Escobar’s Legend Looms Over a City

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — When the mayor of Medellín showed up, he was bearing a sledgehammer.

He stood with it in front of the former home of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord whose cocaine empire once placed him on lists of the world’s richest and most wanted.

Escobar lived for years in the penthouse of the Monaco Building. It was bombed in 1988 by Escobar’s rivals, and not long afterward, he abandoned it. For a while, Medellín could ignore the now- empty Monaco.

Recently, attention to the building has returned, piqued by the Netflix series “Narcos,” scores of books, telenovelas and movies about Escobar.

Tourists now sidle up to the gate, snapping photos and posting them on Instagram. Tour guides stop by. A former cartel hit man-turnedYouTube-star appeared, offering DVDs recounting his exploits with Escobar.

In April, fed up, the mayor intervened.

“This symbol, which is a symbol of illegality, of evil, will be brought to the ground,” said Federico Gutiérrez. The mayor vowed to topple the building by next year and to put a park honoring victims in its place.

Twenty-five years after Escobar was killed by police, the city cannot forget him, no matter how much it might want his legend buried away.

Medellín has become a boomtown where architects compete to build projects and technology start-ups proliferate. Medellín’s residents are the first to tell you where their city has advanced to.

But they are the last to mention where it has advanced from — the depths of the cocaine era that brought not only the horror of Escobar, but also the money that built its skyline, including the Monaco.

“Pablo Escobar has become the pop icon of this story,” said Daniel Vásquez, who heads public outreach at the Memory House Museum, an institution dedicated to the victims of Medellín’s armed conflicts. “The city saw no urgency to tell this part of history. It wasn’t a priority for the government until there was a problem, until suddenly you had narco-tours led by Popeye.”

“Popeye,” the alias of Jhon Jairo Velásquez, a hit man for Escobar, began hawking DVDs and hosting tours of the city after his release

A drug kingpin has become ‘the pop icon’ of Medellín.

from prison in 2016.

“It’s like if members of Al Qaeda gave tours in New York about how they had planned 9/11,” said Luis Hernando Mejía, who represents the neighbors association that includes the Monaco, where Popeye would begin his tours. (Popeye was rearrested this May on charges that included extortion.)

Mr. Gutiérrez said he decided to destroy the Monaco to show that the city had been reborn, he said, and that the law had triumphed over chaos.

But more than anything, he said he wanted to demolish the Monaco because Medellín was sick of telling the same story of the same villain, over and over.