What did Pablo Escobar’s notebook contain?

Pablo Escobar Gaviria was one of the most feared and wealthy criminals in Colombia. He was born on December 1, 1949 in Rionegro, the fruit of the marriage between a farm administrator and a rural teacher.

The rionegrero worked from his childhood in various trades, washing cars or helping in the markets; He was also a cattle rancher, later becoming a hired thug and vehicle thief.

His criminal life began with the purchase of stolen items and small-scale smuggling, until he entered the marijuana trade and, later, the cocaine trade.

In alliance with other drug traffickers, he founded the Medellín Cartel around 1976, an organization that, at its peak in the 1980s, monopolized the cocaine business, controlling more than 80% of the world’s production of this illicit substance.

El Patron _which in 1982 came to occupy a seat as Representative to the Chamber in the National Congress of Colombia_, is credited with the death of the Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara, the director of the newspaper The viewer Guillermo Cano, and the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán.

In addition, the notorious criminal would add hundreds more deaths from bombs placed on a commercial plane and at the headquarters of the DAS secret service in Bogotá. According to the Colombia con Memoria foundation, Escobar’s victims could number 50,000.

The drug trafficker came to accumulate a fortune of $ 30,000 million in cash. He was held in the known jail Cathedral, from where he easily escaped; After a search that lasted several months, he was shot while trying to flee on a roof of an exclusive sector of Medellín at the age of 44, on December 2, 1993.

After his death, the dismantling of the Medellín Cartel began and the capture of his collaborators, including John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, alias Popeye, lieutenant and chief of hitmen for El Patron.

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El Patron’s notebook

Escobar generally used to carry some notebooks that he reviewed and wrote about regularly, as a journal. It was Popeye who many years later revealed, in a video on the YouTube platform, what the narco supposedly wrote in these notebooks.

Velásquez assured that his boss wrote in these notebooks the names of the people he was going to kill, thus ruling out that the drug trafficker managed his wealth in these notes, since he had accountants who were in charge of said work.

“Those notebooks were only to write the names of the people he was going to kill. He did not charge money or anything, that was handled by other people. Whoever was in that notebook was a dead man, “Popeye said. He added that the only ones who survived despite having been in these notebooks were former President Belisario Betancur and one of the men who kidnapped Pablo Escobar’s father.

The leader of the Medellín Cartel also wrote down which hit man had commissioned each murder and how much he had paid for the heads of each of these people.

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From hitman to youtuber

Popeye He died in February 2020 in Bogotá, at the age of 57, as a result of cancer, but while he was alive, he gave different interviews to media around the world, where he took the opportunity to tell some stories of his criminal life together with the leader of the Medellin Cartel.

Born in the town of Yarumal (northwest) in 1962 to a merchant father, Popeye claimed to have grown up in a “violent environment”, “fascinated by the smell of blood.” According to his memoirs, he took courses in the Navy and the Police before becoming one of those close to Escobar.

In 1992, at the age of 30, he left the kingpin to submit to justice. He spent 23 years in prison. Among his confessions is that of having supplied the The weapon with which they killed the liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989.

He also claimed to have shot at the attorney Carlos Hoyos, assassinated in 1988, and participated in the kidnapping of the conservative Andrés Pastrana, who was ultimately elected president (1998-2002).

When he served his sentence, Velásquez set out to lead an austere life focused on exchanging his “anti-values ​​for values,” but vanity and his relapse into crime overcame him before cancer.

Made youtuber -with more than a million subscribers on his channel-, he actively militated against the peace agreement with the now dissolved FARC guerrilla and furiously denounced left-wing leaders, whom he came to threaten publicly.

In 2017, he was discovered at the party of a gangster requested for extradition by the United States and the following year he returned to prison accused of “extortion and conspiracy to commit a crime.” Death found him away from the spotlight. (I)