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Published: February 2nd 2015
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Hacienda Nápoles, Part 1.
We are just back from a visit to Hacienda Nápoles. Before Dec. 2, 1993 the most famous person in Medellín was not Botero, but a criminal named Pablo Escobar. He was born into a simple family near Medellín in 1949. By 1990 he was the wealthiest criminal in history, "the King of Cocaine", worth $30 billion according to Forbes, and before long the world's most wanted fugitive. The U.S. assembled and sent to Colombia a special forces team that worked with Colombian police to assasinate him. He revealed his location on a visit to Medellín, when he called his son on an iPhone. Thanks to ( ! ) American surveillance technology, he was dead a few minutes later on a red-tiled rooftop, just as in the Botero painting. See photo 62 for an actual picture of the scene. He was 44 years old when he died. His mug shot at age 42 is photo 63.
Hacienda Nápoles is the name Escobar gave to his strongly fortified estate about 200 miles from Medellín, where he lived unarrested for many years on end, thanks to his policy of "plata o plomo" ("silver or
lead"; i.e., "take my silver or I'll give you lead"). The estate is huge; it includes a landing strip for large aircraft. Over the gate he mounted the old Piper Cub that gave him his start delivering cocaine to the U.S. (photo 64). He flew it at just a few hundred feet; literally "under the radar" of the DEA in south Florida. Eventually, it was retired and made into an icon of the estate after Escobar graduated to much larger aircraft, and even submarines, for the delivery of cocaine to the insatiable market in the U.S. On English Google, you find almost nothing under "Hacienda Nápoles, but the Spanish Google has a quite lurid account, reminiscent of Tiberius or Nero, translated here with the help of Carol, my favorite Spanish teacher:
"Rumors about what happened inside this property are many and varied; including torture, murder, the settling of scores, and orgies in which beautiful teen-age girls raced in nude comptitions, or climbed trees with an audience of gangsters and politicians below. It is known that Carlos Lehder ended a love triangle with Escobar and a beautiful "escort" by killing the woman with a burst of lead from
his Colt semi-automatic R-15. On another occasion Escobar discovered a waiter stealing silverware, and ordered him thrown into a pool with hands and feet tied, where he drowned."
However, it cannot be denied that Escobar loved children and animals. He built a swimming pool with a helicopter landing pad in its center. His children stood on the landing bars of the helicopter, the pilot went up a few feet and the children jumped off into the pool. It started small, but the boy says he was eventually droopping hundreds of feet. He loved old cars, particularly those of famous outlaws. The Bonnie and Clyde car was his prize; it can still be seen as a rusted ruin (photo 65, scroll on down).
The main house of the hacienda was also quite extraordinary, but it was totally looted and destroyed after Escobar's death. It was one of the two main things that drew us to Hacienda Nápoles, but unfortunately it has recently been closed to visitors, as it is being converted into museum of Escobar horrors by the State of Columbia, who now owns the whole hacienda, and runs it as a "theme park".
Next time: The menagerie and the hippo explosion- now 40 of them !
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