Mrs Escobar’s Affair of the Heart
On the 25th anniversary of his death, Pablo Escobar’s wife reveals the real man behind the notorious drug lord’s legend. In an extract, Victoria Eugenia Henao, who met Escobar when she was 13, talks of the agony of his womanising, why she stood by his side and of visiting him at La Catedral, the five-star prison in Medellin, Colombia.
As the saying goes, a new broom always sweeps well and at first I visited my husband every Sunday ... My romance with Pablo was more intense than ever and we quickly converted his large prison bedroom into a setting that was conducive to love: a romantic fireplace, large candles in every colour and scent, a large waterbed, several paintings by famous painters, the finest quality bedding and pillows, a wellstocked refrigerator and champagne ... lots of champagne. And best of all: a spectacular view of Medellin.
The nocturnal light show allowed us to see the full sweep of our beautiful city.
Three weeks. That’s how long it lasted, my illusion that my life with Pablo would regain some degree of normality.
Naive as always, I started going up to La Catedral several days a week. And while Pablo was meeting with somebody or playing soccer, I’d take the opportunity to organise, rearrange and mend anything in his room that needed attention but I also looked through the many letters he’d started receiving. They were messages from women all over the world, many of them with photos showing the senders in various poses, many of them naked and the common denominator was that they were offering themselves to him in exchange for money.
I was even more surprised when I read
shocking letters from women recalling their recent intimate encounters with him in great detail and inviting him for an encore whenever he wanted; others wrote flowery missives dreaming of another night of passion in La Catedral.
It was horrible. I remember I waited for him and threw a fit, decrying his lack of respect and his failure to recognise the effort and sacrifices I’d made in order to be with him. His response was a repeat of the ones he’d give before. “Tata, I can’t help it if women visit the men who are looking after me and protecting me ...”
“You’re a liar, Pablo, I don’t believe you. Don’t touch me. I want to go back to Medellin, I don’t want to be with you any more.” I left. He came out after me and asked me to talk to him but I ignored him. Deep down, I knew that as the days passed, La Catedral would become a temple of perdition. The next day, predictably, he sent me a bouquet of yellow flowers with a card that read, “I’ll never trade you for anything or anybody.” His standard show of repentance.
Though I considered it, I never stopped going to La Catedral because Manuela and Juan Pablo would ask me to take them to see their father. When we arrived, I’d notice a smirk on the faces of my husband’s lieutenants. It was obvious that he had plenty of female companionship.
What could I do? Once more I was trapped
with no way out. I decided to win my husband back. Rather than kicking up a fuss about his betrayals, I attempted to seduce him instead. I was determined to be more romantic than the women who went after him for his money, and with the help of a philosophy professor, a good writer and an even better poet, with whom I was taking classes at the time, I started sending Pablo up to six messages a day. They were beautiful letters and their one sincere, heartfelt aim was to outdo any beauty queen who visited La Catedral ... My sole intention was to preserve my marriage at any cost. The strategy worked for a while and Pablo made the effort to respond to all of my messages and began a game of seduction that was a raging success. And since everything was going his way right then, he decided to have El Mugre, one of his most trusted men, build a pigeon coop at La Catedral and acquired a quantity of messenger pigeons.
Pablo would write tiny love notes, which the birds would bring without fail to the Torres de San Michel building, where we were living at the time.
Distressed by Pablo’s constant womanising, one day I received some relief from one of his lawyers, who went up to La Catedral and later met with me to sign a few documents. While we were having coffee, he told me that he’d talked to Pablo about male infidelity. He summed up my husband’s attitude in a single statement: “All men cheat but in the end, the only things that matter are your wife and children. Everything else is money. And you can use money to buy whatever you want.” That may have been what Pablo thought but he did just the opposite.
At La Catedral he returned to his old predilection for beauty queens, who visited in droves during the year he was there. On several occasions groups of women arrived to satisfy the base impulses of my husband and his confederates who were incarcerated with him. Once, a truck concealing no fewer than 12 beautiful women was stopped at a military checkpoint, the last one before reaching the prison.
There, the officer on duty filled out a form with the vehicle information, such as the license plate, the driver’s name, and the type of cargo it was carrying. Needless to say, he was writing down made-up information because in fact the hidden compartment was full of eager young women who were after a bit of adventure and a lot of money. The soldier circled the truck several times and suddenly stopped, looked at the back of the vehicle and shouted, “Do me a favour and at least wear less perfume next time, goddammit!”
A bad beginning makes a bad ending, and the La Catedral adventure lasted only a year. My husband squandered that opportunity to rehabilitate himself and repay his debt to society. His actions there were so extreme that in the end he was forced to flee after he got on the government’s nerves for the last time and they ordered that he be transferred to a military base.
Pablo escaped on July 22, 1992 and that day marked the start of the final countdown. He found himself without money, without men, without the ability to move around.
He even gave up his womanising. In other words, Pablo was forced to become faithful to me because of his enemies.
All he had left were his wife and his two children and we never abandoned him.
The big question that many people still ask is why I stayed when I found out about all these affairs, why didn’t I leave? First, because of my love for my husband. Pablo really was the love of my life. Second, because of my unconditional love for my children. And third, because I’m not sure I was ever really there.
By this I am referring to how much real time I spent with Pablo and how much time I spent on the run or in hiding.
My husband was very busy waging a war that demanded a great deal of physical, economic and mental effort, and which he always kept me away from.
And the time he had left over was taken up with the countless stories I’ve just told.
What, then, was the space we occupied as a couple?
All the women who passed through my husband’s life left a mark on our story. What might have been a tragedy back then, with the passage of time and in the solitude of my exile, seems faintly comical today.
These days I often feel that rather than lashing out at them, I should be grateful to those women for entertaining him ... That gave me the space to focus on being a mother, on raising and educating our children and, most importantly, on saving their lives.