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 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. 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.
