ESCOBAR'S HOME TO BECOME PRISON AND THEMEPARK
spectre
Drug Lord Escobar's Bloody Hideaway Gets Revamp as Theme Park
Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine the real estate ad: ``Dead drug lord's
ranch, nestled on 2,000-hectares of prime Colombian cattle country,
with 5,000-foot airstrip, 1,000-seat bull ring, five life-sized
dinosaur sculptures, Bonnie and Clyde's bullet- ridden car, 18 wild
hippos. Additional development possible.''
The Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's lavish weekend getaway before
he was gunned down 13 years ago on the roof of a three-story safe house
in Medellin as he tried to escape from a special police task force.
Since then, the Spanish-style Napoles has been ransacked and left in
ruins by treasure hunters seeking millions of dollars worth of cocaine
loot that many believe is buried on the property. The ranch served as
one of the headquarters for Escobar's $20 billion drug business.
The Colombian government, which seized Napoles from Escobar's exiled
wife and children, will begin breaking up the property into smaller
lots next month. Part of the ranch is intended for a prison housing
1,200 inmates, and there are plans for an anti-crime museum and theme
park. Tourists are expected.
``We want to return the property to its golden age and use the name of
Pablo Escobar to attract people to it,'' said Luis Francisco Sanchez,
who heads the Puerto Triunfo municipality's plans to develop Napoles,
about 200 miles from Bogota. Escobar bought the property for $63
million. Construction on the prison may begin as soon as September,
Sanchez said.
Occasional cars already turn off the highway from Medellin to Bogota
and pass through the entrance gate to Napoles, eager to check out where
Colombia's most notorious citizen lived. At the entrance arch there
used to be a small plane -- since stolen -- that Escobar claimed he
used to make his first drug run.
Trees Through the Floor
The sprawling, L-shaped villa sits at the end of several kilometers of
potholed dirt road, within stone walls topped with barbed wire. The
white, two-story house, once ``El Patron's'' luxury playground, is now
gutted and its walls are crumbling. Floors have been dug into and
ceramic-covered walls smashed apart. Visitors use the house as a
bathroom, perhaps to tell friends they have been to the toilet at Pablo
Escobar's.
The bedroom, which overlooks the murky, slime-covered swimming pool,
looks like the hanging gardens of Babylon as trees curl through the
windows and up through a gaping hole in the floor. The kitchen has
become a favorite of souvenir hunters who pry gaudy green and yellow
tiles from where Escobar's staff once prepared food for murderous
guests at drug-fueled parties. Sanchez hopes to attract enough outside
investment to rebuild the house.
Airline Bomber
Escobar, a plump man with longish hair and moustache, started out as a
petty thief, later taking advantage of a growing appetite in the U.S.
for cocaine. Credited with blowing an Avianca airliner out of the sky,
killing 110 onboard, and orchestrating an attack on Colombia's Supreme
Court that left 11 justices dead, Escobar terrorized Colombia with bomb
attacks and thousands of assassinations.
At the height of his drug dealing in the 1980s, Escobar and his
associates provided more than half of the cocaine entering the U.S.,
according to Mark Bowden, author of ``Killing Pablo,'' a blow-by-blow
account of the joint U.S.-Colombian hunt for Escobar (Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2001).
Part of the tourist attraction at Napoles would be Escobar's collection
of vintage Ford and Porsche cars. One is thought to have been used by
notorious gangsters Bonnie and Clyde and now stands rusted and burned
out in a massive garage, after revenge by a rival drug cartel. But the
biggest attractions for tourists, other than to fantasize about power
and riches in the home of the world's Public Enemy No. 1, are the
hippos.
Hippo Collection
Back in the 1980s, Escobar imported elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses,
zebras and two hippos from Africa to graze and wallow at his many
manmade lakes. While most of the animals have since died or been
transferred to zoos, the hippos, which can grow to 4,000 pounds, have
multiplied to 18.
``They are certainly an attraction, but a potentially dangerous one, if
their numbers outgrow the property,'' Sanchez said. ``We will keep a
few of them, but the rest will have to go to zoos, locally and
internationally.''
Martha Cecilia Ocampo, head veterinarian at Parque Zoologico Santa Fe,
near Medellin, is worried that the hippos, which kill more people in
Africa each year than any other wild animal, have outgrown their
habitat. Her park already houses many of Escobar's animals, including
two hippos.
``This is a time bomb,'' Ocampo said. ``If the authorities don't do
something to rehouse these hippos soon, they will make it to the
nearest river, and then people will die. Catching them is extremely
difficult.''
Party House
A short walk from Escobar's house is his party area, complete with
Roman columns, where beauty queens and strippers once mingled with
assassins and friendly politicians. Now it's obscured by weeds and the
encroaching woodland. He also had a Western-style saloon, currently
boarded up, with the doors hanging off their hinges.
The stables, which could house as many as 12 horses, is now home to
families displaced by Colombia's four-decade war with guerrillas. A
dozen or so families live on Escobar's land.
``We just beg the government to let us stay here and not send us back
home,'' said Bellavida Perea Gomez, 44, who fled the western province
of Choco a year ago and lives with her daughter and two grandchildren
in the stables. Her other daughter was killed by guerrillas.
Among the government's plans is to allow displaced and demobilized
paramilitary fighters to develop parts of the land into small farms,
Sanchez said. Maracuya fruits, lemons, plantain and corn will be
cultivated.
Bull Ring
At the bull ring, the only aggressive creatures now are the hundreds of
thousands of wasps that cling to hives in the interior of the arena,
where his matadors changed into their costumes and bulls waited to be
turned loose. One can imagine Escobar and his lieutenants deciding the
fate of some poor victim in the ring like a Roman emperor.
Here the Puerto Triunfo government plans to develop a commercial
agricultural show ring for cattle, Sanchez said.
On the dirt road that leads to the main buildings, visitors pass by
Escobar's Jurassic park, where he built statues of five prehistoric
animals, including a T-Rex and a wooly mammoth. As in the main house,
the plaster sculptures have been bashed open with sledge hammers,
revealing their metal cages inside, as scavengers searched for hidden
money. The government plans to restore the sculptures as a tourist
attraction, Sanchez said.
Overlooking the ranch were wooden towers where sentries could scan the
horizon and alert Escobar to uninvited guests or aircraft that landed
at his international-size runway.
Escobar, once listed by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh-richest
man, bought old 727s and stripped out their seats to transport cocaine.
The runway, which can be seen from Escobar's house, now will be used
for international tourists to land directly at Napoles, Sanchez said.
-
(Helen Murphy is a reporter for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are her own.)
To contact the reporter on this story:
Helen Murphy in Bogota at hmur...@bloomberg.net.
---
http://www.colombialink.com/01_INDEX/index_personajes/narcotrafico/escobar_gaviria_pablo_ing.html
---
http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2005/pablito.html
Lunch at Pablito's : The Ranch of Pablo Escobar
by Mariana Martinez / May 26, 2005
"Give it time, little sister, give me a chance, I'll make you come."
God! It was good to be back in Latin America again, where men know how
to treat a lady.
Kicking him in the balls wasn't a good response. I was in the back
seat, and he was the driver, and I couldn't see myself walking alone in
an area where guerrillas hang low to recuperate on mama's home cookin'
and want the same thing only maybe they don't ask as charrrmingly as
the driver does. I smiled, a half-smile, a half-snear, a smear, and my
American boyfriend who spoke no Spanish hummed and looked out the
window, unable to follow our line of conversation. He told me later
that night that he thought we were talking about Pancho Villa. Honey, I
said, tapping him on the arm, Pancho Villa is Mexican, but he said that
he had seen it written that Pablo Escobar had a fetish for his get-up.
Shall I say it all again? Among the first memories I have of the world
outside of Tijuana and San Diego, the first I knew that a world outside
of those sister cities existed, was in the stories of Pablo Escobar's
"liberation war" against the Colombian government in the 1990s. The
war, and Pablo, were mocked. What kind of a man sells drugs to feed the
poor?
A very strange man, you could answer. And you would be correct, and
this is a cardinal point at which all enemies and friends of Pablito
meet. Pablo Escobar was a very strange man. Yes, he liked to dress like
Pancho Villa. Yes, once snorted his own product and watched Patton for
three days straight. "All fame is fleeting," are George C. Scott's
final words in Patton. I wonder what Pablito must have thought of that,
what deep significance he saw in it, behind his mountain of cocaine,
beneath his mountain of dollar bills, on top of his mountain of kitsch
at his ranch, Hacienda Napoles.
Which was where we were going. Eleven years after Pablito lit his last
candle for the poor and his devout old grannie lit her first candle for
Jesus to have mercy on his soul, hiring a car for an afternoon spread
on Pablo Escobar's old estate is something every tourist in the Andes
wants to do. There's no velvet ropes but there are giant concrete
dinosaurs. Hacienda Napoles is Colombia's Graceland.
JURASSIC RANCH
Hacienda Napoles is not a town itself, but you have to call it by its
name because no one knows where Puerto Triunfo is. You get warmer with
Medellín, warmer with River Magdalena, red hot when you say "Pablo
Escobar's ranch." He had more than one, because $3 billion is a lot of
money to spend when you're as bored as Pablo was. Three billion? Si.
And that was only his profit.
The ride to Hacienda Napoles is long, especially when your driver is
angling with his mirror to get a better look at the sweat pasting your
dress to your breasts. But eventually you get there, and he agrees to
wait, because your American boyfriend will be easier to murder at dusk,
when the mean peasant dogs howl and men in this part of Antioquía are
obliged to get romantically shit-faced. There's an airplane over the
entrence, the first airplane Pablo hired to ship his nose candy to el
norte. Because the ranch is so huge, we didn't see it. Just walk in the
general direction of the giant Brontosaurus, you can't miss the ranch.
The dinosaurs and some hippos are all that's left intact from Pablo's
days. Everything else is in ruins. So ruined and broken-down, it looks
like the hacienda has been abandoned for more than just ten years. It's
like the giant ants and the earthquakes and the floods and banana
speculators tore the ranch asunder in the early twentieth century.
The government of Colombia has many ideas of what to do here. The last
president, the one that took down Pablito, he was in the pocket of the
Cali cartel. It's well known now that the two of them worked together,
the state and the Medellín cartel's rival in Cali, to bring Pablito
down. Ernesto Samper was that kind of chum to the guys in Cali.
Samper wanted to give Napoles to the people (the Cali cartel had their
own ranches). Out on the edges live some families I thought were
squatters but are the refugees who resettled here under his
government's plan for Napoles.
The new president, Alvaro Uribe, used to be mayor of Medallín, and a
senator. Pablo killed any politician who didn't graciously accept his
bribes. He was a poet, Pablito, like the other Pablo. He called it
plata o plomo, silver or lead, baby, money or a bullet. Uribe was
gracious. He supported Pablito's Medellín sin Tuqurios housing
developments, the "Medellin without slums" like the one Pablo lived in
as a car thief and a tombstone robber. Everyone knows about Alvaro
Uribe's soft spot for Pablo. Uribe is touchy about a dead man, not a
living cartel, like Samper was, so out of kindness they don't mention
it.
LOOTED PARADISE
Pablo built his hacienda in 1979 and he added to it over the years.
Back then he was just hitting the big time, evolving, shedding his
partners like a snake. He built his empire of coca from the ground up.
He could give pointers to Horatio Alger's heroes. Actually, there is
something very American about Pablo. The rags-to-riches heart-throbbing
song of the Andes and the Capone trip of the mad gangster giving to the
poor is as American as bombing a poor brown country with a lot of oil.
So American is what he did with his bootlegging bounty: Escobar
captured his id in staggeringly ugly plaster and concrete.
The halls of the main ranch building are off-limits. The locals tore
out the drywall rooting for hidden treasures. The creatures of the
wilderness took over from there. Not far from the main building is
Pablo's bullring, with a thin ledge where the man himself and his
honored guests could watch the greatest bull-fighters in the world
tease and mindfuck big beasts brought in on a ship from "Air Escobar."
The ring is now a wild jungle of weeds seven and eight feet high sunken
below the splintered wood of the riser.
His garage was also looted. Wrecked classic cars like I've only seen in
Orange County and Cuba are torn to pieces. Even the steering wheels are
gone. One of these big wrecks belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. At least
that's what Pablo was told as he opened his billfold and unwrapped a
few large bills. The chassis of one has a jagged ridge of bullet holes.
The Bonnie and Clyde car? For Pablo Escobar, this could be any of his
vehicles.
Nearby is a fallen statue of an open palm holding a copy of Bruce
Wayne's batmobile. A child wearing rubber thongs was balancing
carefully on a large piece of stone, a sentinel, and whistling he
called out three or four of his friends. They crawled out from under
the weeds, sometimes between the thick stalks, trampling tiny paths
with their feet that no one else could follow.
"Do you live around here?" my boyfiend asked, in English, uselessly.
I repeated the question in Spanish. They live on the property. It was
domingo, they said, it was Sunday, that was important to them. After
some questioning I learned there is a man, or many men, who chase them
out of here. There used to be relatives of Escobar who claimed this
property in the courts, they hired many men, armed men, to preserve
these stones and this splintered wood, all that is left of Pablito's
huge mansion, and they would chase the children away and threaten
families that settled too far from the edges of Hacienda Napoles. The
families here aren't the same ones that looted the property and walked
off with big smiles and worthless pieces of drywall, they said, they
were all from far away, driven here by the guerrilla war.
The new men, the guardia, are with the government. The governor or
President Uribe wants to make a big museum of Hacienda Napoles, they
want to make the people like us come here in organized groups, many
more of us pushing each other in the back to get a look at what
America's appetite for a super-aggressive high in the 1980s could buy.
They chase the children out now, after some of their tools were stolen.
We walked out along Pablo's stream, looking for some of the hippos that
have become famous, but we didn't find them. The hippos are the last of
the open-air zoo that Pablito once had, brought here from Africa on Air
Escobar with giraffes, elephants, tigers, gizelles. All of the animals
except the hippos were captured and put into a proper zoo.
Under the Brontosaurus we stopped to have lunch. There were fierce,
vicious ants on the ground, I swear they were like a military brigade
out to get into our sacks. The boy drank from his Coke and lowered his
can as two big red beasties chewed on his lip.
Overhead a plane was rumbling. American? or some new drug lord, a less
ostentatious and strange Pablo Escobar? The Americans are very involved
here now, outsourcing their military aid to a collection of peculiar
American multinationals. They cut right through Napoles. Pablo had one
rule: he grew no drugs on his ranch. The refugees with their small
plots of poppies and coca don't have Pablito's puritanism.