Hacienda Napoles was once the playground of the world’s most notorious drug lord, a bacchanalian expression of criminal wealth and power, but today it stands as a monument to his extinction.
Pablo Escobar used this 1,500-hectare ranch in central Colombia in the 1980s to host wild parties and strike business deals, as well as to house his collection of exotic animals — and fake, life-size dinosaurs.
Colombian authorities hunted down and killed the billionaire narco-trafficker in 1993 and now the hacienda embodies his downfall. The mansion is gutted, the swimming pools are empty and the site has been turned into a heritage park and zoo. Tourists flock here to gawk at the ruins of one man’s hubris.
An exhibition of photographs, culminating in Escobar’s bloodied, chubby corpse sprawled on a Medellin rooftop, is titled Triumph of the State. A museum narrative tells how Colombia overthrew the drug lord and was reborn with “new values.”
In a surreal touch, speakers hidden in tree stumps fill the air with dinosaur moans and roars. The message is clear: Escobar and his kind are gone.
“That’s all history now. I’m actually more interested in seeing the animals than Escobar’s old stuff,” said Eduardo Torres, 22, a tourist, while feeding carrots to a hippo.
Recent events, however, suggest Escobar’s legacy is far from extinct. A new generation of narco-traffickers has emerged and energetically applied his strategy of corrupting politicians and security forces to smooth cocaine’s passage overseas.
“After the death of Pablo Escobar we were told that the days of the big capos were over. That was clearly a lie,” said Gustavo Duncan, a political analyst and researcher into the social and political impact of drug trafficking in Colombia.
A host of investigations is under way into politicians’ links with the lucrative trade, a corrupt web that reportedly reaches senior government ranks.
This month a US congressional report concluded that nearly US$5 billion in aid to Bogota, a central plank in Washington’s “war on drugs,” had failed in its goal of halving illegal narcotic production in Colombia. Coca cultivation rose by 15 percent and cocaine production rose by 4 percent from 2000 to 2006. The South American nation remained the source of 90 percent of cocaine in the US.
“I think it’s very, very important that a US agency has now said that the US drug war has failed in Colombia,” Adam Isacson, of the Centre for International Policy, a Washington-based thinktank, told the Associated Press.
Escobar’s heirs have learned from his mistake in openly challenging the state. Whereas Escobar flaunted his wealth and intimidated opponents with car bombs, massacres and high-profile assassinations, his successors are lower-profile.
Cocaine barons such as Daniel Rendon (known as Don Mario) and Daniel Barrera (El Loco) account for much if not most of the 600 tonnes shipped annually, a scale that matches the heyday of Medellin’s most infamous son.
The capacity to move that volume “can only exist where there is high-level corruption,”
said Duncan.
The evidence is mounting. In September, in a huge embarrassment to the government, Medellin’s top prosecutor, Guillermo Valencia Cossio, was arrested on charges of colluding with Don Mario. Valencia happened to be the brother of the justice minister.
Earlier this month President Alvaro Uribe, under pressure to crack down, questioned the army’s lack of progress against El Loco’s organization. “I ask is the army capable of capturing [him] or if it is protecting him.”
The scandals have cast a shadow over Colombia’s success in taming the violence that once made its cities synonymous with mayhem. Urban regeneration projects have transformed slums and won international plaudits. The turnaround is expressed in a tourism campaign slogan: “The only risk is that you’ll stay.”
Medellin, Escobar’s former fiefdom, is supposed to be the Renaissance jewel: a safe city with an impressive new cable-car system and daring architecture. “My God, things are so much quieter now. It’s a lovely place to live,” said Sonia Vargas, 34, who sells snacks in a once-notorious hillside slum.
But analysts said the violence subsided in recent years largely because a cocaine baron, Diego Murillo, won undisputed control through government-linked paramilitary groups.
Murillo was extradited to the US in May, leaving a vacuum which his rival, Don Mario, has tried to fill, triggering a renewed wave of violence. By September murders were up 35.5 percent to 735 from the same period last year, according to the mayor’s office. Rattled, the authorities have launched a media campaign with a slogan which sounds like a plea: “Violence will not return to my city.”
The city retains a sneaking regard for the one-time car thief who rose to became a charismatic, if psychotic, billionaire. It is not forgotten that Escobar built houses for the poor and distributed Christmas toys.
Taxi drivers display stickers with the familiar, chubby features and most people refer to him as Pablo. Flower-sellers do brisk business on the anniversary of his death, Dec. 2, when crowds visit the grave.
Out at Hacienda Napoles, his rural retreat, nostalgia is blossoming. At the entrance, Escobar used to display, on a pedestal, the single-engine Piper Cub plane that flew his first cocaine shipments. It disappeared long ago but earlier this month a replica took its place.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS