While in Colombia researching an idea for a photographic project called Narcotecture, I found a bag of photographs on Pablo Escobar’s private prison. It set me on a journey for the next 3 years searching for visual material and meeting people who knew Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar was ‘the richest and most violent gangster in history’, the head of the Medellin Cartel, which was responsible for supplying 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine during the 1980s. In an attempt to avoid extradition to the USA, he declared war on the Colombian state and thousands died as a result. For this brief web version I have extended the visual intro to the book.
Paris Review Text
A few years ago, during a visit to Colombia, I wanted to photograph a prison, and I wound up at Valledupar, a state-of-the-art facility, designed and paid for by the United States. During my visit I met the prison’s most notorious inmate, a man known by his alias, Popeye, who had spent much of his working life as the “head of security” for Pablo Escobar, the godfather of the Medellin cocaine smuggling cartel. Popeye was held responsible for at least a hundred and fifty murders. I found him reading Homer’s Iliad in the prison’s high-security wing. Popeye was a personable hitman, who told vivid stories of his years in the employ of Escobar, who had killed half of the country’s top judges, stormed the Supreme Court to destroy evidence, bombed the national intelligence headquarters and one of the leading newspapers, and blown a commercial airliner out of the sky. In 1989, when Escobar said, “Death to the police in the city,” Popeye enlisted subcontractors for a volume of assassinations that he could not personally handle: “It was Col$1million [US $2500] for a dead policeman, $2 million for a dead corporal, $3 million for a sergeant, $4 million for a lieutenant, $5 million for a captain, $10 million for a major, $50 million for a colonel and $100 million for a general,” he said, and added, “Pablo Escobar always thought big.”
I wanted to know more. My next project in Colombia was to photograph “narcotecture”—the influence of drug money on the country’s architecture. I made a tour of properties reportedly built by drug smugglers in Medellin—lavish fincas, extravagant nightclubs, blocks of flats with swimming pools on their balconies. By comparison to their legend, these buildings were invariably dull, even shabby, and none more so than the last on my list, Edificio Monaco, which had been Escobar’s residence until his Cali Cartel enemies bombed it. The place looked more like a concrete office block or a six-story bunker than a home—ugly and characterless. I set up my tripod in the street outside, and was soon apprehended by security officers who confiscated my camera and escorted me off to see “the boss.”
It turned out that the building was now the local headquarters of the Fiscalia, Colombia’s public prosecution service, and I was in breach of security rules. When I told the boss, Manuel Dario Aristizabal, that I was taking pictures because this was once Pablo Escobar’s house, he proudly informed me that his office used to be Escobar’s bedroom and that the beat-up leather sofa I was sitting on was originally Escobar’s sofa. Then he said, “I have a bag of Pablo Escobar photographs—would you like to see them?”
The photographs were from Escobar’s police files, images recording the scene at his private prison in Medellin after his escape. Like the room and the furniture in which I was sitting with Aristizabal, the pictures didn’t fit the image of underworld opulence I’d heard and read about. Beside the photographs of guns and sex toys in his hideaways, found images of Escobar playing with his family, of his gang playing soccer or drinking in the prison “disco,” and of his Mickey Mouse slippers suggested a more ordinary man, at once more complex and less glamorously evil than I’d imagined him. Sitting in Escobar’s former bedroom, somewhere between his myth and his reality, it occurred to me to explore his legacy by reconstructing Pablo Escobar’s story in photographs.
Most Colombians would rather bury this painful chapter of their history than revive it. Escobar’s dominance of the global cocaine trade and his reputation as a mass murderer tarnished the image of the country. During the two and a half years that I worked on this project with the journalist Rainbow Nelson, we met resistance wherever we went. And, although the principal characters seemed eager to talk (we were able to interview more than a hundred key people at length about their memories of Escobar), it was difficult to find images that corresponded to their stories. While Escobar’s self-regard and greed and violence made him loom large in the public eye—he even went into politics at one point, and ran for congress—he spent much of his life in hiding, and he was a master at eliminating his traces as he went along. So the visual record is composed only of fragments, and the collections of photographs and documents that remain have the quality of a forensic dossier.