Pablo Escobar

Pablo Escobar ran the Medellin cartel, was for a time among the richest men alive, and waged a bombing campaign against the Colombian state to avoid extradition. He began stealing cars and headstones in Medellin and moved into cocaine in the mid-1970s, at the moment American demand was rising and the route through the Caribbean was open. At its height the cartel was moving perhaps fifteen tons a month and the organisation's own accounts allowed for losing large sums to rats and damp. He built housing for the poor of Medellin, paid for football pitches and a zoo, and was elected an alternate member of Congress in 1982, which is the part that mattered: the money bought a constituency as well as police. When extradition to the United States became the central political question he answered with terror - the justice minister Lara Bonilla, the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, an Avianca airliner with 107 people aboard, a car bomb at the security headquarters in Bogota. Estimates of the dead run into the thousands. He surrendered in 1991 to a prison he had built himself, walked out of it in 1992, and was hunted for sixteen months by a police unit working with American intelligence and with the rival Los Pepes. He was shot on a rooftop in Medellin the day after his forty-fourth birthday. His brother Roberto, the cartel's accountant, survived a letter bomb in prison and now runs a museum. The hippopotamuses he imported for his estate escaped into the Magdalena river and have bred into the largest invasive population of them outside Africa, which the Colombian government is still trying to manage. Medellin has spent thirty years trying to be known for something else.

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