The
love story of Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo
Pablo
Escobar's biography written by his lover: gangster, billionaire, enemy,
monster, myth.
Loving
Pablo, Hating Escobar 2010
Spanish, American Edition, 2007. Spanish, European
Edition, 2008
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar
will not be released until 2010. It was published in Spanish as Amando a
Pablo, Odiando a Escobar and since November 2007 has been on the list
of the top 10 bestsellers in the Hispanic market of the United States and
every Latin American country where it has been released.
It's complicated! Carolyn Castano, Walter Maciel Gallery, Los
Angeles, April - May 2009
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar 2010
Excerpt from the Introduction. Copyright Virginia Vallejo 2009
“As Jerry McMillan, Attaché of the Department of Justice, stretches
out his hand and says that I am now under the protection of the
Federal Government of the United States of America, I say a silent
prayer for him, Ambassador William Wood and every single one of
their children. Unbeknownst to them, the USA has just saved me from
death under torture at the hands of one dozen butchers.
But—unbeknownst to me—I am the American Government’s secret weapon
in a 2.1 billion dollar criminal case.”
******************
“When the DEA
officers finally leave my room and I’m left there with that ton of
luggage and that piercing pain as my only company, I prepare myself
for something worse than a prospective appendicitis. I am perfectly
conscious that, if returned to Colombia, I will not be the first
person to be killed or disappeared after offering to cooperate with
the Department of Justice. I can visualize my arrival in Bogotá…
those large SUVs with their black windows… waiting for me… sent by
President Uribe, former Director of the Civil Aviation Agency and my lover’s
errand boy from
1980 to 1982 … or by Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel
Santos, whose generals murder thousands of poor teenagers to
claim rewards and present them to the Pentagon as “evidence”
of their success in the war against rebels… or by
Military Intelligence, the B-2 that provided official badges
to the eighteen assassins of the
presidential candidate with eighty-five bodyguards, Luis
Carlos Galan, and then
murdered the other three who did not have bodyguards because
they were leftist and poor… or by the Black Eagles, Uribe’s
fanatic paramilitary squads who send all opposition journalists to
exile or to a grave… or the Director of the Colombian Secret Service
DAS and the Inspector General who cater to narco-presidents Alfonso Lopez and
Ernesto Samper … or by henchmen of Alberto Santofimio’s, with blood
ties to both the Rodriguez-Orejuela of the Cali cartel and
the Lopez of Semana… Yes, upon my arrival someone wearing an
official badge provided by the B-2, the DAS or the F-2 will exhibit
an “order of capture” for God knows what
and once inside that van my destiny will be
torture and the bottom of a bathtub filled with sulfuric
acid and quicklime, like those innocent workers of the
cafeteria of the Palace of Justice detained and disappeared
by the military after the 1985 siege, whose bodies, torn to pieces and washed in
blood, still haunt my nightmares on days of despair and
join me in prayers to the God of my Tears.”
The story
In 1983 Virginia Vallejo was Colombia’s number
one television star. A sophisticated socialite, she had been courted by the country’s
traditional billionaires when she met Pablo Escobar. The
ambitious politician of humble origins, also thirty-three,
introduced the elegant anchor-woman to a world in which never-ending floods of money poured
into his charitable works and the campaign of the Presidential
candidates of his choice, at a time when both Forbes and Fortune
listed him as the seventh richest man in the world.
In Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar the author describes the birth of
the cocaine industry,
a world of unbelievable new wealth,
her former lover’s meteoric rise
and fall and the evolution of one of the most powerful criminal
minds of all times: his strengths and vulnerabilities, his fits
of jealousy and methods of punishment, his addictions and
fantasies, his legendary capacity for corruption and terror and
the links of his trade to dictators, presidents and the
Colombian Army and Secret Service. In the early stages of what
later became a multi-faceted and stormy romantic relationship,
the television journalist who inspired the drug lord's passion
also witnessed the birth of the extreme-right paramilitary
squads, her lover's relationship with extreme-left guerrillas,
his role in historic tragedies like the 1985 Palace of Justice
siege and his capacity to seduce the poorest of the poor,
manipulate the Press and subdue anyone who crossed his path in
what he considered a fight for a nationalistic cause: the
elimination of the Extradition Treaty with the United States of
America.
The joy and happiness of their first years fastly turned into a
story of unending suffering, horror and shame. After Vallejo and
Escobar separated in late 1987, he went into a bloody war with the
Colombian Government and the Cali
Cartel.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar
is the intimate biography of the legendary drug baron and the
only love story ever inspired by him. Besides his wife, Virginia
Vallejo remains the only adult woman in Escobar’s romantic life.
She was also the only prominent one and the witness of key events that
parted in two the History of Colombia.
Pablo Escobar and Virginia
Vallejo campaigning in 1983
The first person to read the
manuscript of Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar was Nobel
prize-winner Gabriel García-Márquez. When Vallejo’s first bookbecame an instant bestseller in every country where it was
launched and the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean presidents praised
it, Colombian President Uribe publicly called Virginia Vallejo
“a liar” and accused a foreign correspondent of being her
ghost-writer. The journalist angrily denied any
cooperation with the author, but in the next two days he received twenty-four death
threats and was forced into exile.
In January 2007, Virginia Vallejo filed for political asylum in the
United States and she now lives in Miami.
Recent Events
On July 11th 2008, Virginia Vallejo testified
during five hours in the Colombian Consulate in Miami on the
reopened case of the Palace of Justice siege. She confirmed that Pablo Escobar had financed
the coup, committed in 1985 by the M-19 rebel group. In October and November 2008,
she described in radio
stations how her reserved testimony to the Colombian Attorney
General's Office had been filtered to El Tiempo, the newspaper
controlled by the family of Colombian Vice President Francisco
Santos and
the Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, Alvaro Uribe's key
officers in the distribution of five billion dollars in American
military aid to
Colombia.
During 18
months Amando a Pablo, odiando a
Escobar became the #1 bestseller in Spanish in the United States
of America. In Colombia, the pirate edition - promoted by
leading newspapers and magazines close to the Goverment - sold
thousands of copies. In Mexico it was forbidden after selling
29,000 units on the first trimester.
In the recent Buenos Aires Book Fair
the book was completely sold out.
All major movie projects on Pablo
Escobar have been apparently cancelled or delayed. Virginia Vallejo-Garcia has received
several offers to take her story to the screen once the updated
version is released in 2010.
To this day, Random House Mexico refuses to pay Virginia Vallejo
any royalties on Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar.
Random House Inc.,
distributor of a book written by Escobar's brother, has tried to
block the
publication of Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, the English
version.
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