All in White: The Life and Death of Pablo Escobar

For three years, British photographer James Mollison documented the legacy of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, who left thousands of victims and admirers in Colombia.

Most Colombians view Pablo Escobar as a criminal who plunged the country into chaos for a decade, but in the poor neighborhoods of his native Medellin, he is known as Robin Hood. The drug lord donated millions of dollars earned from shipping cocaine to the United States to public housing, churches and soccer fields.

Many Colombians remember free tours of the zoo at Escobar's Hacienda Napoles estate, where elephants, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinos, hippos and exotic birds were kept. The area built in Medellin with the cocaine king's money is still called the Pablo Escobar quarter: the walls of the houses here are decorated with portraits of the drug lord and the inscription "Saint Pablo", and his grave is visited by thousands of people, despite the authorities' fight against the cult of the former "master" of the city.

Escobar, the son of a farmer and a school teacher, began his criminal career by stealing tombstones from a Medellin cemetery. At the age of twenty, he was already the head of a gang that stole cars. When cocaine began to displace marijuana on the global market in the 1970s, Escobar turned to drugs: he started as a supplier, reselling Colombian cocaine to dealers in the United States, but soon he controlled the entire chain. He opened his first lab in Medellin, and then a whole network of factories appeared in tropical forests across the country.

In 1977, Escobar founded the Medellin cocaine cartel, and a year later, his partner Carlos Lehder bought an island in the Bahamas, where passenger flights from Colombia landed, loaded with cocaine, which was then shipped by private jet to Georgia and Florida. Two submarines were also used for smuggling.

In a short time, the cartel managed to capture about 80% of the cocaine market in the United States and practically monopolized drug trafficking to Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Spain. During its heyday, Escobar's cartel earned about 60 million dollars a day, and Forbes magazine estimated the drug lord's personal fortune at three billion dollars in 1989.

In 1982, Escobar was elected as a substitute member of the Colombian Congress, granted parliamentary immunity, and represented the country at the inauguration of Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González. But the following year, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonia publicly accused Escobar of drug trafficking and organizing a criminal group: based on the evidence he had collected, the cocaine king was expelled from Congress in January 1984. A few months later, the minister's Mercedes was shot at point-blank range with a machine gun, and Lara Bonia died on the spot.

That same year, Colombian authorities ratified a treaty with the United States on the extradition of drug cartel leaders. In response, the leaders of the Medellin cartel created the Los Extraditables group, which began to carry out intimidation actions: attacks on officials, police officers, and politicians.

In 1976, Escobar married his girlfriend, Maria Victoria Eneo Viejo, and soon they had a son, Juan Pablo, and three years later, a daughter, Manuela. Since 1979, they have lived in the Hacienda Napoles estate, which they bought for $63 million, covering an area of 3,000 hectares.

It is known that, even when he was wanted, the drug lord tried to spend all family holidays and birthdays with his children. In 1993, when members of a rival gang declared a hunt for the cocaine king's relatives, he hid with his family in the mountains and one evening burned two million dollars in a fire so that Manuela would not freeze.

After Escobar's murder, his family fled to Mozambique and then Argentina, where Juan Pablo took the name Sebastian Marroquín. In 2009, he publicly apologized to the children of politicians killed by the Medellín cartel leader, and in 2014, he published a memoir and launched a line of T-shirts featuring his father. Escobar's brother Roberto has also written two books about him, and each of his sisters has written one.

After the US passed a law allowing drug cartel leaders to be extradited, Escobar began sponsoring the militant group MAS (Death to Kidnappers). In addition to an impressive arsenal of weapons, it had its own planes with 30 pilots, and the fighters were trained by American, Israeli and British instructors. In 1989, the Medellin cartel leader offered the Colombian government a deal: he would surrender to the police if the extradition law was repealed.

Having received a refusal, Escobar launched a reign of terror: within a year, the headquarters of the Administrative Department of Security, the country's main intelligence service, as well as the editorial offices of the El Espectador and Vanguardia Liberal newspapers were blown up in Bogotá; a Supreme Court judge, a police colonel, and presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán were killed at the hands of killers.

In 1979, Escobar established the social assistance system "Civic Responsibility in Action", under the auspices of which medical centers for low-income families were founded in Medellin, green areas were created, and sports facilities were built. The drug lord's most famous charity program was the "Medellin without Slums" project, which envisaged the construction of a thousand houses in the poorest district of Moravia.

The city rebuilt the Pablo Escobar Quarter, which is now home to almost 13,000 residents. The program received the blessing of the Catholic Church, and in the slums of Medellin, the drug lord was often seen handing out money to the poor in the company of two priests.

In 1989, the local football club Atletico Nacional, sponsored by Escobar, won the Copa Libertadores, becoming the best team in South America.

In 1991, Escobar surrendered to justice in an agreement with the government; shortly before this, Colombia had adopted a new constitution prohibiting the extradition of its citizens.

The drug lord was placed in a prison he built himself, La Catedral, which had a bar, a soccer field and a jacuzzi. It was completely controlled by the Medellin Cartel.

When a year later Escobar learned of President Cesar Gaviria's impending decision to transfer him to a regular prison, he staged an escape from La Catedral.

In response, the head of state established a special search group under the leadership of Colonel Hugo Martinez, who coordinated efforts with American intelligence agencies. Los Pepes, a group of his drug-trafficking competitors, ultra-right guerrillas, and victims of the Medellin Cartel's reign of terror, also joined the search for Escobar. Over the course of a year, Los Pepes killed more than 300 cartel members and destroyed much of its property.

After fifteen months of searching, on December 2, 1993, a special task force intercepted a call from Escobar to his son and established his location. That same day, he was shot to death on the roof of a house in Medellin.