Loving Pablo,
Hating Escobar
 

by Virginia Vallejo
 
The true story told by his lover
 

                Pablo Escobar's biography written by his lover: gangster, billionaire, enemy, monster, myth.

 


                                                                             
    Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar 2009
 

                                                       
                                                             American Edition, 2007.                                                       European Edition, 2008                                                            


Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar will not be released until 2009. 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.
 

   
         


                                                         Bestselling books in the United States of America

                  


"When 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."

(From the Introduction of Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, 2009)

   



Virginia, Father Lopera and Pablo Escobar, Jet-Set



   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 and his former lover became a social pariah: she was threatened and scorned by the media and allies of presidential families linked to Escobar and his rivals, the Rodríguez-Orejuela brothers. Journalists in the payroll of both drug cartels were used by them to publicly warn her that her face would be cut with razors if she ever opened her mouth. 
 

   

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, the witness of events that changed the History of Colombia and the key reason why Escobar went to war with Gilberto Rodríguez, head of the rival Cali Cartel. The author describes the contents of her book as “What the two movies - one based on Escobar brother’s book, the other sponsored by his wife and son - will never tell you.”  

  
In 1993, eight thousand men, the Navy Seals and the Delta Force were needed to hunt down Escobar and help a specially-trained squad of the Colombian Police to end six years of narcoterrorism.

   After Escobar's death Virginia Vallejo was blacklisted and her career in the media ended. In 1995, she began her activity in the multilevel marketing industry and in 1997 became the first Colombian Diamond.


                             The US Government saves Virginia Vallejo's life

  
On July 2006, Virginia Vallejo offered her testimony against Alberto Santofimio - Escobar's presidential candidate and his link to the political class - to the Colombian Attorney General. The former Justice Minister was on trial for conspiracy in the murder

        

of another presidential candidate, senator Luis Carlos Galan, committed by Escobar in 1989. One of the only two witnesses in the case has been killed and the other was serving life. The case was closed two days later, before she could take the stand. Immediately, she asked the American Embassy to save her life.  

   On July 18th, Virginia Vallejo was brought to Miami as as potential witness in the trial of the Cali Cartel bosses. Her
departure made front-page news in 42 newspapers worldwide. Several weeks later, the Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers pleaded guilty without going to trial and their 2.1 billion frozen fortune was split between Colombia and the USA. In October 2007, Alberto Santofimio was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

   

Virginia Vallejo, Cosmopolitan cover 1984.

   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 book became 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. Again, the story made front page news in worldwide media, including the New York Times and Time magazine. PEN and Human Rights Watch filed complaints to the Colombian Government. Hours of interviews on television, including CNN, followed. In January 2008, after several prominent journalists presented evidence that confirmed Virginia Vallejo’s claims, the Colombian Anti Corruption Czar Rodrigo Lara, son of the Minister of Justice murdered by Escobar in 1984, resigned his post.

   Virginia Vallejo filed for political asylum in the United States and she now lives in Miami. Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar became the #1 bestseller in Spanish in the American market and in May 2008 the European edition was launched in Madrid.

   On July 11th 2008, in the Colombian Consulate in Miami, Virginia Vallejo testified during five hours in the case of the Palace of Justice siege. She confirmed that Escobar had financed the coup, committed by the M-19 guerrilla group.
  

   

   While the rebels stole his criminal records from the Palace before the Supreme Court could decide on his extradition to the United States, their leaders would denounce the murder of hundreds of former rebels who had deposed their arms in compliance with President Betancur's "Peace Process". Vallejo described a meeting of her former lover with rebel commander Ivan Marino Ospina in which she had been present, two weeks before the latter's death. She accused the military of burning the building to disappear 1800 files on human rights violations, the murder of the Supreme Court Justices to leave no witnesses of the carnage and the rape, torture, murder and forced disappearance of all the innocent people detained after the siege, whose photographs had been anonymously sent to her with a threatening letter several months later.

   In October and November 2008, Virginia Vallejo 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 the Colombian Vice President and Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, in charge of the distribution of the five billion dollars in American aid to Colombia. To attack the opposition party Polo Democratico - where former M-19 leaders are now senators - El Tiempo and the military had adulterated the contents and turned over a completely different version of her story to a television channel. The members of Military Intelligence accused of human rights violations in Vallejo's book and in 600 other testimonies compiled throughout the past 23 years have been recently freed after paying a US $4,000 dollar fine.

   
         
 

              
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                                                                      Virginia in CNN en Español, Nov. 2007

          
                      
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