How Pablo Escobar's son atoned for the sins of his father

Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar was gunned down in 1993. In an exclusive interview, his son tells Uki Goñi why he had to seek reconciliation with the children of Pablo's victims

Juan Escobar was a teenager when he first challenged his father, the most notorious and brutal drug lord in Colombia's history. "I confronted him about the deaths attributed to him on the TV news," he recalls now. "He started calling me 'my 14-year-old pacifist son'. But no one could stop my father. Not all of Colombia, together with the help of the CIA. So what could the son of Pablo Escobar do?"

Nearly two decades later, Pablo Escobar is long dead, gunned down in 1993 on a rooftop in Medellín, home of the drug cartel that made him one of the most feared men in Latin America. His son now lives in Buenos Aires and has legally changed his name to Sebastián Marroquín. But the murders and horrors of the past have never ceased to haunt him. And in an act of immense emotional courage, the 32-year-old Marroquín has decided to revisit them, searching for a kind of forgiveness and a form of expiation.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Marroquín has revealed the motivation behind an extraordinary new documentary, entitled Los Pecados de mi Padre (The Sins of my Father), which culminates in an attempt to make his peace with the sons of two prominent Colombian politicians, murdered at the behest of his father.

"A great deal of young people want to live the life of Pablo Escobar," he said, "but if they knew what that really meant nobody would dare do that."

Rodrigo Lara, a former Colombian minister of justice, and Luis Galán, a charismatic presidential candidate, had both dared to take on Escobar at the height of his power, publicly opposing the drug baron's ambitions of becoming president of Colombia during the 1980s. Their bravery cost them their lives.

At the time, Escobar was making billions of dollars as his cartel pumped a never-ending supply of cocaine into the United States and ordering the assassinations of hundreds of opponents. The Medellín drug cartel had cornered 80% of the world cocaine market. In 1989, Escobar was rated the seventh-richest man in the world by Forbes magazine. "My father called the shots in Colombia," said Marroquín. "He was running the country."

Lara was shot by Escobar's henchmen in 1984, soon after setting fire to $1.2bn-worth of seized cocaine; Galán was killed while campaigning in 1989.

"How do you write to the sons of families that your own father hurt so much?" said Marroquín. "How do you start a conversation?"

It was remarkable in itself that he had come to the point of asking such a question. For years after his father's death, Marroquín refused to look back.

His last memory before leaving Colombia at the age of 16 is of sitting in an armoured car for his father's funeral. It was as close as he could get to his grave without tempting sharpshooters. Soon afterwards, Marroquín abandoned Colombia with his mother, sister and teenage sweetheart María, to whom he is still married.

"I was called to a meeting with enemies of my father," he said, "and told I would be allowed to live on two conditions: that I leave Colombia permanently and that I promised never to get involved in drug trafficking."

The family finally settled in Argentina after entering a witness protection programme and changing their names. Pablo became Sebastián. "It's my real name now," he said. "Even my wife calls me Sebastián."

Marroquín's mother went into property; he became an architect. "Nobody realised I was the son of Pablo Escobar and I never told anyone."

Immersed in a new identity, Marroquín was left only with bizarre, private and often disturbing memories of a childhood lived in the shadow of a father who terrified almost everyone he met.

"I was never scared of him," said Marroquín. "The only thing that scared me was that he never felt any fear in any situation." Despite the family's wealth, young Escobar had few friends. "At school, I had a bodyguard outside the classroom, next to me in recess or even when I went to the bathroom. My friends were these bodyguards."

Life included normal childhood experiences, such as visits to Disneyworld or a tourist trip to see the White House, but also baroque excess, such as the private zoo at their giant Napoles estate.

"Father picked out animals to buy from National Geographic magazine. It was my backyard, a 3,500-hectare backyard with elephants and giraffes. But the other parents at school were too terrified to let my classmates come to visit me."

Then there were the murders, reported regularly on the national news, that compelled the teenage "pacifist" son to speak out.

The letter Marroquín eventually wrote to the sons of Galán and Lara astonished the recipients. "That very brave letter took us completely by surprise," says Juan Galán, now a Colombian senator himself. "He's searching for peace for himself and for those around him, in contrast with his father, who sowed violence and death."

For Marroquín, writing had become a psychological necessity as the documentary project for The Sins of my Father took shape. According to the documentary's maker, Nicolás Entel: "At first I planned to make a documentary on the life of Escobar, but I quickly realised that it would be much more interesting to bring the son of Escobar together with his father's victims."

After reading Marroquín's letter, Rodrigo Lara, the son of the murdered minister of justice, boarded a plane to Buenos Aires to meet him. "The impossible became possible," said Entel.

Both Lara and Marroquín had once vowed to avenge the death of their fathers. "I planned in my head at the age of eight how I would shoot the men who had killed my father," he said. "Violence is inherited, hatred is inherited in Colombia."

But the meeting with Marroquín unexpectedly revealed what the two men had in common. In The Sins of My Father, Marroquín says to Lara, as they sit uneasily on a garden bench under shady trees: "It's very hard to separate these facts from our names. This involves our loved ones, our families, the terrible death of your father, but in the end we are all orphans."

The meeting ends in a guarded hug as Lara replies: "We can't keep feeding this circle of anger or we'll never get out."

To meet the sons of Galán, Marroquín had to return to Colombia for the first time in 15 years. In the heart of Bogotá, as Marroquín and the three sons of the dead man confronted each other and the dreadful facts of the past, he told them: "I am here to ask for forgiveness and look into the eyes of each of you."

One of the Galán brothers said: "Emotionally, it's not easy to talk to someone who is not guilty, but who is still the son of the man who killed our fathers." But then he added: "We are all the victims of drug trafficking. We have nothing to forgive you, because you are not Pablo Escobar."

For Juan Pablo Escobar, now Sebastián Marroquín, the moment was a breakthrough: "I felt the greatest freedom and joy and it lifted the greatest weight off me," he told the Observer. Finally, the son of Pablo Escobar is free to face the future.

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