2024-07-24 03:01:00
In 1986, the average age of those killed in violent incidents in Medellín, Colombia, was between 35 and 45 years. In 1987, it dropped to the 25 to 35 range. In 1988, it was between 20 and 25. In 1989, 70 percent of those who died were between 14 and 21 years old. 1991 marked another sinister record: 7 thousand murders in one year. Behind these figures there was a name that few dared to mention, at least not in a critical way.
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria.
It is difficult to exaggerate the stature of Don Pablo, the Pattern, as the most famous drug trafficker on the planet. At its peak, the Medellin Cartel provided the United States with 60 percent from their cocaine use, and some studies claim that the cocaine came from Antioquia 80 percent of world production of the white powder that made Escobar the most powerful man in Colombia. It is not surprising, then, that there are dozens of audiovisual works, documentaries or fiction, that they have him as the protagonist or a necessary character to explain the plot of the eighties.
And yet Escobar’s 500 days manages to catch the attention. Made by Caracol Television, the documentary that Netflix has just uploaded to its platform, it tries – and succeeds – to go beyond the known and well-trodden history to the point of telenovela (come on, what was it The patron of evil (but a soap opera?) to offer other points of view. It does so by focusing on the decline of the empire: between July 22, 1992 and December 2, 1993, there were, in fact, 498 days, But punctiliousness cannot make one disdain a powerful title.
Why the importance of these dates? The first one marks one of many cinematic episodes in Escobar’s life, the escape from the “prison” of Envigado; the second, of course, the moment when he received three shots on a tiled roof in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín, one day after his 44th birthday. The quotation marks for the prison where his end began are entirely justified, and the documentary takes care to reflect this: Cathedral It was the place where Escobar entered of his own free will, after forcing the government of Cesar Gaviria to accept a series of conditions that show to what extent The drug trafficker had more power than the entire political, judicial and security system. The most important was to obtain a law that prevented extradition to the United States (Escobar and several of his leaders called themselves “The Extraditables”)but the testimonies also give an account of how Don Pablo managed to get the State to grant him a fortaleza to protect him from his own enemies.
From there, the boss continued to run the business and ordering the murder of former allies such as Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada. Faced with the scandal over the conditions of detention, the Vice Minister of Justice Eduardo Mendoza and the director of prisons Hernando Navas appeared in La Catedral and were taken hostage; in the scenes that parade in the first part of The 500 days, Colonel César de la Cruz, in charge of the operation that was to free the officials and transfer Escobar to a common prison, recounts the shooting and the inexplicable escape, ten men who managed to evade the siege of 180 troops. Escobar’s own voice tells in a radio interview that “I escaped when the Army came shooting; I only call because I am interested in not deceiving people, that they do not involve people who have nothing to do with it,” and then, in an almost comedic move, deny categorically one of the versions. “That is false, they are bringing out fantasies of wigs and women, My position as a man does not allow me to disguise myself as a woman,” dice.
The documentary abounds in first-hand testimonies, who in some cases still today cannot hide their amazement at the story. One of them is Javier Peña, DEA agent who had his successful fictional portrait in Narcos through Pedro Pascal: it is he who states without hesitation, just before the opening credits, that “when I saw the delivery and the helicopter took off, I said to myself “Pablo Escobar won and we lost.” Later, he will describe, bewildered, the comforts of La Catedral, and in 1992 he is seen pointing to a photo of a party where the bartender is… one of the prison guards.
The thing is Escobar’s 500 days does not avoid a thorny issue, that which the American writer knew so well how to portray Don Winslow in The power of the dog and its continuations, The Cartel y Border: the futility of the “war on drugs,” how porous the divisions between law enforcers and lawbreakers become. The documentary directed by Simon Hernandez, with a script written jointly with the journalist Jorge Cardona Alzate (editor-in-chief of The viewer, The key newspaper in the Escobar era) digs into these uncomfortable nuances. It does not hide the dark profile of a key character in the hunt: Marta Ruiz, a member of the Truth Commission, relates that “the colonel Danilo Gonzalez He is a man who, because of his virtues, was led by his superiors to do the most difficult task, which was dealing with Los Pepes, thinking like them, working with them. And then there was no way to return him to the Police institution, and he ended up becoming a nefarious character for the police and the Colombian State. I asked a very high official why he was never removed from the institution or prosecuted, knowing that I was working with the mafia. And the answer was that Danilo served them and also the Police.”
The Pepes, Another key to the final defeat of the Boss: in that same 1992 Fidel Castaño, Pablo’s former partner, allied himself with the Cali Cartel to form the group Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, that blurred all legal boundaries by working closely with the Search Block of the Colombian Police and Army. The testimonies of former officials and uniformed officers, cartel lawyers such as Gustavo Salazar Pineda, former drug traffickers such as Ramón Zapata, give an account of this association as the only way to locate and liquidate Escobar. Because it was no longer a matter of “arresting” him, much less with the storm of terror in the form of car bombs launched from the underground, and having involved in the search guys like “Don Berna”, Diego Murillo Bejarano, sworn enemy of Don Pablo since the murder of Galeano and Moncada. Don Berna, so functional for the Bloque, would also end up in prison.
The documentary also focuses on the final scene and the role of Los Pepes, who were part of the operation that surrounded Los Olivos when Escobar revealed his whereabouts by calling his son. The photos from that December 2 show the smiling uniformed men around Escobar’s body, but there are There are many doubts about the real perpetrator of the shooting. While the director of the National Police Antonio Gómez Padilla talks about the impeccable intelligence work of the Block, the investigator Luis Fernando Quijano He states that “Pablo was not killed by that man who appears in the photo, Hugo Aguilar, nor by the Search Block: Los Pepes kill him. There are serious indications that the person who killed him was Semilla, Diego Murillo Bejarano’s brother. If he was the one who killed him and then let the Bloque take the photo, it means that they were even embarrassed to admit that They had to use the illegal-criminal to stop Pablo Escobar.”
“There is a duty to remember and memory is a right at any time,” Cardona Alzate said. Page 12. “Thirty years ago, Pablo Escobar fell on the roof of a house in Medellín and everyone declared victory. The good, the bad and the ugly. A major piece of the plot fell, but the war continued on other fronts of power. To tell it is to pause to relive it and “to remember the victims.”
This is reflected in one of the great syntheses of The 500 days of Pablo Escobar, which ends up being a direct relative. In a television interview on the same night of December 2, her sister Marina Escobar says it bluntly: “Do not believe that because Pablo Escobar was vilely murdered, the violence in Colombia will end. Don’t be fools. Do you think that drug trafficking and narco-terrorism will end with the death of Pablo Escobar? The killers of Cali will continue killing. If not us, they will continue killing many people. Stand on the banks of the Cauca River and watch the corpses come down.
In 1994, Colombian President Ernesto Samper had to give explanations about the alleged contributions from the Cali Cartel to his campaign. At least until mid-1995, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers enjoyed the reign that they had held The boss. but that’s another story.
The Block and the Lemon
The figure of Pablo Escobar appears in countless musical works of all styles, in titles such as “Death Foretold” by The Tigers of the North, the explicit “Pablo Escobar” of Jorge Santacruz, “The tough guys from Colombia” Gerardo Ortiz, “The Boss” of grindcore Witchcraft, “Silver or lead” of the also very heavy ones Soulfly from the Brazilian Max Cavalera or the invectives of the Mexican Paquita of the neighborhood, who calls him “Damn cockroach that infects what you bite” in “Rata de dos patas”. Less than three years after the death of the capo, a portrait in the form of a song by Patricio Rey and his Ricotta Rolls.
Little Light, seventh album by Los Redondos (eighth if you count Wolf on the loose y Tied lamb as two independent albums), includes the marchosa “They’re killing me, Lemon!” direct allusion to that December 2nd in Los Olivos de Medellín. Not only because of the phrase “The Block is coming through the roofs, again” but by the mention of the last bodyguard faithful to the Boss, who fell minutes before his boss: the “Lemon” of the title was Alvaro of Jesus Agudelo, hitman in charge of buying soldiers for Escobar’s protection in the Cathedral of Envigado. “They gave it to me, Limón / They bleed through the tiles like you, Limón”, the Indian sings, in an almost cinematic manner.