Photography reunited after a few years two men who met in high school. One managed to cherish the most beautiful moments, the most intimate, family, of the other with his camera and lenses. It was “El Chino” and Pablo Escobar himself.

“El Chino”… That’s what everyone calls Édgar Jiménez Mendoza, the man whose talent made him the trusted photographer of the Colombian drug trafficker.

Mendoza and Pablo Escobar, the former head of the Medellín Cartel, met in high school when they were just 13 years old. After studying in the same classroom for three years, Mendoza did not hear from him for 15 years, Anadolu Agency reports.

“El Chino” remembers Escobar as an “average student”. He says Pablo “lost a year and went to a different school, so we lost touch,” he says.

They met again in 1980. A mutual friend took “El Chino” to the Hacienda Nápoles, the famously luxurious and controversial property of the dreaded capo.

Pablo greeted me with great happiness, very effusively and asked me what I did, what I did

“El Chino” replied that he was a photographer and Pablo Escobar told him that he took some pictures at the Naples Zoo.

“He hired me. That’s when I started being personal photographer from Pablo”, he emphasizes.

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Friendship and admiration for Pablo Escobar

From friendship to admiration there are invisible boundaries. El Chino, consulted on the capo most wanted by authorities in the 1980s and early 1990s, went so far as to say that “Pablo’s difference from other drug traffickers is based on the fact that he is at least first was the most powerful man in that industry. Second, according to Forbes magazine, Pablo was one of the richest men in the world in the early 1980s, and third, he was the only one to declare war on a government that had never been seen before in history.

The photographer was close to Pablo for nine years, as he called him with the confidence that friendship gives.

Pablo was always very formal with me, we met to chat and listen to music.

He says he last played Pablo Escobar on his son’s birthday in 1989.

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The most kept secrets

The drug trafficker died violently on December 2, 1993.

Before the death of his friend, “El Chino” remembers the feelings of his relatives: “Pablo’s family says that Pablo killed himself, and that’s what I believe, because in many conversations Pablo said that he would not let himself be caught alive. This is the version of Roberto Escobar, his son and mine.”

In 2023 it will be 30 years since Escobar died and a book, rather a photobook, was published and launched about “El Chino”.

It is, says Infobae, a publication of one of the most important image reporters in Colombia.

The photo book bears Title “The Chinese. The Life of Pablo Escobar’s Personal Photographer” and on the cover he can be seen half reclining, relaxed, on an elephant’s trunk in that famous Hacienda Nápoles.

Alfonso Buitrago, a Colombian journalist, is the author of this photo book. Explain that it is structured in five chapters.

The publication is 300 pages and has 100 photos selected by “El Chino”, emphasizes the communicator and writer.

Almost the whole book is about unraveling that legend because 30 years later that ghost is still there, I think a big part of that book is built up with the images of El Chino.

The photographer “preached so much into the day-to-day life of the drug trade that he earned the full trust of Escobar, who even named him as one of the coordinators of his 1982 campaign for Congress.”

The making of the book was motivated by a chronicle by the famous journalist Jon Lee Anderson, who had access to the files as a reporter for The New Yorker during one of his visits to Medellín.

What Anderson saw “added to everything he researched, he later wrote in a chronicle titled Beyond Pablo Escobar.”

Buitrago says: “I think the story of El Chino helps explain how drug trafficking and the war on drugs took hold on the local economy, politics and culture, initially giving our society a kind of comfortable numbness. effect of cocaine consumption, which added to the splendor of Medellín’s trade in the 1970s and 1980s.

Then it caused a violent hangover with tens of thousands dead. And the myth of Escobar continues to attract current generations.