Robert Escobar, the older brother of Pablo Escobar, handled millions of dollars a year when he was the head accountant for the Medellín cartel in the 1980s. He was accustomed to flying around in private jets, he sent his children to a Swiss boarding school, and one time on a hike to avoid capture, he threw a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars into a river because it was heavy. After serving 14 years in prison, Robert Escobar now earns money by leading tourists around one of his family’s former safe houses. During the 1980s, Pablo Escobar was among the richest men in the world and was responsible for a drug-smuggling empire that extended from Colombia to a dozen other countries. There has been a growing number of narcotuistas in Colombia, who come to see the places where Pablo Escobar lived and worked. Robert Escobar founded a holding company, Escobar Inc., in 2014 to license the family name. But he is far from the only person who tries to sell a version of Pablo Escobar’s life and death. There are books, television shows, documentaries, T-shirts, paintings, mugs, baseball hats, and more. Hollywood has examined his life in multiple films, and Narcos, the Netflix series, is mostly responsible for the tourist boom. Pablo Escobar was a murderer, a torturer, and a kidnapper. But he was also loved by many in Medellín, writes The New Yorker, and he was at one point the most notorious outlaw on the planet. He controlled some eighty percent of the cocaine entering the U.S. and had a fortune of about three billion dollars. His legacy is everywhere in Colombia, but people have a hard time agreeing on whether his story should be seen as entertainment or as a cautionary tale.
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