“He did a lot of good things for us,” said Ms Gaviria. The neighbourhood is today called Barrio Pablo Escobar. Irene Gaviria, 88, thanks the fallen drug lord for giving her a decent roof over her head – one of the thousands of colourful houses he built for the destitute people who lived at the Moravia garbage dump. He was a complex character, capable of loving and hating with the same strength.” “Even if he did a lot of harm to Colombia. “Pablo Escobar was a god,” said 28-year-old Jorge Londono. People come from across the country and even overseas to visit his grave. But he retains his esteem for “the boss.”Įvery year in Medellin, Escobar’s admirers celebrate the anniversary of his birth and death – Decemand December 2, 1993. Today, his close-cropped hair going white, he says little remains of his younger self. Popeye got his nickname from an early stint as a sailor and his sharply protruding chin – which he has since had plastic surgery to reduce. Little by little, I changed my way of thinking and acting.” “Every day, I made a list of all the nasty things I said to the guards. ![]() “I’m a professional killer, not a psychopath who kills people because he can’t help it,” he said.įor eight years, he and his psychologist “worked on my violence,” he said. He went into therapy while he was in prison. He was released last year on parole, nearly seven years early. Popeye for his part was sentenced to 30 years in a maximum security prison. We hugged and I left him, alone,” he said.Įscobar was killed in a rooftop shootout with police in Medellin the following year. Popeye quit Escobar’s outfit one morning in July 1992, knowing he would be arrested. But the problem with war is that there are innocents, there are pregnant women who fall,” he said with a sigh. The Medellin Cartel against the Cali Cartel, against the government, against the Americans. I didn’t make a little hash mark every time I killed somebody,” he said, seated on a bench in front of Escobar’s austere tomb in the Itagui cemetery perched above Medellin. He estimates he killed “at least 250 people, maybe 300,” and ordered the killing of some 3,000 others. Popeye, who turned 53 recently, is unabashed by his crimes. Simple as that, this cattle farmer’s son from the small village of Yarumal was employed by the Medellin Cartel. “He came up to talk to me and asked me to come work for him. Escobar invited her to his house one night, and Popeye went along. He met the feared kingpin while working as a bodyguard for a Colombian beauty queen. Popeye was Escobar’s chief “sicario”, or hitman, during the bloodiest period of the Medellin Cartel’s reign in the 1980s. “He had an incredible magnetism,” he said in an interview in Medellin, the city from which Escobar ran a massive cocaine trafficking operation that made him the world’s seventh-richest man. But he was my friend,” said Popeye, whose real name is Jhon Jairo Velasquez. “Pablo Escobar Gaviria was a murderer, a terrorist, a drug trafficker, a kidnapper and an extortionist. ![]() ![]() He parted ways with Escobar’s blood-stained Medellin Cartel in 1992, and, after serving a 23-year prison sentence, says he is trying hard to be a new man.īut this self-confessed killer of hundreds of people still harbours fond memories of the man who took him aside three decades ago and invited him into a world of glitz, intrigue, violence and wealth he could only have dreamed of.
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