Pablo Escobar’s legacy refuses to die 25 years on

Medellin, Colombia: Twenty- five years after he was gunned down by police, Pablo Escobar’s legacy refuses to die in Medellin, the Colombian city where he ran his cocaine empire with a mix of brutality and largesse.

Even as city officials prepare to demolish the bunker- like mansion where the late drug lord lived, in the neighbourhood that bears his name residents who live in homes he built for them are planning heartfelt tributes to mark Sunday’s anniversary.

Escobar was killed in a rooftop shootout 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 straight time.

His eight- story mansion, the Monaco, a symbol of the decadent opulence of the Colombian mafia in the 1980s and 90s, has fallen into disrepair in the years since his death.

Its battered frame still bears the scars of Colombia’s first car bombing, in 1988, the start of a bloody war between the country’s rival cartels.

The hulking white building is slated to be demolished in February, in a public implosion complete with stands for viewers to watch. “The Monaco has become an anti- symbol, in a place where some people are outspoken defenders of crime and terrorism,” says Manuel Villa, the city hall secretary who will perform the official countdown to the detonation.

“We don’t want any more children saying they want to be Pablo Escobar when they grow up.”

The mansion, a top tourist attraction in Medellin’s upscale El Poblado neighbourhood, will be replaced by a public park dedicated to the thousands of people killed in Colombia by “narcoterrorism” — the no- holds- barred war the cartels waged on each other and the state in the 1980s and ‘ 90s.