JUAN PABLO ESCOBAR: “Mi padre, Pablo Escobar, se mató; no lo mataron” | EL BUSCADOR con Julio Leiva

The search for the truth

Juan Pablo, what is your search today?

My search? I would say that my personal search is to be able to make good use of the story I had to live to leave a clear, unequivocal, forceful message to invite the non-repetition of my father's story who I think was a man who showed us all the way that we should not go.

You have a story, a lineage, and at one point also a stigma of being Pablo Escobar's son. And the story was always seen from your father's side. And I think this series makes you see the story from your eyes. How is it to be created by hitmen?

Look, for me it was a personal drama to dare to tell this story. For years I dedicated myself to writing about my father, to make documentaries, and he was the central character of my stories, of my life, of the information I collected, until in the exercise of life, after making the documentary Sin of My stories, of my life, of the information I collected, until in the exercise of life, after doing my father's sin documentary,

I became very friends with the screenwriter and editor, Pablo Farina, and of course, among friends, I already told him these anecdotes with the nannies, this happened to me, that happened to me, obviously there were some to laugh, others to cry, but then I had the opportunity to write a comic, also with Pablo Farina. And there we saw the opportunity to say, OK,

maybe here, in this atmosphere so different from a comic, there is the opportunity for me to start telling the world what it's like to grow up and be born in a world where the worst hitmen in the country are your babysitters. As I was saying, I have great respect for my father's victims and I have never wanted to do anything that offends them, because it is like redoubling that pain, I think it is too much, what they have suffered. And telling this story from a place of responsibility seemed fantastic to me.

And being able to turn it upside down on the big screen is the first time we've managed to do it, and it's been very successful, especially from the message. Pablo Escobar is not the protagonist.

I want to go to the first place that the series takes, which is part of the scenery, the Hacienda Napoles. What was the Hacienda Napoles? I want to go to the first place that the series takes, which is part of the scenery, the Hacienda Napoles. What was the Hacienda Napoles?

The Hacienda Napoles was a place where my father, in some way, was able to begin to materialize his dreams. We had his zoo with 1,200 imported species from all over. It was to get up and see giraffes, zebras, hippos, rhinos, elephants. It was very bizarre. But it was also a place where...

Do you have a favorite animal? The rhinoceros.

Does it have a name?

No, no. Although today my father associates it a lot with the phenomenon of hippos and others, but no, it didn't have a name. I am attracted to that animal animal for its calm and power. With my nannies, we played and bet to see who could climb the back of the rhino, for example.

And there was no lack of the ignorant, or the idiot, or the brave, who did it. So, I swam with hippos, not because I was brave, but because I was ignorant. I imagined that I saw them as the face of a pig, good people, like they don't give the feeling that it's an animal that will open its jaws and eat you. I swam with them as an ignorant, I had them by my side.

Incredibly, and thank God, nothing happened to me. That's why it's hard for me to understand when they say it's the most aggressive animal, because it's not what I saw. And I believe them, it's not that I'm going to debate that. But I grew up in that world, in that farm in Naples, which had about 3,000 hectares. It's like, I usually say, there was nothing left to buy, to have.

That was it. A sentence from a chapter of your book to answer this question. Where is the money?

You have to read my book. But I can answer you, because it is a topic that I dedicated a whole chapter to, to be able to explain this, which is a complex topic, because of of course, everyone believes, and I also wonder, where did all that money go? It turns out that my father, no one kills for pleasure. And my father managed to generate such a great destruction in Colombia. He killed dozens of politicians, journalists, transseuntes,

kidnapped people, changed the constitution of a country, he corrupted senators, constituents, and everything so that things were done at his will. He dictated to the president of the republic how he wanted his decrees to be. Nothing of that happens for free. I mean, it's not just fear that spread my father. He also spread money with his silver or lead policy. And although he was a man who earned 50, 70 million dollars on a weekend, he didn't save.

My father self-defined. He told me one day, he said, I don't care about money. He told me, it sounds very arrogant what I'm going to say, on his part, but he had such confidence to make money that he says, I'm a machine to make money, that's why I don't save, I don't care. I mean, I don't have, my dad didn't save anything.

He wasn't like other mafiosos who say, hey, because diamonds don't rot, dollars do. My dad couldn't even hide them. He had them compromised, he was already spending them. So, just like one day he earned 50 million, the next day he owed 100 million dollars. These are figures that seem like lies, but drug trafficking handles that level of money, that volume. So, terrorism, kidnappings, and all that, no nanny did that out of love for the boss.

Not at all. Everyone asked for money and they asked a lot. Corruption was taken elsewhere. The caskets that fell, the dollars that got rotten, and what was stolen, there it is, my father's money. And on top of that, what we managed to hide, the war with de Cali,

que se va a terminar por las negociaciones de paz, y ahí nos dicen, me dicen a mí, si escondes una sola moneda, te matamos. Llévense todos, señores. Y a esos, con eso no podías jugar. Porque ellos sí, al haber sido socios y amigos de mi padre en

el pasado, ellos sí sabían todo lo que había. to dinero nosotros para tener que cargar como que todavía lo tiene entonces nosotros dijimos ahora que nos o sea nos dejan sin nada y que bueno porque yo en mi segundo libro se los agradezco y les digo gracias por haberme robado todo y la gente dice pero cómo te puedes cómo le puedes dar las gracias a ladrón supuestamente no es que no era mío porque no estaba bien habido y segundo me hicieron un favor enorme al quitarme absolutamente todo fíjate que And second, they did me a huge favor by taking absolutely everything from me. I came here to study industrial design and I entered the Ort Institute.

I didn't have, and this is an incredible thing, I didn't have $220 that was worth the monthly fee for me to study my career. My family sent it to me, they said, I can't believe it, with the millions of dollars I saw, with the fortunes, with the Ferraris, with the hippos, I said, now I don't have to pay $220 to go to school. I mean, I had, and happily, because it was the first time I got on a bus,

and I didn't even know if the driver paid for it, if there was a machine, I didn't know any of those things. But suddenly, seeing you with nothing, really dispossessed. And I said, this is my opportunity to start from scratch. What I have is mine and it is well-existing. And I start from scratch, and this is thanks to my enemies, or my father's, because they were not even mine. They take everything from me.

So there is the money. It is a very long topic to explain, but my father, hating kidnappers, had set up the first business, let's say it was, Muerte a Sequestradores, it was a paramilitary group that was dedicated to killing kidnappers. My father founded it. Then my father ran out of money and began to kidnap people, Colombian businessmen, to take their money. I saw those contradictions. And suddenly my father, of course, the pressure of all the cartels and authorities

made my father leave the drug trafficking business. He couldn't continue, but he had to continue to sustain that structure. And he did it at the brink of kidnapping.

Which was your most expensive toy?

My most expensive toy? My most expensive toy? Well, my father gave it to me, and this is another paradox, it didn't last three days, he gave me a Ferrari Testarossa when I was about 13 or 14 years old. It didn't last long, I could drive it for three days, I didn't go over 60 km per hour. It's like giving a candy to a child, then stealing it and taking it out of his mouth.

You get too excited. Why did it last three days? Because of the war. The war didn't let us enjoy anything. And that's the message that has to prevail for me. Who doesn't want to have a Ferrari, drive it, or enjoy it for a while?

But when you get it badly used, it doesn't want to have a Ferrari, drive it, or enjoy it for a while?

But when you get it in a bad way, it doesn't last. And this life came to ratify us that a bad way is not a good business and it won't last. I lived it in my own flesh, every day of my life. I got used to what we had, boom, flying through the air. It was destroyed, confiscated, burned, stolen. So, yes, it's a good gift, but what for?

There are several characters that fly over your childhood. One is Michael Jackson.

I'm a super mega fan of Michael Jackson, but mega fan.

Was it true that your father wanted to hire him and kidnap him?

Yes, it was true. It was a great disappointment to see how I just wanted to have Michael Jackson in front of me, playing, dancing, doing the moonwalk. And my father, the only thing he was thinking was how he kidnapped this character. He took my idea of inviting him to give us a private concert, and said, this is the opportunity for me to bring him to Carnada and kidnap him. So that was devastating for me because he was my idol.

I mean, I would never have crossed paths with him to invite him to do such harm. But well, my father was a criminal mind and he was always looking for opportunities from the less kind side of life.

There is another character that your father names, with whom there is a myth, that has to do with Maradona, that he admired Maradona. Did you get to know him?

No, no, no. They never met. Obviously, my father was always a football fanatic. He was never a team owner, he never had that much... because there are people who accuse him of being the owner of a certain team.

And I break down those accusations because I say, look, my father didn't have any legal business. For him, legal business was not profitable. So, you can't point out to my father that he owned a legal business because you're wrong. But yes, football was a place of union for us too. Maradona, an idol not only of Argentina, but of all of Latin America and many parts of the world.

It's like you say Argentina and Maradona, and it's exactly the same word. So, he was always someone we admired a lot. There's a picture I've always wanted to take of you, an iconic picture, which is that picture in the White House. Yes. What do you remember from that picture?

Well, besides the picture itself, which is obviously the most widespread and well-known of my father, I remember something worse that happened that day, and that is that my father takes me to the headquarters of the FBI in Washington, D.C. And apart from that, he has the audacity to enter with a fake passport. I mean, to measure, long they were really FBI, to see if they knew, and to go see how those offices were. There were tours to visit the J. Edgar Hoover building.

And we went in, right? And then I feel that he was like doing counter-espionage, because he didn't care about the tour. He wanted to know how they worked. He wanted to present a fake passport to see if they noticed at the entrance.

It was a moment in the planet in which there was not as much stigmatization of the activity of drug trafficking as such. In fact, different terms were used to refer to drug trafficking. It was talked about, it almost seemed a minor crime and I don't want to relativize this, but it was what was lived at the time. They talked about cocaine smuggling. Smuggling at that time was something where taxes were not paid for any merchandise, but it was not as demonized as it is today. So, in some way, that made my dad's path easier to succeed in the drug trafficking business.

The authorities were not so prepared, nor was society. Nobody required you to get on a plane. in the drug trafficking business. The authorities weren't so prepared, nor was the society. Nobody required you to get on a plane. Nobody checked your suitcases. There were no X-rays. That was after it was installed.

So that allowed my father to be very successful in that business.

Another thing that flies over your childhood has to do with art. And I say, your mother, who was the one who invested the most in art, I read that they said she had the most important collection in Latin America in terms of art.

Incredibly, I mean, I started to take love for art because my mother, I think that for her art was also a refuge of culture, of growing, of understanding the different artists of the planet. In my house I've seen Dalí or Rodin, super important people. And art is something fantastic, it ends up saving our lives. Because it is, let's say, the currency of change that my mother uses to negotiate with all the posters salvándonos la vida. Porque es el, digamos, la moneda de cambio que mi madre usa para negociar con todos los carteles y decirles, quédense con todo y perdónenle la vida a

mi hijo, porque la vida mía estaba, no había manera de arreglarla. O sea, yo habiendo cometido el error de haber amenazado a un país, de reaccionar de la manera inapropiada, por más I'm going to donate it in an inappropriate way. Even if I call you 10 minutes later and I regret it, I was already set up that I was going to be the successor, everyone thought that, and art ends up being what she called, well, a painting of Dalí is given,

which in the peace talks, before in the war, my mother was stolen, later in the conversations, it is given as a sign of goodwill, and in the war, they stole it from my mother. Later, in the conversations, they gave it to her as a sign of goodwill. And in the same act, she says, thank you, but I'm going to donate it to you, for peace, so that everything ends here. And so with all the works of art that I had.

So it was something paradoxical, right? Suddenly being in that mansion, which was the Monaco building, surrounded by all these artists, but in absolute solitude. My father shone for his absence. It was something that... They were moments of luxury, of ostentation, of eccentricities. But in the end, you didn't enjoy that.

It was always fear, confinement. As much as you are in a golden prison, it is still a prison.

When did you realize that your father was a criminal?

I was seven years old and he told me, really, in his brutal honesty, he recognizes me, he says, I am a bandit and that is what I do. I was seven years old. A bandit, can you imagine?

That is a man, in my imagination, I imagined a guy who was riding a horse with a gun and a revolver, and he was going to rob banks and he didn't kill anyone. But actually, today that I can look at it in perspective, he was the head of the largest criminal organization of the last century, without a doubt.

In the series there are many moments of a lot of violence that you live with the eyes of a child. I know that people from your own family saw those images and said, that didn't happen. And you said, it happened, I never told anyone.

Yes, it's something that hit me a lot because, incredibly, even my own family, the people closest to my wife, we've been together for 30 years, she had to go through all of this. We took her to see the final cuts, and I was also seeing it for the first time, and at first I was outraged, I said, this didn't happen, how is it possible that they tell something like this about your father? He never exposed you to this kind of thing. Of course, I said it as if it were something she knew.

And I look at her and say, my love, we've been married for 30 years, this did happen, this is something that she had never dared to tell me. And that it's in the series. She found out when it was done. My meetings with the screenwriters and my interventions, she never knew what I was talking about. Is there a particular scene like that,

that you can tell us about, that happened?

Well, I don't know if it's possible, or we're going to ruin it, spoil something, but there's a scene where my father does a terrible thing to a person, and obviously no one would imagine that a father is capable of letting his son see such things.

I discover that in the series. I see that my father is a guy who has no value and that he doesn't care about people's lives at all. And seeing him, listening to him, sending him to kill and saying those things, is something I had never dared to reveal. I was very young when that happened. And it's the adult who looks at that child from the past

and starts remembering those things. That is to say, the violence that I saw as a child is indescribable. And there in the series there is a lot of violence that this child saw, but there is much more. It is very strong that a child sees his father murdered. What kind of trauma does that leave?

Today they asked me if I had gone to the psychologist. I said, just once, and we'll finish talking about other things. I feel that the psychologist said, with this child you can't even talk. He read that. So, for me it has been a great therapy to dare to tell these stories.

Now we colloquially call it cine-therapy. The fact of having written, of having made documentaries, of having gone beyond, of having spoken with the victims of my father, I have spoken with more than 150 direct victims. I've talked to their enemies, reconstructed their story from a place that involves a lot of responsibility.

I've never apologized, nor have I glorified my father's activity, nor do I feel proud of the bandit I had as a father. And I feel that having dared to tell these stories is part of my own healing, of my process. It's like my psychologist telling the world, this is what I lived, this is what my eyes saw. I invite you to get into my shoes for a while and see life from the perspective of a child, how it looked.

From that child, right? I still discover stories of my father, to this day. It's incredible how a man with 44 years of life, who didn't live more than that, could have generated so many stories, so much controversy, and so much horror.

What about everything that was natural to you, you're seeing it as very eccentric, what you lived.

Look, I see my son, he's 13 years old. What I had already lived, after the 13 years my son had lived, I say, thank God for allowing me to let my son live a normal childhood. That he is reaching adolescence, that he is living it, that he goes through that painful step. But I look at my son and I compare them and I can't believe it. At 11 years old, I already had what here they colloquially call a bulo,

an apartment for a single man, for me to go to do my chores, if I had a girlfriend. Everything was allowed there. I had given it to my mom, an apartment. So that I, obviously, she did it for my safety. Instead of me going to look for you in all the hotels in Medellin,

I want you to have a place where you will be alone, where I will never go unless your life is in danger. Never.

For that Latin American who did not understand the term, it was a place, it is said that it was in Argentina,

an apartment to be with girls. Argentina, a place for girls. Exactly, for only sexual activities. And of course, I look at my son now, I was going with my nannies, and there were thousands of things happening. There were orgies.

The life I had to live was very crazy. And I thank God for every day I see my son still making normal transit for the stages that any human being must go through. I skipped adolescence, I had to take care of all my nannies,

my safety, my sister's safety, my mom's safety. I was in another world for me, very different from the one I should have been in.

One fact that always caught my attention was going to school by helicopter.

I didn't want to be late. It happened, we were in the city of Naples, we spent the weekend, and Sunday is the city of Naples, we spent the weekend, and Sunday is the day of the most rest, but it's also the most boring, because you have to pack, you have to go, so suddenly, I said, and if the trip is 20 minutes by helicopter or three and a half hours by car, let's go tomorrow morning, and there, where I landed, there were three football fields in my school and we would get there a couple of times, not always.

Juan, what was your relationship with cocaine? Because I was present all the time. What was your relationship with it like? Did you ever get there or did one of your friends make you try it?

They all offered me, but my father had a fantastic conversation with me about the subject about drugs. I was about 8 or 9 years old, I remember. In the Naples store, at a table this size, he put all the drugs available. And he said to me, son, sit down, today we are going to talk about drugs. He started, this is cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and he starts to make an absolute description,

and so it is composed, and so it is, and this is the damage it does to you. And he tells me, cocaine is a poison. You see, the man who distributed 80% of the cocaine on the planet. And he tells me a phrase that I never forget and that I always share with young people. He tells me, the true brave son is the one who doesn't take drugs. I was left on fire.

And he said, you're going to be surrounded by situations, by people, you're among friends, and they're going to say, try it. And you're a coward if you don't try it, and you're a fool if you don't dare to do it. And he's not going to be your friend because you didn't try it. It doesn't matter. Be importa. Sé valiente, dile que no. Es un veneno, me decía. Y a

mí eso me quedó grabado de una manera increíble, que al día de hoy yo no probé cocaína en toda mi vida. De hecho, la única vez que estuve cerca de la droga así, mi padre me llama de urgencia, estaba en la cárcel de la catedral y me dice, vente para acá, que este es el I was in the prison of the cathedral and I said, come here, this is the only safe place for you, the police want to kidnap you. I found out about their plan. I ran to the prison and I stayed 20 days with my father in his prison, unable to leave.

I went and became another prisoner. It wasn't a prison, it was a five-star hotel, but it wasn't my place. And I got a morphine-like pain in my back, which happens when you can't go to the dentist. And that's when my father, I was dying, and I told the boys, the nannies, to bring a kilo. They put a kilo of cocaine in front of me, and I said,

calm down, but you've always told me that it's a poison that kills, and now you're putting it in front of me. And then he says, no, it's just to get rid of the pain in the jaw, take a little bit and put it exactly in the jaw where it hurts, because today, or tomorrow, I don't know when you'll be able to go to the dentist. I was the only one who did it. I took the pain away from me in 30 seconds. It was a horrible, bitter taste. That was the closest I was to it. Now, how did cocaine associate pain?

An incredible thing.

There is a record of him as the worst criminal of the last century, but at the same time there is a family register of a guy who hugged, who kissed, which for those who come from the generation like yours, it was not common.

It was not possible. Look, it was a moment and even today in Colombia we continue with a very macho society. It has changed and it has diminished. But at that moment, as you say, the worst thing you could do was show affection to your son. Forget about kissing his cheek, that was almost like a violation. A hug, a hand,

distance, authority, that very macho thing, and that he grow up and not cry. My dad was the opposite. No, he wouldn't open the door, he would wait. I would go in where my dad was and he would stop all the meetings, and in front of all that world of men, who is the strongest and whatever, he would hug me and say, wait, now my and all. I hugged him and said,

wait, now my son is here, I love you so much, give me a kiss on the cheek, on the other cheek, give me a hug. He's an extraordinary dad. The terrorist, the drug dealer, is another thing. But as a father, I don't have many complaints about that.

Now, someone who was so violent with the outside, was he never violent with the family?

I'm going to tell you something that I found very curious. My father, in life, I've heard him say bad words once, in all my life that I was with him, until I was 16 years old. My father dies, and at the time I made my first documentary,

someone gave me all the phone calls that the Colombian National Police had made to my father during his entire life as a criminal. Obviously, out of curiosity, I started listening. There were a lot, but many were random. And it's the first time I've heard a lot, but many of them were random. It was the first time I heard my dad insult, threaten, attack.

I met another dad with those recordings. The other, the real one, is the one in those recordings too. I was very surprised because I never saw my dad shout at anyone. I never saw him shout at my mother or be violent with her. And suddenly I met that new world, that other person, who for years hid it from us.

However, he didn't hide being a criminal, but that violent, aggressive part, in bad words, he never brought it home.

Now, there was a double personality, but did you see something with your own eyes that gave you fear of your own father?

Of course, I think it was very evident in the first episode of the series how we showed that it is something that impacts you your life. It's not something that gets erased. And there was another thing that scared my father more, and that was that he didn't feel fear. That was something that I saw that all the dwarves were trembling with fear in front of situations, and my father didn't understand what fear was. He was a man who trusted his fate a lot.

So he put his foot in the gas pedal and every day he said, today is not my day, and he kept going. That was more terrifying, to see a man without fear.

Another myth is that he was offered to pay for Westerners, did that exist?

No, that's a lie. That's part of all the myths that have been built around the character. I asked him because I also heard it. And it seemed to me like, seriously, we have so much money that we can afford to pay the external debt. And he told me, no, someone said it without authorization, then it became a... and I'm not going to go out and clarify it, but that payment was never offered.

What my father did offer, at one point, after the assassination of the Ara Bonilla, was to dismantle 100% of the Colombian drug trafficking business. But the authorities were not interested in that proposal.

Did you want to be president?

Yes, I dreamed of being president.

For what? Look, I thinkaba con ser presidente. ¿Para qué?

Mira, yo creo que hay muchos que sueñan con ser presidente por tener el poder, por tener este dinero, etc. Mi papá ya tenía poder y dinero. Mi papá, creo que ahí no había, no estaba motivado por esa ambición muy personal de dinero y el poder. Creo que a él le faltaba el poder político y le faltaba ese poder que él quería utilizar para ayudar a la gente. personal question of money and power. I think he lacked political power and he lacked that power that he wanted to use to help people. And, I don't mean he was a good guy because he wanted to help people. Just like he killed people, he helped people. One thing doesn't

take away the other. I'm very clear on those issues. But I feel that, and he told me, he had a crazy idea. He told me, me decía, yo voy a poner el narcotráfico al servicio de Colombia. Yo decía, ¿qué estás diciendo? Me dice, pues el dinero que produce el narcotráfico, yo voy a construir los puentes, las escuelas, todo lo que los políticos se roban, lo pago yo, lo voy a hacer yo.

Y quería ser presidente porque soñaba con tener ese poder de decisión para ayudarle And he wanted to be president because he dreamed of having that power of decision to help many more. But it was his worst mistake, wanting to get into politics. A mafia that they didn't even let him participate in.

Why is this the war against the Cali Carder?

Look, as it is told in the series, it is a problem of skirts. Between two boys, one of whom was driving the routes of the Cali Cartel, the other, those of Medellin. For reasons of life, each one is imprisoned in the United States, they meet and meet in the same prison, these two boys fall in love and they promise each other that the one who gets out free,

stays with the routes of the one who is in jail. And the one who got out free from the Cali cartel stayed with all the routes, or most of the routes of the Medellin cartel. My father, obviously, gets upset with this situation, asks for this guy's head, and Cali says no. After my father had sent them all the heads they asked for.

So there they say, well, if you're protecting the one who's stealing my routes, you're against me. And then the first attack and violent act is done by Cali against us, which is to put a bomb car on the door of our house, where a kilometer around all the windows of the city were destroyed.

That's the beginning of drug terrorism in Colombia.

Now, I didn't know this fact that it was the result of a relationship.

It was, of course. And I found out about it. First my father had told me. Then I'm going to visit people, sons of the Cali Cartel. People worked with them to tell it in my books. And the story was like that, a story of skirts between two men.

The first episode that you mentioned, the fruit of that war, is the explosion of the bomb car in Monaco. Tell us, for those who don't know what Monaco is, and what happened, because you were there at the time of the explosion of that car bomb.

Monaco was at that time the most important and most luxurious building in the entire city of Medellín, I think even in Colombia. It was not a very tall building, it was nine floors in total, with a penthouse of 2,000 square meters. Nobody lived in the apartments below, it was exclusively ours for security reasons.

It was never done as a real estate business and suddenly when the war with the Cali cartel begins, the first thing the building was called Monaco and the first thing the cartel does is put a bomb of 700 kilos of dynamite on us and there my father for an hour thought that we had not survived in fact casually we had a car left outside, we managed to escape, and we arrived like this, full of debris and dust from the whole explosion.

Can you tell us, because one thing is to say, a bomb exploded, but another thing is to be in the moment it explodes, and what happens to you when that happens?

Well, it's something incredible, because when I tell this story, I ask people, what is the last thing you see when you go to sleep? Generally, it's the ceiling of your room. Generally. I saw that before I went to sleep, and when I was going to try to wake up,

something wouldn't let me move. It was the ceiling that was pressing me and crushing me, almost without letting me breathe, against the mattress. And I started to feel like I couldn't move. Of course, like a force, it's like a something that keeps you pressed against the mattress. And I started to scream,

Mom, Mom, she was in bed next to me, but she had already managed to get out of the rubble. She had more light to get out of there. I couldn't move, literally. The only thing I could do was turn my head, almost to break my nose against the mattress, to get some air to breathe. And I heard her screaming,

Mom, Mom, help me, please. And she had gone to see what had happened to the girl. And the girl was already carrying her in her arms, and she saw that she was fine, and she went to help me. She raised the roof by herself and saved me. We went down the stairs and it was something impressive.

The stairs are down. I saw a mountain of debris, so big, that I said, there's no way, the stairs are completely covered. There's no hole to pass through. All the debris was thrown over the stairs of the penthouse on the second floor. We were isolated.

The nannies came in to remove debris and as they could, they opened a path. I left the building, we went down nine floors. I was barefoot. This is a miracle. I don't have a scar to show you, not even a scratch. And I show you the photos and they say, no one could have survived this.

It's a miracle. And I didn't cut my feet. I went down between debris, nails, screws, plaster, broken pieces of wood, fragments of ... In my room, where I was sleeping, we found a piece of this size of the chassis of the bomb car. It was torn like a baguette,

like a piece of bread. And I said, how did that piece not cross me, that came up like a projectile, how did it not cross my mom or me?

The most miraculous thing I have experienced is that situation of the Monaco building.

Your father was a criminal mind, just like he did evil. On the one hand, there is also something that is recognized in much of what has been written or what has been told, which is the creativity he has had for that evil. What creative things did you see him do that you said, how did this happen to him?

Look, there is an anecdote that I remember. My father invented a formula to impregnate the fabric, mainly jeans, with cocaine. I don't know how he invented it, or what he diluted the cocaine with, and he put it on jeans,

he put them in the sun, they dried up, he put a substance on them so that they didn't have any smell, detectable by dogs, and so he exported kilos and kilos of cocaine in fictitious brands of jeans. Until, obviously, they discovered it. Years passed, they discovered it, and my father said,

well, I'm going to keep sending jeans. And the nannies look at him and say, but, boss, they already know that you are sending jeans that way, with cocaine. But that intelligence that you ask me about, has to do with that ability he had to predict

what your next move was going to be, and you didn't even know it. And it was like he organized the pieces to make you play in a way that could only have one result. So he keeps sending the same boxes, with the same genes, and of course, the DEA takes everything, confiscates it,

takes it to their offices and they start looking for gene by gene, to see where the drug was, there was not a single gram. And he, in his wisdom, said, surely this is going to happen, they are going to take the boxes, but I'm going to send them so many boxes that they're not going to fit in the offices, no matter how big they are. And then he says, at some point they're going to get tired of having that there,

that it has nothing to do with drugs, and they're going to throw it in the trash. Indeed, that's how it was. They threw the boxes with the that were already impregnated with the drug. So, from his ability and intelligence, unintentionally, he wanted it, but the DEA officers unintentionally ended up helping him transport the drug to the garbage dump in Miami, where they were easily identified by the wolves, and he sent his people there and recovered the impregnated boxes. So, it's not to glorify his criminal activity,

but the former vice president of Colombia, Francisco Santos, said that my father was the Da Vinci of crime. It's not a very happy nickname, but I think it reflects that intelligence that my father had and that he has been using, wasting his talent.

It reminds me a bit of what the storm was, the fact of having to flee and go through clandestinity, the murder, the persecution by the state towards him and his response with the murder of the Minister of Justice, Lara Bonilla, and where you lose contact with your father and you start to be clandestine. You also became clandestine with him.

Many times, and with the nannies all the time, with these murderous nannies who took care of me. They hid me permanently, they took me, protected me, took me out of one place, took me to the other, which is part of what is reflected there. Then, when the situation gets to the extreme, my father voluntarily surrenders to the cathedral, then he escapes, a thousand things happen.

It's like there were no more nannies to take care of us. Many had been murdered. And that's the moment when he tells us, the only way is that we have to live together, because I can't protect them any other way. We lived the last year with him, which is also part of what the series reflects in very uncomfortable conditions.

It's not like we're in a mansion and we're sunbathing, not at all. So for me, those messages and those situations that could have been well thrown into the series are of great importance to me. Because there is no ode, from my point of view, to the drug dealer, to his activity. I think this is the only project in which we haven't shown Pablo Escobar successful. Because he wasn't. Because society has a crazy idea of success. And it's not obtained through evil.

Success is something you can enjoy throughout time. Not 30 seconds of your life.

Well, there's a topic there with having the money available, or millions of dollars available, but because you're a clandestine you can't buy anything.

We're starving with cash. And that's one of the main messages of the series, to show that you won't find success in crime.

Did you know how much money he had?

I asked my dad, because I was curious. I saw a lot of money, that there were a lot of luxuries. It was ineffective until the last days of my life, when I did see it in quantities. But I asked my father, I said, Dad, how much money do you have? And he gave me an answer that left me,

and it will leave us bewildered, because his answer was, Son, one day I got to have so much that I stopped counting it.

I mean, and that I stopped telling them.

And then I looked into it, I found out about the people who worked with him, who managed his money. And I told one of them, hey, tell me how was a day in your golden age as drug traffickers, tell me a day that went well for, to understand what we are talking about. And he said, well, a weekend for your dad, in the early 80s, only in the city of Miami, your dad could earn between 50 and 70 million dollars. In a single weekend. And it was not that he forced anyone to buy it, they took it away from him.

When there was speculation that the war against the Cali Cartel was because of the subject of, hey, you're using my corner. That's not true. The truth is that there was a deficit of drug dealers compared to the high consumption of cocaine of the Americans,

which was unstoppable. So it's very different how it's portrayed. In this escape, in the clandestinity, they manage to go to another country.

They go to Panama de Noriega and Nicaragua with the Andean people.

In my father's life. Of course.

How was that experience? Because you were there too.

Look, I remember everything. And there, for the most painful moment, is when, was when they were going back to Colombia and I was with my mom, just a little bit. And when she said, I'm not going with you anymore, it was a terrible blow for me. I was never as depressed in my life as when we went to live in Panama,

and worse when we went to live in Nicaragua, because the country was at war. Every night we heard gunshots. We got to a house with the same high walls as this place where we are. You didn't see anything outside, only people watching with AK-47s, full of nannies everywhere. And I didn't have a school, I didn't have toys.

And one day my father sends someone, well, I'm going to buy a toy, and the man comes back with the money and says, there are no toys, they don't sell toys in Nicaragua. They are at war, there is no open toy store. So, imagine, I ended up, I became very friends of another nanny there. And there was a room that I don't know why it was full of flies. I think there were, I don't know, a thousand flies per cubic meter.

And then the game was, the toy was to grab a magazine and with the nanny, to see how many flies killed more one or the other. And that was all the toys there were. And there is a good friendship with one of the nanis is born. In these extreme situations where there is nothing to share, we end up having fun with the flies.

You just mentioned it, it was always talked about the cathedral, the prison that your father had built for the prisoner himself. But you had the opportunity to be inside. You just mentioned it as something that was not a prison. How was it?

Of course, the journalists were deceived. When they finish the prison, without any luxury of course, they let the press in. They say, go, look, there is no marble, there is nothing strange. And of course, the journalists go, register, and get their reports that it's a normal prison.

As soon as the journalists left, the big televisions came in, the jacuzzis, and all the luxury came in. So it's a part of the story that's incredible, because there's no other record in the history of a bandit who has been subjected by, to an entire country, and who has financed, built his prison, and handed it over to her, and escaped from her.

So, I remember that when I first arrived at the prison of the cathedral, I arrived at a farm that was ours. That house was always ours. Then they presented it to the world as if it was from a municipality, a big lie like the Maracana. And I don't forget, I mean, I arrived with a lot of hope and hope

that I said, well, my dad is finally in jail, I'm going to be able to visit him, I know where he is, I can turn to him, because before it was a nebula. And I said, and on top of that he is going to confess his crimes, he is going to repair his victims in some way. I came with that illusion, but it was a big lie, and I was disappointed.

I just put my first foot in the cathedral, because I go down and my father says to me, go, I'll show you where I'm going to escape. I had been a prisoner there for a month when I went to visit him for the first time. I said, how are you going to escape? You just arrived, you just voluntarily surrendered. Yes, yes, come, I'll show you. Then he shows me four bricks. He says, those bricks that seem to be well placed, that seem to have cement,

they have a bad mixture, I had it made bad, and with a kick I hit them and I passed the wall and I left. So, this man is cheating us all, he definitely used the cathedral to regain the power that the Medellín cartel had lost during the war with so many enemies. So, it was like now he postcard with a postal code, where letters came from all over the world,

people offering their services to commit illegal acts.

In the middle of this war, there were several shocking events, the assassination of candidate President Galán, the explosion of the Avianca plane. Which one shocked you, that you were surprised with what happened and said, obviously you were crazy, but you already exceeded, right?

Look, I think everyone in their own way, because if there is a witness of how the violent acts of a father affect a child and the family, it is me. Because there were times when they were looking for myself to kill myself more than my own father. Because the enemies wanted my father to suffer, that my father hurt him. They started burning planes, burning houses, bombing there and here. My father didn't care. He would go back and buy others.

You didn't hurt him at all. When his son was hurt, he did hurt. So, I tell you, I was obviously moved, each crime is incomparable to the other, but I'm going to tell you something. I know Gonzalo Rojas,

whose father was traveling on the Avianca plane. That day he retired after 30 years of work in a company that was waiting for him to receive him, to say goodbye to him with honors. And when I talk to Gonzalo, I'm not talking to Gonzalo. I'm talking to... there were 107 victims of the attack against the Avianca plane. To kill a person who didn't get on the plane.

I mean, you can't be more innocent. And that fact, for me, marked my life brutally, because I saw how the conflict escalated to unthinkable levels. It was like things you only heard about in the Middle East, or situations of that nature, that level of extreme terrorism. And talking to Gonzalo Mejo, destroyed me for three days, I couldn't talk, eat, say anything,

I didn't do anything but cry because I saw this man who told me the story of his father with so much pain, an absolutely transparent, innocent guy, a family that's hyper-decent in Colombia, that drags that pain, that blood, in an unfair way. And it was very hard for me personally, and I think that's a violent, very hard fact. Just on the second day of the series' premiere, Gonzalo sent me a message and said, Sebastian, I just finished watching the series Dear Killer Nannies, and I said, my God, what is this man going to tell me?

I was fascinated with the message he sent me. He said, I congratulate you because you have always been a person who raises his hand to say, beware, drug trafficking is not going to lead you to success. I was grateful because he said, Thank you for the message you are giving in the series. And for me, that is the greatest prize this series can have,

is the recognition of a victim who did not do it to glorify her executioner, but to tell a story that generates awareness and invites non-repetition.

Do they kill or are they killed?

My father is killed. But, I'm not going to discuss this subject, not because it bothers me, on the contrary, but because everyone wants to say, I killed Escobar. So you start analyzing books.

I had a publisher where I published my first two books, and paradoxically, within the same publisher, under the same label, there are three books that tell three different versions. That's the same publisher. There was mine, which defends the theory of suicide. I explain it to you because my father taught me to commit suicide correctly. me I was like in the movies, or in La Boca, or in La 100, it doesn't work. Not even in the forehead.

How do you know that? I asked the doctors where I had to shoot to be dead and not be like a vegetable for the rest of my life. So it wasn't a taboo for me. He told me, I have 15 shots in my gun, son, 14 will be for my enemies and the last one will always be for me. I had a cyanide pill, etc. He told me, if you ever see yourself surrounded,

I prefer you to take a shot. And that's what happened. He told me, for 10 years, don't use the phone, which is death. My father never used the phone until December 2, 1993, when he used it 10 times. That was already a suicide act, the call.

You can't be the most wanted man in the world and go to talk on the phone with your family at a hotel that is of the Colombian military forces. So I already understood it clearly. My dad called me and said, this one wants to kill himself. Because I hung up on him.

Don't call, we're fine. I protected him. He was my dad. And he always told me, I grabbed everyone I ever had in my life by the phone. They always call their girlfriend,

they always call their mom, their friend. They fall for that. That's why he told me, never install the phone. Wherever you go, tear it from the wall.

There's a very famous song in Argentina that Patricio Reyes Urgento Ricota wrote for her, called Me Matan Limón. Me Matan Limón. Do you know it?

Yes, of course. I've heard it. At first I didn't understand it very well, but I did listen to it and it seemed to me... It's a story, let's say, that his chorus says, Me Matan Limón, right?

It's my father who's singing, somehow, telling Limón, hey, they're killing me, help me. And do you know how many have written about him? More than 40 in the world.

Did it ever happen to you to be somewhere in Buenos Aires and that song would play?

It happened to me.

Do you remember any that happened to you when you heard it?

When it came out and it started to sound loud on the radio and all, suddenly one day I was listening to it and a friend called me and said, Hey, it came out, I said, I'm listening to it now. And it always caught my attention. I never paid too much attention to all his lyrics, but the fact of the song Me Matan Limón always impacted me a lot,

because it was like saying, he's my dad in the last seconds of his life. Even though he never said, they kill me, but it's a metaphor.

Was Limón the last hitman that accompanied him?

Limón, look, more than a hitman, Limón was a driver. What happens with this story, that when my father dies and there's no one to go and clarify, then all the bosses, all the right hand, all the hitmen,

the press from a very responsible place, very responsible and absolutely focused on the business that generates all this, ended up condemning other hitmen who survived out there, who became YouTubers and influencers. My God. So in the press you said, Pablo's right hand,

he says, that guy wasn't right handed. I met them, I grew up with them, I can tell you who were the right hands, not him. So a lot of fantasy has been built about my dad's story and his supposed caregivers, or nannies, or bodyguards, or with spikes.

But he was the one who stayed with him, the last one.

Yes, Limón stayed, but he was not a hitman as such, he was more of a driver. Limón was in charge of driving the truck that took all the people up the mountain to the jail in the cathedral. That was Limón's job.

Who was the right hand? Pinina, for example. Alias Pinina. Her name was John Jairo Arias Tascón, who I became very friends with in Nicaragua because we killed flies every day of our lives. I would go into a room where there was a radio.

A radio, I don't know if it was UHF or VHF, I don't remember what it was called. And I remember that's when I started to be a fan of the national athletics, because he's a big fan, but a passionate fan. And he asked that the radios through which my dad communicated through Colombia, he asked them to play the games.

So I ended up locked up with him in that room, killing flies and listening to the national games. That's where that friendship was born. I didn't have toys in Nicaragua, so with that Nani, I had the chance to feel like a kid for a while.

You already had a death sentence from your father's enemies, but when they kill him, they call you on the phone and you end up doubling that sentence.

I doubled it and reacted with a lot of violence, I didn't think about what I said.

The exact phrase was?

I'm just going to kill those bastards, literally. A phrase that taught me a lot in my life, because that's when I understood the power of declaration. But I was also left on fire. And that's when I learned, and that's what I tell the kids when they come to conferences, to be careful with what they say, careful with what comes out of their mouths, because it can transform your reality in an automatic way. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool.

It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. to that, and they became 30 years in exile for me. Those were very unfortunate words. It took me 10 minutes to deactivate those words,

because there comes the other statement. And it's also another power, which is the same one used, but for good. I call the media and tell them, look, I just made a terrible mistake. I regret what I said.

I'm not going to avenge my father's death. It reminds me more of the threats, of course. No one remembers the good things. But I also declared that I was going to be a man of peace and that whatever I had to do to maintain peace in my country, I was going to do it. I publicly went out to tell my nanis, please don't do anything.

The war is over and let's leave it at that. And from that place, I think I also started to consolidate that man of peace, who was already there, because my father, when he surrendered to the cathedral, publicly says, I dedicate this surrender to my 14-year-old pacifist son.

Many times you would have imagined the moment of your father's death, because of all the threats he had. A thousand times. When you saw the images, the images are very strong, I imagine you saw them. What happened to you? Because many times you would have imagined it, but when you see them,

I imagine that it will have gone through another sensation in your body, right?

Look, I saw how when a hunter goes to Africa and kills a lion, and he's pulling out his fang. They cut his mustache with a knife to keep it as a souvenir. And to see the whole press celebrating the death of a person... I know my dad killed many people, but we never celebrated anyone's death. And to see all the newspapers saying,

at last he fell, hallelujah, what a joy, it was painful, because he was my dad, for me, I knew he was a mobster, a terrorist, a drug dealer, but he was my dad, for me. So, even though death was never a taboo for us, and my father always spoke to me with that crudeness,

he was such an optimistic man, that he never let us imagine that the day of his death would come. Because he was always such an optimistic man, that he thought he was going to win all the battles. And he had managed to escape in such a successful way, from such big operations, that one would say,

this one is always going to make them for me. But that ends when he starts calling me. That's a before and after. I already clearly understood those calls. And they are in the recordings. And I have made them public myself.

Not only the one about the threats, but the one where I say to my dad, don't call me anymore. In one of those calls, I had five generals of the Republic in my room. I'm the son of so-and-so, the most wanted man in the world. I have five generals in my room, one from the Navy, another from the Army, another from the police, another from the Navy. And he's calling me, the one they're looking for. So I said, Grandma, don't call me anymore, we're fine.

And I hung up. I knew they were listening to me too, but at least I wasn't going to tell all these generals that I was talking to the most wanted man in the world, the one they wanted the most.

With that death sentence you were carrying, with your mom negotiating, at those who chased Pablo Escobar, or those chased by Pablo Escobar. What do you remember from that talk with the enemies, which was your transition to another life?

The talk is literally the one you see in the series. I finished it, I had already seen it a couple of times, but I finished watching it two days ago. I couldn't stop crying in that scene, because I got into those shoes again. Hanner Villarreal, who is a great actor, got into my soul, into my body,

and he showed me again the horror that I lived in that moment. Look, I never went to that meeting with the hope of coming out alive. I was determined to die in that meeting. I don't know how many can go to die in that meeting. I don't know how many people can go to meetings where they are told, we are going to kill you. And I went.

Because they never told me, go, you are going to deal with them. They told me, go, they are going to kill you. And someone makes me realize, it touches my shoulder, because all this comes from a... I have to go to a prison where there is a mafia boss and he tells me, you have to go kiss the ring to the new bosses, those are the ones who rule now,

and there they are going to kill you. I told him, I'm not going to go where they are going to kill me. You think you are worth a lot, you think you are very big, I don't know what. You are worth nothing to me. Your life is worth nothing to me. 300,000 dollars is worth killing you. I was 16 years old, I was in his cell and he had 20 bodyguards and I was alone.

So I told him, this is with Ivan Ordinola Grajales, head of the North Cartel of the Valley. He threatened me in a thousand ways. I told him, Mr. Ivan, my survival instinct doesn't allow me to go to a meeting where you are already telling me that I'm going to be killed. He got mad at me in French, he started yelling at me, telling me who I was, who he believed in me.

He said, there are your bodyguards, they are asking me $300,000 to kill you. They were no longerguards, who were at the mercy of whoever paid for the head, who cut it off in two minutes. And he says, do you want me to make the call now, so they kill you? I looked him in the eyes and said, Mr. Ivan, if you feel you have to make the call, do it. And this man ended up as surprised, outraged, he didn't know if I was very brave or stupid, I wasn't either. But after I got out of that extreme situation and his wife came home, he got distracted,

a person told me, hey, you have to go to that meeting. And he said, you don't understand what's going on. I said, no, I do understand, they want to kill me in a thousand ways. He said, no, tú ya estás muerto. Así me lo dijo. Y la única posibilidad que tienes de salir con vida es

llegando puntual a la reunión donde te van a matar. Y nunca nadie me dijo algo tan elocuente, tan simple, tan sencillo que yo dije, I'm going. Why? I'm tired of running. I'm tired of running away for things I didn't do. I'm tired of the bombs, of the threats, of the massacres,

of all the, sorry, the fucking blood I saw running. And I said, well, I'm going to get killed. And here I put an end to this. And there is no Escobar legacy. here everything is over and there is nothing. And the Cali Cartel was not that they liked to kill with a shot of grace. They loved to somehow put people in grasshoppers,

they started cutting into pieces like sashimi by the toes. And I was willing to do that. Why? Because I was tired of running from that violence. I didn't want to repeat my father's story. And I made my will to go to that meeting. I said goodbye to my whole family and I told them,

until I get there, if they find me, I'll go back in a bag. But I'm going to get killed. I never went with the hope of getting out alive with that. That's why when I see Hannah's performance in the series, I say, all that moves me. And even the place was similar, and the actors were very similar,

and their attitude, their body language, their way of saying things. No, no, that's something that I relived at that moment, it was very sad, but also, well, relieving. Today I have a very correct, very transparent friendship with the children of all the bosses of the Cali Cartel. We all learned the same lesson as me. Nobody wants to repeat the story of all the leaders of the Cali Cartel. We all learned the same lesson.

No one wants to repeat their parents' story. That's why we're friends today. Because we found a lot in common.

They had to leave Colombia. Many countries rejected them.

Not many, 100%.

100%.

All of them.

We were aliens on this planet. They arrived in Mozambique and then you came to Argentina, to Buenos Aires. Did Menem give you asylum? Another one of the myths.

No. We got into Argentina without anyone's permission. I didn't understand why Menem would come out saying, yes, of course, I knew they were there. And at one point I spoke to a friend of mine, a very Ayacal, Argentine, singer, who knew all this, this whole thing. He said, it's very bad for a president to say that he didn't know what was going on in his country. I said, ah, from that place I do understand that he prefers to say, of course we knew.

Because when I see in the press that he said that, I said, where is this man? He didn't know anything. We don't know anyone from the Argentine government, no authority. We went to the National Institute of Immigration to do the queuing every day at 4 in the morning, to bring papers. There was no internet, I mean, we didn't even know what we had to bring. And that's how we earned the temporary residence, then the permanent residence, with many years of queuing. It wasn't like the ones that I did help, didn't have an Argentine passport in 20 days.

I don't even have it. We really did the procedure as it should be in immigration.

You got married in Argentina. What happened?

It's a very paradoxical thing. I got married in Argentina by permission of Bergoglio.

I was going to tell you that. Pope Francis had to do it.

Pope Francis even got involved in this story, but in a very decent, natural way, because this story that I carry would allow me to damage the good name of many people, and I never do. People love it, many newspapers love to damage my name

with the last name I have. But I don't do the same. We just had a problem. I wanted to get married, not in a church, for security reasons, because on that day I was going to get married and everyone knows. It had to be a private ceremony. And at that time the church had prohibited private ceremonies

that had to be done in churches. We met with all the priests that none wanted. And my mother gets the phone number from Bergoglio, calls him, he was in a cloister, I don't know what, I answer the phone and she explains, look, he already had an idea why she was calling him,

explained, it's a matter of security, it's not that we don't want to enter the church, we can't, they can kill us, we need a private place, well, and there they make it easier for us, don't worry, I'm going to talk to a certain man, talk to him, and he's going to put the priest who is going to marry you out of the church. And so we got married at the

Sheraton Hotel in Pilar, but it was very funny because here people always get married for the civil and for the church. So, before the marriage for the church, my wife travels to Mexico, she's Mexican by birth, and she marries me, I'm here in Argentina, for a power gave her power to her dad. Edipo was there, and my wife married her dad. Her dad said yes to me, and called me.

I don't know why, but I was passing by the San Lorenzo Stadium. He called me and said, Hi, honey, we're married. I said, really? I wasn't there. I was't there. And he said, well, you're a little bit of a dick. But of course, we got married at a distance, by power,

she with her father, in a situation like that, very, very strange, very bizarre, like everything that should happen to us. And that's how I got married, with the permission of Bergoglio, and with my wife in Mexico.

I should look at the files, but I think you were the first human being who was arrested with his father and his mother. Because when you were in Buenos Aires, you were arrested with your mother.

You gave me a cold in my stomach, reminding me of that. It's true, how can you be arrested with your father and your mother? And always for the same crime. It's incredible, it's a coincidence, the crime of DNA, the crime of last name. Because the causes that make me up have to do with that. They are based on the last name as the great probatory burden.

I am presumed guilty because I already have a last name that... Forget that you can't be a good person. If you have a cowardly last name, you're bad. You're a bandit, you're a criminal. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm a good man. I'm a man of peace.

Your son is 13 years old. What does your son know about his grandfather? What does he ask you and what did you tell him?

Everything.

Obviously, when my son starts talking, of his grandfather, and what did he ask you and what did you tell him? Everything.

Obviously, when my son started talking, he was about a year and eight months old. When I saw that there could be a communication, obviously I wasn't going to tell him everything, he was a terrorist. But little by little I began to interiorize him about the history of his grandfather, that he liked animals, and cars, this and the other. And then, about three or four years ago, I took him to Medellín and I said,

I want you to come with me. I want to show you everything your grandfather did wrong. And I took him to the museum, not the one you had. I took him to the horror museum, where there are photographs of the dismembered bodies of the police, of the bomb cars that he put, all the police trucks when they passed, the murder of Galán, of the Aragonite, of all those who kidnapped absolutely everything. Difficult images to see, even today.

Because I have a great responsibility with the son that I am raising. I don't want him to grow up hating his grandfather, because what kind of father would I be if I taught him to hate his grandfather? But the big challenge for me is that he grows up with enough knowledge of history so that he understands that there is nothing beautiful here to repeat. And at the same time, on the same day, I took him to Pablo Escobar's neighborhood in Medellín, and I said, you're going to see another side of the coin. These people who tell this story of pain about your grandfather

have every reason to say what they're saying about your grandfather. And these others, too, because they were impacted by your grandfather's life, but in a different way. And these who were helped do not blame your grandfather at all.

It's not that they clean and wash their faults like that. no exculpan a tu abuelo en absoluto. No es que se limpien y se lavan las culpas así. Entonces mi hijo es una persona hoy absolutamente consciente. Si tú le preguntas, oye, Jota, que le decimos, ¿cómo era tu abuelo? ¿Quién es tu abuelo? Y él lo primero que te va a decir es, mira, mi abuelo era un criminal.

Lo tiene perfectamente claro, asumido. He is perfectly clear, he has assumed it. I have been very surprised, and for good, I value and respect my son a lot, that he does not show off to his grandfather, that he does not show off to his relatives, that he does not care, that he does not use him as a tool for anything. That is something for me, it makes me feel that he has learned the real lesson. You shouldn't be proud of yourself. It's not a story to show off.

It's a story to reflect on.

Your son is Argentinean.

He's the most Argentinean I know. I've been here more than half of my life. He's the most patriotic Argentine I've ever met. He looks at me in the matches and puts on the uniform and the shirt. He tells me that if his blood was cut, he would be as white and blue as the Argentine flag. He loves this country incredibly. He's a person who has made me value a lot what this country has given us positively.

I was able to educate myself here, I was able to live in peace. For five years we lived the privilege of not being anyone, of living in absolute anonymity. When Menem said yes, he knew, he didn't know. I was an absolutely discreet person. We didn't have anything to show off, because they had taken everything from us. But we never revealed our identities to anyone.

And it was 5 years that went by without warning, until they finally arrested us. They extort us, they steal from us. We go to the police and report them, and they put us in jail. It's like they steal your wallet, you go to the police and report him, and we get arrested. Like if someone bribes you, you go to the police station and say, you idiot, you get arrested. It's more or less the same thing that happened to us.

I have two last questions. As you said, there were many series, many bibliographies, talking about the life of the drug lord. Many kids saw and read. What would you say to a kid who wants to be Pablo Escobar or who sees that life as a way out?

I'm going to tell you a very nice thing that happened to me here. I'm presenting my second book, Pablo Escobar, Infraganti. And I see in the presentation here in Buenos Aires, in this neighborhood, I see a father with a face of a sleeping, disheveled man, and his 13-year-old son, Benjamín. I'm not going to say the last name because of respect to the youngest.

When I see him, who brings my two books, I see him underlined, with post-it, with everything, I mean, he almost falls apart that he read it 50 times. And this boy stopped and asked me two or three questions from the audience with an eloquence and a solvency that I said, my God, where does this boy know so much? A 13-year-old boy.

The time has come for the photo, the signature. My dad comes up to me and says, you don't know, he made me travel 400 kilometers to come see you. I said, where are you from? Well, from the Sea of ​​Silver. And the boy handed me a closed envelope. I look at my dad like, what's going on? Can I receive it? I don't even know what he's giving me. He says, yes, please receive it. And it was a handwritten. And then he tells me, read it later,

because there were a lot of people taking pictures. Read it later and tell me. And this boy starts telling me in his letter, which I still keep on my desk as my safe haven as a writer. Because this boy tells me how he began to know the story of my father, that his grandmother was in the living room of his house watching a series

and that he sits next to her to see what the grandmother was watching, and he starts telling her about Pablo Escobar and the whole series was seen. And from that moment on, that child was fascinated with the figure of Pablo Escobar and that he wanted to be Pablo Escobar. And then the other series came, and now I also want to be, or I don't know what. And I tell my dad, I want to read, I want to buy all the documentaries, I want to know everything about Pablo Escobar.

And I wanted to learn from that character, from that supposed case of success that the other series had been showing him. And in that envelope, Benjamin tells me, I wanted to be Pablo Escobar, I dreamed of being Pablo Escobar, until I read your two books. That's when I understood that there was no success in criminality and that I wanted to be

either a lawyer or a journalist. Today, he's a lawyer, he's a good person, I'm still in contact with him, he's a leader where he is, but that boy was going to be a bandit. That boy was determined to follow step by step, as a catalog, what Pablo Escobar was doing. And you don't know the number of cases like Benjamin's, but that's a case of an Argentine boy

who was going to become Pablo Escobar 2.0, because the irresponsible people who have told my father's story wrongly made him believe that it was a successful story. In contrast to what I do, what I dedicate myself to. There is nothing I have done that says that Pablo Escobar is a success or is a story worthy of being imitated.

That is what I tell the children in my projects, whatever they are, whether they are books,

series, documentaries. Sebastian or Juan Pablo, I want to thank you very much. How would you prefer to be called?

As I told you, my mother baptized me Juan Pablo and she calls me Sebas. It's the same for me. It's something important, you know, the name doesn't define us. The name, we are attached to our names, family stories, and others, attached to those heritages. The true identity of a man or a person, of a woman, is in their actions.

That is the true story and the true name is what, let's say, their actions define.

We always have one last question, which is the same for everyone who goes through this cycle, and I want to ask you, Where is the magic for you?

In love. The love that I received from my nannies, that I received from my family, from my wife, from my mother in the most difficult moments. There is the magic. Love transformed the person that I am. I could have been someone worse than my father, but love saved me, and that's magic. but love saved me, and that's magic.

Thank you.