Cap 89 pablo escobar biography

One day, he recalled, some Escobar men began discussing a murder they were planning. “I got up, as if to leave the room, but one of them said, ‘Stay. We trust you.’ I stayed.” Correa realized that he had crossed a line. “I’m a big reader of World War Two histories,” he said. “And something I’ve always noticed is that, for those who were in the concentration camps, a moment comes when they became accustomed to everything going on around them.” Correa waved to the streets around us. “I mean, I suffered over what was happening, the violence. But the morbid curiosity—you know, it was like Alka-Seltzer. I felt something here, inside me.” Correa made an itching motion with his fingers around his stomach, and smiled.

When Escobar began to establish himself as a public figure, in the early eighties, he found other people willing to tell his story without judgment. In April, , the weekly magazine Semana published an article titled “Un Robin Hood Paisa.” (Paisa is the local term for the people of Antioquia province, which contains Medellín.) Semana described Escobar as a politically ambitious and civic-minded thirty-three-year-old businessman who owned an immense private ranch and a fleet of helicopters and airplanes. The magazine evaded questions about the origin of Escobar’s fortune, saying only that it was “the subject of widespread speculation.”

Escobar had recently mounted a campaign for Congress, in which he spent freely in Medellín’s poorer neighborhoods. He had initially tried to join a branch of Colombia’s mainstream Liberal Party, led by a popular young politician named Luis Carlos Galán, but he was thwarted when Galán denounced him as a mafioso. Escobar, undaunted, joined a different branch of the Party, with the help of a powerful, corrupt senator named Alberto Santofimio.

Escobar made it to Congress, and began working to build a political constituency in and around Medellín. “His civic vocation seems to know no limits,” Semana gushed. “His civic works inc

Who Was Pablo Escobar?

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug trafficker who collaborated with other criminals to form the Medellín cartel in the early s. Eventually, he controlled over 80 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States, earning the nickname “The King of Cocaine.” He amassed an estimated net worth of $30 billion and was named one of the 10 richest people on Earth by Forbes. He earned popularity by sponsoring charity projects and soccer clubs, but later, terror campaigns that resulted in the murder of thousands turned public opinion against him. After surrendering to the Colombian authorities in , Escobar escaped detainment in and was a fugitive until his dramatic death in December

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria
BORN: December 1,
DIED: December 2,
BIRTHPLACE: Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia
SPOUSE: Maria Victoria Henao ()
CHILDREN: Juan Pablo and Manuela
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius

Early Life

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1, , in the Colombian city of Rionegro, Antioquia. His family later moved to the suburb of Envigado. He was the third of seven children born in poverty to a schoolteacher mother and a peasant farmer father. From an early age, Escobar packed a unique ambition to raise himself up from his humble beginnings and dreamed of becoming the president of Colombia one day.

Escobar reportedly began his life of crime early, stealing tombstones and selling phony diplomas. It wasn’t long before he started stealing cars, then moving into the smuggling business. Escobar’s early prominence came during the “Marlboro Wars,” in which he played a high-profile role in the control of Colombia’s smuggled cigarette market. This episode proved to be a valuable training ground for the future narcotics kingpin.

Establishing the Medellín Cartel

It wasn’t by chance that Colombia came to dominate the cocaine trade. Beginning in the early s, the country became a prime smuggling ground

Pablo "El Doctor" Escobar was a notorious and wealthy cocaine trafficker and drug lord from Colombia who led the Medellin Cartel. Escobar was the richest criminal in history, with $30,,, by the early s. Escobar was killed by the government in in a shootout in Medellin.

Biography[]

Pablo Escobar was born in in Rionegro, Colombia. On the streets of Medellin as a teenager, he made money illegally by stealing gravestones and giving them to dealers for resale. By the early s, he was a thief and a bodyguard, and made a quick $, for capturing and ransoming a Medellin executive. Escobar's childhood ambition was to become a millionaire before he was 22 years old, and starting in , he began to smuggle cocaine. Escobar himself flew planes between Colombia and Panama, smuggling crack into America. In , after purchasing 14 kilograms of cocaine, he killed dealer Fabio Restrepo, and all of his men were told that they worked for Escobar now. In May he was arrested for possessing 18 kilos of crack after returning to Medellin from Ecuador, but he bribed the two arresting officers and the case was dropped. Because there were no cartels or barons back then, Escobar had plenty of customers, and soon the demand for coke skyrocketed in the USA. Escobar took over several trade routes into America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Spain with crack produced in Bolivia and Peru, and he bought Norman's Cay in the Bahamas. There, he constructed a zoo, a lake, and a base of operations for his smuggling operations. Escobar formed the Medellin Cartel, made up of several gang members that smuggled drugs through the Americas and the Caribbean.

In , Escobar gained political power after being made a part of the Colombian Liberal Part

Warning: This blog contains graphic images that some readers may find disturbing.

Thirty years ago this month, the bloody reign of the world’s most wanted narco kingpin came to a violent end. As Colombian forces closed in on drug lord Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, the old cliché rang true: “Live by the gun, die by the gun.” On December 2, , Escobar was shot and killed atop a terracotta roof in a Medellín suburb.

The epic tale of Pablo Escobar involves an eclectic cast of characters whose stories garnered fame for some and infamy for others. From books to movies to TV series, supporting players in the larger drama have included Griselda Blanco, George Jung, Barry Seal, Jack Carlton Reed, Carlos Lehder, Manuel Noriega and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Steve Murphy and Javier Peña.

Escobar amassed so many enemies that neither his vast wealth nor fear tactics could provide him with any solace or protection, especially in the waning years. Few remained loyal and those that did were picked off by the law, military or vigilante posse. With his days numbered, the ever-defiant Escobar tried to evade the multipronged front hunting him down, literally to his final moments.

However, the chapter did not fully close there, as is often the case with legendary figures and dramatic downfalls. Conspiracies and conjectures circulated regarding the circumstances of his death. Among them are legitimate questions that remain intriguing.

The high life

Most of what we know regarding Escobar’s early forays into crime comes from hearsay, folklore and a handful of accounts shared by surviving friends and family. Almost all versions share a few common denominators: Escobar started with small-time theft, smuggling and marijuana dealing before graduating to international drug trafficking. Other tales speak of kidnappings and murder. His first major arrest occurred in , an auto theft charge for which he ser