If you want to look at the bad, he was very bad. “If you want to look at the good side, he was very good. “Pablo will confuse you,” Yamile Zapata a stylist in Medellin said. Escobar’s victims are still seeking justice and a balanced narrative of what really happened. “To me, God is first, and then him.”īut the damage he inflicted is also remembered.
“I see him like a second God,” resident Maria Eugenia Castano, 44, told AFP news agency, as she lights a candle at an altar that bears Escobar’s photograph. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.
#PABLO ESCOBAR SERIES#
In Antioquia, an area surrounded by drugs, many still speak about the fact that it has the biggest concentration of hippopotamus outside of Africa – animals that, having escaped from Escobar’s ranch, were left to roam wild instead of being transferred to the zoo, according to reports from El Pais.Īccording to Netflix, more than 60 million viewers have been attracted to the eccentric details of his life through hugely successful series such as Narcos and other TV series and documentaries.Īnd for many, he is still the “Colombian Robin Hood”, particularly in the neighbourhood that bears his name, where he donated 443 houses to people who earlier lived at the local dump. In 1991, at the height of Escobar’s conflict with authorities, Medellin had recorded 6,349 murders.īut the fascination with the legend of Escobar has overshadowed this reality for many, and stories around him are still popular. Renovating and reinforcing the mansion would have cost $11m, according to the city.Ī woman shows a poster promoting a magazine style publication about the life of the late Escobar in Medellin “They’ve changed and are less intense but we need to keep working on our culture so that it will always be less present,” he added. “We have moved forward but we still have huge challenges because the violence and drug trafficking are still here. “It’s a tribute to the victims and all the people that defended legality,” Daniel Vasquez, collaborator at Colombia’s Memory House Museum, told Al Jazeera.
But it will soon be replaced with a public park that will be dedicated to the thousands of people killed in Colombia by drug gang disputes. The home has become a top tourist attraction in Medellin’s El Poblado neighbourhood.
The mansion where Escobar lived with his family was bombed in 1988 and abandoned, but today it has become a symbol of Escobar’s era – one the authorities want to get rid of. He helped many,” Emanuel Lara Rodriguez, a Mexican tourist in Colombia told Al Jazeera.Įscobar was killed in a rooftop shoot-out with police and army soldiers in Medellin on December 2, 1993, one day after his 44th birthday and five months after he appeared on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people for the seventh time. “He was a good person who also had to do bad things, otherwise he would have been killed earlier. Pablo Escobar watching a football game in Medellin in 1983