Sao Paulo, May 4 (Inditop.com/EFE) The son of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar said that from the incalculable fortune of his father, the only thing he inherited was a watch that he keeps out of “affection”.
“My dad wasn’t very good at accounts, at numbers, I don’t think he knew how many millions he had. When we left the country after his death, the government kept everything. It’s all in the hands of the authorities and not of the victims as it should be,” Sebastian Marroquin said in an interview with Brazil’s Globonews television.
He said that his father’s fortune, estimated at the time by some business publications at $10 billion, financed the cartels’ battle against the Colombian government.
“He was just one person paying the costs of a civil war against the government machine. Financing violence has a very high cost,” said Marroquin, who assumed his new name after leaving Colombia with his mother and his sister.
“The name of Juan Pablo Escobar doesn’t bother me, but the name Sebastian Marroquin allowed me to get ahead as a professional, to leave the past behind and start a new life,” he said.
Brazilian movie theaters will premiere May 14 “Pecados de Mi Padre” (Sins of My Father), the documentary about Escobar that shows the meeting between his son and the offspring of two of the best known victims of the drug trafficker: Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan and former Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.
“My apology is sincere and a contribution to peace in Colombia. One example of that was to show myself before the cameras, which put my life at risk at the hands of my dad’s old enemies,” Marroquin said.
The film, directed by Argentina’s Nicolas Entel, portrays Escobar as seen by his son, who lives in Buenos Aires and works as an architect, a professional career that has suffered at times from letting clients know who his father was.
“I’ve lost a lot of business because of that, but it’s my duty to tell people I’m working for exactly who I am and that I have nothing to do with my father’s past,” he said.
Escobar was killed in December 1993 on the roof of a house in Medellin when police were able to find his hideout after intercepting Pablo’s telephone call to his son.
Minutes after the death of the Medellin cartel kingpin, the young man then still known as Juan Pablo Escobar said on a radio station that he would take revenge and kill everyone guilty of his father’s death.
“Afterwards, when I calmed down, I thought about what I had told the country and retracted my statement. If I had continued seeking revenge I would have ended up dead just like him,” Marroquin said.
He also said that when his father was a Colombian congressman he carried out several beneficent campaigns with Brazilian doctors who operated on children with harelip in the shantytowns of Medellin.
“They were doctors who regarded my dad as a politician, a charitable businessman. I’m sure they had no idea he was involved in drug trafficking,” he said.
