ESCOBAR’S LEGACY REFUSES TO DIE
City officials prepare to demolish drug lord’s mansion to build public park
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, residents who live in homes he built for them are planning heartfelt tributes to mark yesterday’s anniversary.
Escobar was killed in a rooftop shootout in Medellin on Dec 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-storey mansion, the Monaco, a symbol of the decadent opulence of the Colombian mafia in the 1980s and 1990s, 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,” said Manuel Villa, the city hall secretary who would perform the official countdown to the detonation.
“We don’t want any more children saying they want to be 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 1990s.
The park will cost an estimated US$2.5 million (RM10.48 million). Renovating and reinforcing the crumbling mansion would have cost US$11 million, according to the city.
“It will be painful” to tear it down, said Villa, “but it’s the only way we can heal our wounds”.
Colombian society remains deeply divided over the legacy of Escobar and other drug barons.
According to Medellin officials, Colombia’s drug violence killed 46,612 people from 1983 to 1994.
Escobar is remembered as the “Colombian Robin Hood” in the neighbourhood that bears his name, where he donated 443 houses to formerly homeless people who lived and scavenged at the local dump.