three other major drug lords teamed up to create what became known as the Medellin Cocaine Cartel.
He had the most powerful financial cocaine empire, which no drug mafia in the world could dream of.
To deliver cocaine, the cartel had a distribution network, and planes, and even submarines.
Pablo Escobar became the most indisputable authority of the cocaine world and the absolute leader of the Medellin cartel.
He bought policemen, judges, politicians.
If the bribery did not work, then blackmail was used, but basically the cartel acted on the principle: "Pay or die".
By 1979, the Medellin Cartel already owned more than 80% of the US cocaine industry.
30 year old Pablo Escobar became one of the richest people in the world, whose personal fortune was estimated in billions of dollars.
Escobar had 34 estates, 500 thousand hectares of land, 40 rare cars.
Escobar's estate has dug 20 artificial lakes, six swimming pools and even built a small airport with a runway.
Sometimes it seemed that the cocaine drug lord simply did not know what to do with the money.
Within the boundaries of his estate, Pablo Escobar ordered the construction of a safari zoo, to which the most exotic animals were brought from all parts of the world.
There were 120 antelopes, 30 buffaloes, 6 hippos, 3 elephants and 2 rhinos in the zoo.
he brought the most beautiful girls of Colombia and not only, and where sexual orgies were arranged.
With such enormous funds, in a part of his estate hidden from prying eyes, Pablo Escobar arranged a harem in which he got himself more than 400 mistresses, who could actually be considered concubines.
For them, Escobar built a real closed small town.
Each mistress, among whom there were local winners of beauty contests, and models, and actresses, had her own cottage with a swimming pool, all kinds of gazebos, fountains and other delights, the design and decoration was unlike any other.
In the town itself, there were real parks with artificial lakes, beaches, porticos, in the shade of which Escobar liked to indulge in love pleasures.
The eye was pleased with white and black swans floating on the lake, naked dancers, who formed a separate caste in this paradise, entertaining the owner with their incendiary gestures.
The girls lived in the harem no worse than the eastern houris.
Each had a lot of gold jewelry, a chic wardrobe from the most fashionable couturiers.
For his favorite favorites, the godfather ordered cosmetologists, massage therapists and hairdressers from Paris and Milan.
In order to enlist the support of the population, he launched extensive construction in Medellin.
He laid roads, built stadiums and erected free houses for the poor, which were popularly called "barrio Pablo Escobar".
He himself explained his charity by saying that it was painful for him to see how the poor were suffering.
Escobar saw himself as a Colombian Robin Hood.
In the underworld, he has reached the pinnacle of power.
Now he was looking for a way to make his business legal.
In 1982, Pablo Escobar ran for the Colombian Congress.
And eventually, at the age of 32, he became a substitute member of the Colombian Congress.
That is, he replaced congressmen during their absence.
After breaking into Congress, Escobar dreamed of becoming president of Colombia.
However, once in Bogota, he noticed that his popularity did not go beyond Medellin.
In Bogota, of course, they heard about him, but as a dubious person, paving the cocaine road to the presidential chair.
One of the most popular politicians in Colombia, the main candidate for the presidency - Luis Carlos Galan, was the first to openly condemn the connection of the new congressman with the cocaine business.
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A few days later, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonia launched a broad campaign against the investment of dirty cocaine money in the election race.
As a result, Pablo Escobar was expelled from the Colombian Congress in January 1984.
Thanks to the efforts of the Minister of Justice, his political career ended once and for all.
However, Escobar was not going to leave quietly and decided to take revenge on the minister.
On April 30, 1984, Bonia's ministerial Mercedes stopped at a traffic light on one of the busiest streets in Bogota.
At that moment, a motorcyclist drove up at point blank range from a machine gun riddled the back of the Mercedes, where the Minister of Justice usually sat.
An automatic burst literally blew off the head of Rodrigo Lara Bonia.
This is the first time bandits have killed an official of such a high rank in Colombia.
From that day on, terror began to spread throughout Colombia.
In the mid 80s, Escobar's cocaine empire controlled almost all spheres of life in Colombian society.
Nevertheless, a serious threat loomed over him.
The administration of US President Ronald Reagan has declared its own war on the spread of drugs not only in the United States, but also around the world.
An agreement was reached between the United States and Colombia, according to which the Colombian government undertook to extradite cocaine barons who were engaged in drug trafficking to the United States to American justice.
This was done because if drug traffickers were in any Colombian prison, they could, as before, continue to lead their gangs without hindrance directly from the places of detention and would very soon be released.
As for the United States, the drug traffickers understood that they would not be able to buy their freedom.
The drug lords responded to the attempts of the authorities to extradite the gang members to the United States with terrorism.
They had their own motto, with which they bravely went under bullets: "Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States."
Escobar also made this vow to himself.
But in September 1990, the new president of the country, Cesar Gaviria, offered the drug lords to voluntarily surrender in exchange for a promise not to send them to the United States for trial.
The situation for Escobar was very tense at that time.
The government declared an all out war on the cartel and immediately received $65 million from the United States for this.
As a result of a single nationwide operation, 989 houses and farms, 367 planes, 73 boats, 710 cars, 4.7 tons of cocaine and 1,279 weapons were confiscated from Escobar (the zoo, by the way, was also confiscated).
Each blow of the government was responded by a counterattack of the cartel Pablo Escobar, created a terrorist group called "Los Extraditables".
Its fighters, trained by Colonel Yair Klein, a paratrooper of the Israeli army, attacked officials, police officers, as well as anyone who opposed drug trafficking.
The reason for the terrorist action could be a major police operation or the extradition to the United States of another boss of the cocaine mafia.
The confrontation turned into mass murders.
During the period from 1988 to 1994, 25,211 political and 31,385 non political murders occurred in Colombia during the fight against the mafia.
In November 1985, Escobar and other drug traffickers banded together to show the government that they could not be intimidated.
Escobar hired a large group of leftist guerrillas to commit sabotage.
Leftist guerrillas armed with machine guns, grenades and portable rocket launchers suddenly appeared in the center of Bogota and seized the Palace of Justice when at least several hundred people were inside the building.
The partisans refused to conduct any negotiations, and began firing in all directions, without making any demands.
While they were holding the Palace of Justice in their hands, they destroyed all the documents related to the extradition of criminals.
Large forces of the army and police were brought into the capital of the country.
After a whole day of siege, the assault battalions, supported by tanks and helicopter gunships, broke into the Palace of Justice.
As a result of the assault, 97 people were killed, including 11 of the 24 judges.
A year later, the Supreme Court canceled the agreement on the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States.
However, a few days later, the new President of Colombia, Versilio Barco, vetoed the decision of the Supreme Court and renewed the agreement.
In February 1987, Escobar's closest aide Carlos Leider was extradited to the United States, who by that time had fallen into the hands of the security forces.
Pablo Escobar was forced to build secret shelters all over the country.
Thanks to information from his people in the government, he managed to stay one step ahead of law enforcement agencies.
In addition, the peasants always warned him when suspicious people appeared, a car with policemen or soldiers, or a helicopter.
In 1989, Pablo Escobar again tried to make a deal with justice.
He agreed to surrender to the police if the government would guarantee that he would not be extradited to the United States.
The authorities refused.
Escobar responded to this refusal with terror.
In August 1989, the terror reached its peak.
On August 16, 1989, a member of the Supreme Court, Carlos Valencia, died at the hands of Escobar's killers.
The next day, police Colonel Waldemar Franklin Contero was killed.
On August 18, 1989, at an election rally, a well known Colombian politician, Luis Carlos Galan, was shot dead, who promised, if he was elected president of the country, to start an irreconcilable war with cocaine traffickers, to clear Colombia of drug lords, extraditing them to the United States.
Before the elections, the terror of the Medellin cartel took on a special scale.
Every day, the cartel's killers killed dozens of people.
Only in Bogota, one of the terrorist groups of the drug mafia, committed 7 explosions within two weeks, as a result of which 37 people were killed and about 400 people were seriously injured.
On November 27, 1989, Pablo Escobar planted a bomb on a passenger plane of the Colombian airline Avianaka, on board of which there were 107 passengers and crew members.
The successor of the deceased Luis Carlos Galan, the future president of Colombia, Cesar Gaviria, was supposed to fly on this plane.
Three minutes after the airliner took off, a powerful explosion was heard on board.
The plane caught fire and crashed into the nearby hills.
None of those on board survived.
As it turned out later, Cezanne Gaviria canceled his flight at the last moment, for some reason.
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Mass raids swept through the country, during which chemical laboratories and coca plantations were destroyed.
Dozens of members of drug cartels were behind bars.
In response to this, Pablo Escobar twice made 4 attempts on the head of the Colombian secret police, General Miguel Masa Marquez.
In the second attempt, on December 6, 1989, a bomb explosion killed 62 people and injured 100 of varying severity.
By the early 90s, he was considered one of the richest people on the planet.
His fortune was estimated at at least $ 3 billion.
He headed the list of the most wanted drug traffickers in the United States.
On his heels, the most elite special forces invariably followed, which set itself the task of catching or destroying Pablo Escobar at any cost.
In 1990, the mere mention of the name of Pablo Escobar terrified the whole of Colombia.
He was the most famous criminal in the world.
The government created a "Special Search Group", the target of which was Pablo Escobar himself.
The group included the best police officers from selected units, as well as people from the army, special services and the prosecutor's office.
The creation of a” Special Search Group", headed by Colonel Martinez, immediately brought its positive results, several people from the inner circle of Pablo Escobar found themselves in the dungeons of the secret police, and in 1992, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, one of the organizers of the most high – profile crimes, was shot by the El Mexicano police.
Together with his son, they shot back for a long time, the Mexican yelled from the windows that he would rather die, but the "gringo" (Americans) would not give up.
The remaining top of the cartel – Escobar himself, Luis Ochoa and his two brothers - began to insist on negotiations with the government.
The deal offered by the cartel was as follows: they surrender voluntarily, but at the same time they will be charged with only one crime and, of course, there can be no question of any extradition to the United States.
In addition, in Envigado, Escobar's hometown, a suburb of Medellin, an individual prison should be built for cartel bosses.
And in June 1991, El Doctor handed himself over to justice.
Escobar agreed to plead guilty to several minor crimes, in return, he was forgiven all his past sins.
The prison was called " La Catedral” and was built in the Envigado mountain range.
La Catedral looked more like an expensive, prestigious country club than an ordinary prison.
There was a disco, a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi and a sauna, and a large football field in the courtyard.
Friends and women came to him there.
Escobar's family could visit him at any time.
Colonel Martinez's " Special Search Group “had no right to approach La Catedral closer than 20 kilometers.
Escobar came and went when he wanted to.
He attended football matches and nightclubs in Medellin.
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During his " incarceration” Pablo Escobar continued to run his multibillion dollar cocaine business.
One day he found out that his partners in the cocaine cartel, taking advantage of his absence, robbed him.
He immediately ordered his men to take them to La Catedral.
He personally subjected them to torture, drilling his victims ' knees and pulling out their nails, and then ordered them to be killed and the corpses taken outside the prison.
But on July 22, 1992, President Gaviria ordered the transfer of Pablo Escobar to a real prison.
Escobar, having learned about the president's decision, escaped from prison.
Now he was free, but he had enemies everywhere, except for the government, he was being hunted by competitors from the Cali cartel and the Los PEPES organization created by them.
There were fewer and fewer places where he could find a safe haven.
The governments of the United States and Colombia were this time determined to put an end to Escobar and his Medellin cocaine cartel.
After his escape from prison, everything began to collapse.
His friends began to leave him.
The main mistake of Pablo Escobar was that he could not critically assess the current situation.
He considered himself a more significant figure than he really was.
He continued to have huge financial opportunities, but he no longer had any real power.
The only way to somehow improve the situation was an attempt to resume the announcement with the government.
Escobar tried several times to re conclude a deal with justice, but President Cesar Gaviria, like the US government, believed that this time it was not worth entering into any negotiations with the drug lord.
It was decided to pursue him and, if possible, eliminate him during his arrest.
On November 30, 1993, Pablo Escobar planted a powerful bomb on one of the crowded streets of Bogota.
The explosion occurred when there were a lot of people.
They were mostly parents with their children.
As a result of this terrorist attack, 21 people were killed and more than 70 were seriously injured.
A group of Colombian citizens created the organization "Los PEPES “(Spanish:” Los PEPES“), the abbreviation of which meant”People persecuting Pablo Escobar".
It includes Colombian citizens whose relatives died because of Escobar.
The day after the terrorist attack, Los Pepes detonated bombs in front of the house of Pablo Escobar.
The estate that belonged to his mother was almost completely burned to the ground.
Instead of pursuing Pablo Escobar himself, Los Pepes began to terrorize and hunt everyone who was somehow connected with him or his cocaine business.
They were simply killed.
In a small amount of time, they caused significant damage to his cocaine empire.
They killed many of his people, persecuted his family.
They burned his estates.
Now Escobar was seriously worried, because Los Pepes, having discovered the family, would immediately destroy it to the last person, not even sparing his elderly mother and children.
If his family were outside Colombia, out of the reach of Los Pepes “he could declare an all out war on the government and his enemies.
In the fall of 1993, the Medellin cocaine cartel broke up.
But Pablo Escobar himself was more concerned about his family.
He had not seen his wife or children for more than a year.
For more than a year, he did not see his loved ones and missed them very much.
For Escobar, this was unbearable.
On December 1, 1993, Pablo Escobar turned 44 years old.
He knew that he was being constantly monitored, so he tried to speak as briefly as possible on the phone so that he would not be detected by NSA agents.
However, this time his nerves finally gave out.
The day after his birthday, December 2, 1993, he called his family.
NSA agents waited 24 hours for this call.
This time, while talking to his son Juan, he stayed on the line for about 5 minutes.
After that, Escobar was spotted in the Medellin quarter of Los Olibos.
Soon, the house in which Pablo Escobar was hiding was surrounded on all sides by special agents.
The commandos knocked down the door and broke in.
At that moment, Escobar's bodyguard, El Limon, opened fire on the police officers who were trying to storm the house.
He was injured and fell to the ground.
Immediately after that, with a gun in his hands, Pablo Escobar himself leaned out of the same window.
He opened fire randomly in all directions.
Then he climbed out of the window and tried to escape from his pursuers through the roof.
There, a bullet fired by a sniper hit Escobar in the head and killed him on the spot.
On December 3, 1993, thousands of Colombians filled the streets of Medellin, some came to mourn him, others to rejoice.
Escobar's funeral was attended by more than 20 thousand Colombians.
When the coffin with the drug lord was carried through the streets of Medellin, a real Colombian Hodynka began – the comrades carrying the coffin were swept away by the crowd, the coffin lid was thrown off, and thousands of hands reached out to Pablo's already frozen face with the sole purpose of touching the recently living legend for the last time.
People's rumor played a cruel joke with Escobar's villa, claiming that the billionaire drug lord had a habit of hiding money and jewelry in the walls of his house.
After the death of the godfather, in 1993, Colombian peasants in search of hiding places dismantled the villa brick by brick.
Now Escobar's prison has been looted, his estates are overgrown with grass, cars are rusting in the garage.
Escobar's widow and children live in Argentina, his brother was almost completely blind after a letter bomb was sent to his cell.
If you ask a question today in the slums of Medellin about who Pablo Escobar was, none of the people interviewed will say a bad word about Escobar.
Literally everyone speaks of him as a positive hero.
After the collapse of the Medellin cartel, the leadership was seized by competitors from Cali.
However, already in 1995, the top of the cartel was arrested.
But with Escobar's departure from the scene, the drug mafia did not even think of turning down the business.
They drew conclusions from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Today they want to be invisible.
The Colombian police donot even know their names.
They no longer control the production of the drug, but simply buy ready made cocaine and heroin in neighboring countries or from rebel and paramilitary groups.
Within a few years, they had established large and well protected plantations in the jungle.
The stories of the lives of Pablo's friends can be read in the second part the Medellin Cartel.
Today, the drug business in Colombia is a free market, where there are many contractors.
Drug traffickers make deals with various groups, buying cocaine from them.
For its transportation, they are already turning to others, new heroes from Mexico have entered the arena.
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