Pablo Escobar is, arguably, the most controversial villain of all time. Central to Colombian drug dealing history is a man born and raised in a humble background who rose to become the greatest drug baron in the country, the name of Pablo Escobar. Pablo was able to rise above the poverty he grew up in to become the commander of the Medellin drug cartel, the 7 richest man in the whole world and controller of 80 percent of the world’s cocaine market. He managed to get all he ever wanted, albeit through unconventional and highly criminal ways. So wealthy was Escabor that he was rumoured to have stashes of cash that rats would chew on and that he once burnt thousands of notes to keep his daughter warm. Escobar was known for his ruthlessness and impatience with anyone who attempted to cross his path. Some commentators referred to him as the very personification of all that is evil. For years, he ordered several assassinations of police officers and government officers, including that of the country’s justice minister in 1984 and that of Louis Galan, a presidential candidate in 1989. He committed so many murders through his assassins that the number still remains unclear.
While some people regarded Escabor as a ruthless villain, others saw him as a legendary hero, a saviour. The two different camps were justified to regard him as such. While the former drew their evidence from the numerous crimes he committed, the hundreds that had lost their lives in the hands of Escabor and his assassins and the fact that he was in an illegal business, the latter had evidence in the numerous charity works he initiated and took part in. Escabor committed large amounts of money into funding social programs and construction of low cost houses for the poor in his neighbourhood, the most famous being the Barrio Pablo Escabor house project that houses over 10,000 residents. His charity works were greatly lauded as the works of a saviour in a highly disadvantaged neighbourhood, never mind they were constructed using drug money.
Pablo did not stop at being the seventh richest man in the world. He was not satisfied with merely being rich and charitable. He wanted to gain more influence and he knew that the ticket to getting it was to get into politics. He went ahead and got into politics and he even got elected as an alternate congressman. However, his life in politics was extremely short as, soon, his party kicked him out due to his undeniable involvement with drugs and drug trafficking. He was a great campaigner for against extradition and he would bribe, or kill, any authority on his way and it is only after his government gave in to his demand for protection against extradition that he turned himself in in a private prison where he was to serve his sentence. He however broke out of prison barely a year later claiming that the government had betrayed him. A year and a half later, the police caught up with him and killed him as he tried to escape.
Escabor died in 1993 but his legacy lives on over two decades later. Some people have illustrated him as a monster who deserved to die as he did, having claimed so many lives, and others defend him, seeing him as the saviour who oversaw the upgrading of thousands of Medellin’s lives. Every year, thousands visit his grave, some to have a glance at this ruthless drug lord, others to curse him for the pain he caused and others to genuinely mourn him for the positive mark he left in their lives. For whatever reason that people come to visit his grave, we cannot deny that Pablo Escabor was a legend in his own right and like the saints or villains before him, he has a rightful place in the history of not just Colombia but the entire world.
Works Cited
Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo. NY: Penguin Books, 2002.
Bowley, Jenner. The Social Constructions of Pablo Escabor. Main: University of Main, 2013.
Russell, Crandall. Driven By Drugs: US policy towards Colombia. Bolder: Lynne Rissner, 2002.
