My Father, the Drug Lord: Pablo Escobar's Son Speaks

[Judi Lynn]

My Father, the Drug Lord: Pablo Escobar's Son Speaks

TIMENov 5--While on the phone with his son 16 years ago, Pablo Escobar stayed on the line just long enough for Colombian police to trace the call. Minutes later, the world's most violent and notorious drug lord was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop. Fearing for their lives, Escobar's wife, son and daughter sought safety in exile, but most nations shut their doors. After stopovers in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa and Mozambique — a whirlwind on par with the deposed Shah of Iran's desperate 1979 world tour — the widow and her children finally entered Argentina as tourists on Christmas Eve 1994. They've lived relatively quiet lives in Buenos Aires ever since.

But the son on the phone on that fatal day is breaking his silence. Now an architect and industrial designer, Juan Pablo Escobar, 32, has changed his legal name to Sebastián Marroquín to avoid scrutiny and notoriety. He is, nevertheless, emerging as the central character in a documentary about his father's brutal legacy, Los Pecados de mi Padre (The Sins of My Father). The film shows Marroquín returning to Colombia to renounce Escobar's violent legacy and apologize to the families of some of the victims. "I wanted to do something positive that would help Colombian society," Marroquín told TIME in a telephone interview. "I wanted to show the errors of getting involved in drug trafficking."

Some observers wonder about the value of an apology from the son of the perpetrator of the crimes and not the criminal himself. But the film's Argentine director, Nicolás Entel, says the point is to promote reconciliation in Escobar's homeland. "Colombia is a nation in which cycles of violence can continue from generation to generation," he says. "If you do something to me, my family members will look for your family members ... So has the value of saying, 'It stops here. We are not going to inherit our parents' hatred."

Among the documentary's highlights are emotional meetings between Marroquín and the son of one of his father's most famous victims: Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, who was killed in 1984. Lara's son, also named Rodrigo Lara, is a Colombian senator. He was just 8 years old when he helped bodyguards bring his bullet-riddled father to the hospital. Still bitter about the assassination, he was skeptical about Marroquín. But after receiving a gracious letter from drug lord's son, he met Marroquín in a Buenos Aires suburb and the two ended up embracing.

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Background on the conditions which lead to the assassination of Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara:

Violence in Colombia
by Carrigan, reprinted from NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 1995

Tuesday, August 19, 1994, mid-morning. On an ordinary, traffic-clogged street in Bogota, two motorcyclists ride up alongside the motor car of a prominent opposition politician, open fire with heavy-caliber automatic weapons, and ride away. In the backseat, Senator Manuel Cepeda, a respected, 60-year-old parliamentarian and the sole surviving senate representative of the ten-year-old Patriotic Union (UP) party, lies dying. In the landscape of Colombia's prolonged dirty war against the organized left, the death of the senator represented the latest murder of an opposition leader whose only crime, in the eyes of those who ordered his "extermination," was that he favored a peaceful settlement to the country's 40-year-old guerrilla war.

Within 24 hours, a paramilitary group, the self-proclaimed "MACOGUE," or "Death to Communists and Guerrillas," claimed responsibility for this latest assassination of a leftist political leader. After studying the MACOGUE communique, the new government of President Ernesto Samper duly attributed Senator Cepeda's assassination to drug traffickers.

For more than a decade, an official script that attributes all the political violence in Colombia to an all-powerful drug mafia has shielded the true identity of the killers of Colombian citizens from public scrutiny and judicial accountability. Internationally, assisted by the media's single-minded obsession with drugs, this official version has gone virtually unchallenged since it was first aired in connection with the 1984 assassination of Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Yet within Colombia, the credibility of this official explanation for all the killings that have devastated the organized left since the early 1980s has badly frayed.

In the last few years, scores of investigations by Colombian and international non-governmental organizations, including the UN Center for Human Rights, the Council of the European Economic Community and the Inter-American Commission of the OAS, and by the government's own investigators, have built a solid case for discarding this official script once and for all time. The cumulative evidence of the past 12 years reveals a policy of systematic political and social "cleansing" of selected individuals and groups, sponsored and organized by the state's own security forces. The story further involves a degree of passive toleration of--sometimes difficult to distinguish from complicity with--this killing by successive civilian governments.

Like all of the murders of prominent Colombian politicians in the last decade--those of four presidential candidates: Jaime Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo of the UP, Luis Carlos Galan of the dissident wing of the Liberal Party, and Carlos Pizzarro of the M-19 Democratic Alliance; of two ministers of Justice: Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and Carlos Mauro Hoyos; of thousands of elected civic and political officials: mayors, town councillors, community leaders, indigenous leaders, and regional prosecutors; of teachers, priests, lawyers, journalists, human rights activists; of countless anonymous peasants; of workers: according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), Colombia holds the world record for numbers of assassinated trade unionists; and of the entire activist membership of one political party, the UP--like all these, Senator Cepeda's death had been "foretold." For several months his name had headed one of the sinister death lists that circulate from time to time in political, media and legal circles in Bogota. His assassination had been "on hold"; his life was threatened weekly, then almost daily, on the anonymous, cellular telephone.

Manuel Cepeda had no illusions. When he knew he was the latest target of the army officers who plan and execute the dirty war, he went to see the then-minister of defense, Rafael Pardo, to ask him to investigate his suspicions of a military conspiracy to eliminate him. Minister Pardo refused his plea on the grounds that Cepeda "had not presented proofs." After the assassination, when Cepeda's son and the Secretary General of the Communist Party asked Pardo's successor, Fernando Botero, to initiate an investigation into the involvement of the army in the senator's murder, he also declined. In the absence of prior proof, the minister explained, he had no justification for opening an investigation.

As columnist Antonio Caballero acidly commented in the newsweekly Cambio 16: "After careful reflection, the Minister of Defense explains that in order to investigate for evidence it is first necessary to have the evidence. If not, there is nothing to be done. Neither suspicions, nor clues, not even the formal, prior accusation by the dead man himself, whose subsequent assassination might be said to provide a certain element of credibility to this case. No: what is needed are the proofs. And if they don't exist, it's not possible to look for them."

And finally, there was nothing arbitrary about the timing of Cepeda's death. Contrary to the much promoted view that all of the violence in Colombia operates in a climate of uncontrollable chaos, political violence is never arbitrary. It is selective, efficient and systematic. When the victim is a national figure, his murder always carries a message and is in response to a specific context, as befits a calculated policy geared to advance a precise political agenda.

In the case of Senator Cepeda, the context was the inauguration of the new government that had assumed power two days earlier amid a flurry of promises to make the protection of human rights a "priority issue" of its agenda, and public pledges to re-open negotiations with the guerrillas and seek an end to the war. The message delivered by this latest assassination put the new President on notice: any attempt to bring the guerrillas in from the cold would not be tolerated.

It is a simple message. Its content has not varied since its first airing in the early 1980s, for it precisely reflects the political agenda that has perpetuated all the political violence of the last 12 years. In the terminology of the hardliners in the army and among the right wing of both traditional parties, who direct and pay for the murderous activities of a proliferation of paramilitary groups with names like "MACOGUE", support for a negotiated solution to the 40-year-old peasant-based guerrilla war means "support for the guerrillas." Consequently, the message spelled out in some 30,000 identifiable political killings since the early 1980s reads: "No negotiations. No peace."

In the past, wherever Latin American "dirty wars" have flourished on a scale comparable to the Colombian experience of the last decade, they have always been sponsored and conducted from the Presidential Palace, where the strong man of the hour traditionally took up residence following a military coup. As a consequence, wearing the uniform of an identifiable tyrant and law-breaker, the military dictator was vulnerable to international opprobrium, and even perhaps to economic sanctions. At the very least, his democratic opposition could count on the informed solidarity of an alerted international community.

Alas for Colombians, their case is unique. The Colombian military doesn't need to stage coups. Colombia's ostensibly democratic civilian government provides the military--on whom it depends for its survival--with limitless freedom to exercise arbitrary power. Armed with an impressive display of image-boosting official human rights mechanisms (even the Ministry of Defense boasts its own "Human Rights Office") and the strongest, most talented diplomatic force in the hemisphere, the Colombian government polishes its democratic credentials for foreign consumption. Meanwhile at home, behind a brilliant facade of democratic institutions, it steadfastly pursues a 40-year-old policy of uncritical support for, and complicity with the military's brutal domination of all aspects of Colombian life.

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