Pablo Escobar’s son is asking for forgiveness

By The Associated Press Comments 0
Published: November 9, 2009

BOGOTA — After notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed, the son who many thought would succeed him fled Colombia, assumed a new identity and lived a low-profile life as an architect in Argentina.

Sebastian Marroquin, son of Colombia’s late drug lord Pablo Escobar, poses for a photo Thursday in Buenos Aires. AP PHOTO

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"When you don’t ask forgiveness and cling to hate, you are perpetuating the pain a violent act provokes."
Sebastian Marroquin, son of Pablo Escobar

The former Juan Pablo Escobar, who was 16 when his father was shot to death in 1993, is now trading anonymity for what he calls conscience, asking forgiveness for his father’s reign of terror in the documentary "Sins of My Father,” which opens at film festivals in Argentina on Thursday and Amsterdam on Nov. 19.

In a rare telephone interview last week with The Associated Press, he claimed his father’s fortune is gone and that he wasn’t part of his criminal enterprise.

He said he went public with his apology to the sons of two politicians his father ordered assassinated because of the pain his father wrought as a billionaire drug trafficker.

Escobar led the world’s leading cocaine cartel in the 1980s. He fought extradition to the United States with a violent campaign at home, ordering bombings — including one that destroyed an airliner four minutes after takeoff, killing all 107 people aboard — and the kidnapping and killing of politicians, judges and journalists who got in his way.

But the son insists he was not involved and his family has been unjustly persecuted, though many wonder what happened to Escobar’s vast wealth — estimated at $3.5 billion by Fortune magazine at one point.

"For every 10 doors we knock on, 11 get slammed in our faces,” said Sebastian Marroquin, 32, whose first and last names were changed for his protection before authorities spirited the family out of Colombia.

Marroquin and his mother were charged but then cleared of money laundering in Argentina after illegally entering the country in 1994. And a former top U.S. anti-drug official for Colombia said authorities had evidence in the early 1990s that Marroquin was preparing to succeed his father.

Marroquin’s claim that he had nothing to do with his father’s crimes is bogus "because there was a lot of evidence up there that the old guy was trying to groom him,” said Joe Toft, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief in Colombia during Escobar’s heyday.

There was never a criminal investigation against Marroquin in Colombia, in part because he was a minor at the time, Francisco Jose Sintura, a former top Colombian prosecutor from the Escobar era, told the AP.

Marroquin, chubby like his father and bearing some resemblance, doesn’t plan to return to Colombia. Instead, he wants to open a door to reconciliation.

"He’s risking the most important thing that he’s had in the last few years, which is nothing more and nothing less than his anonymity,” said Nicolas Entel, the documentary’s Argentine director.

Entel said he and his brother spent about $750,000 making the movie and that Marroquin did not invest any money and has no financial stake in it.

The son of a farmer and a schoolteacher, Pablo Escobar started his criminal life as a teenager stealing tombstones and grew to lead the world’s biggest cocaine-smuggling operation.

He used his drug earnings to buy popularity and win election to Congress. When politicians, judges and police resisted him, he had them killed.

In 1989, he ordered the bombing of the domestic airliner because he thought future President Cesar Gaviria was among the passengers.

At one point he surrendered to authorities, yet maintained his grip on the country from a posh prison he designed. He later escaped from the jail and turned fugitive again.

Escobar was killed by Colombian police on Dec. 2, 1993, when Marroquin was 16. Father and son had carelessly lingered on the phone, allowing authorities to home in on the drug lord. They shot him dead on the roof of a safe house as he tried to flee, pistol in hand.

"When you don’t ask forgiveness and cling to hate, you are perpetuating the pain a violent act provokes,” Marroquin told the AP from Argentina.

Even as he apologized for Escobar’s crimes orchestrated from Colombia’s former drug capital of Medellin, Marroquin also defended him as "not only a terror machine.”

"He was also a father, a great father.”