How Pablo Escobar's son atoned for the sins of his father

Juan Escobar was a teenager when he first challenged his father, the most notorious and brutal drug lord in Colombia's history. "I confronted him about the deaths attributed to him on the TV news," he recalls now. "He started calling me 'my 14-year-old pacifist son'. But no one could stop my father. Not all of Colombia, together with the help of the CIA. So what could the son of Pablo Escobar do?"

Nearly two decades later, Pablo Escobar is long dead, gunned down in 1993 on a rooftop in Medellín, home of the drug cartel that made him one of the most feared men in Latin America. His son now lives in Buenos Aires and has legally changed his name to Sebastián Marroquín. But the murders and horrors of the past have never ceased to haunt him. And in an act of immense emotional courage, the 32-year-old Marroquín has decided to revisit them, searching for a kind of forgiveness and a form of expiation.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Marroquín has revealed the motivation behind an extraordinary new documentary, entitled Los Pecados de mi Padre (The Sins of my Father), which culminates in an attempt to make his peace with the sons of two prominent Colombian politicians, murdered at the behest of his father.

"A great deal of young people want to live the life of Pablo Escobar," he said, "but if they knew what that really meant nobody would dare do that."

Rodrigo Lara, a former Colombian minister of justice, and Luis Galán, a charismatic presidential candidate, had both dared to take on Escobar at the height of his power, publicly opposing the drug baron's ambitions of becoming president of Colombia during the 1980s. Their bravery cost them their lives.
 
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