Colombian city struggles to bury ghost of ‘evil’ drug lord Escobar
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 Monaco Building, a white, six-story edifice with a penthouse apartment on top and his family name still inscribed in fading letters on the exterior.
The building was bombed in 1988 by Escobar’s rivals, and not long afterward, he abandoned it. Weeds grew in cracks in the driveway.
Recently, however, attention to the building has returned, piqued by scores of international 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-turned-YouTube-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 remembering victims in its place.
How the Monaco Building went from relative obscurity, to global tourist draw, to one of the most publicized demolition projects in Colombia speaks to the uneasy relationship Medellín has with Escobar, the city’s most notorious son. Twenty-five years after he was killed in a police shootout on a Medellín rooftop, the city cannot forget him, no matter how much it might want his legend buried away.
The city has become a boomtown where international architects compete to build prestige projects and well-funded technology startups proliferate next to trendy restaurants. Medellín’s residents, a famously proud clan known as paisas, 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.
But the city itself was a key character in “Narcos,” and fans of the show come to Medellín in droves, seeking more stories of Escobar’s life. Mustsee stops include Hacienda Nápoles, his ranch outside town; his grave; and La Catedral, the prison built to his specifications.
Daniel Vásquez, who heads public outreach at the Memory House Museum in Medellín, seemed exasperated when asked why visitors are more interested in the life of the city’s top villain than in visiting this institution dedicated to the victims of the city’s armed conflicts over the past 50 years.
“Pablo Escobar has become the pop icon of this story,” Vásquez said. “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.”
The Monaco now awaits Gutiérrez’s wrecking ball.
“Why did I decide as the mayor to destroy the Monaco?” he asked himself.
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.