Ok! Finally sitting down to do this, currently on the roof of my new hostel, Puriwasi, in Lima, Peru. Let me just start off by saying to everyone who told me not to come here, I am so glad I did not listen. Lima is awesome! I got a little crispy (sorry mother, I didn’t remember sunscreen) but so happy to be here.
Anyway. Ok, going back in time to last Friday when I took a tour to Guatapé.
Day 8
I woke up early to ensure I wouldn’t miss the 8:45 meet up down the street in one of Medellin’s many squares. When I arrived, I immediately recognized 6 other travelers–two girls from Paisa Hostel (Becca and Johana) and four guys from my Cartagena hostel, El Viajero.
We set off on our two hour venture, snoozing and listening to music between catching up with the girls. Finally, we arrived at a little village on the edge of a lake, where we were told to pile into or onto the roofs of massive Jeep’s.
The drivers were just short of reckless, blaring house music and plowing through the rocky dirt roads (I wasn’t lucky enough to sit on the roof, but it turns out this was actually a blessing). After about thirty minutes, we finally pulled into a deserted rundown property where our vehicles disposed of us before disappearing in a cloud of dust.
Our guide, Maria, told us we had arrived to one of Pablo Escobar’s mansions, but explained that it had been taken by the government twenty years before he was captured, hence why it was left in such poor shape. There were many holes in the walls, she said, because Pablo had hidden money everywhere he could since he had more than he could ever account for and needed places to hide it.
She told us to explore the grounds and that we would eventually regroup down by Pablo’s pool.
A good twenty minutes later, Maria gathered us in the shade of Pablo’s pool house and told us she was going to tell us about Pablo Escobar.
“He was not a good man,” she said gravely, “I understand why people come here and want to hear about him, but the people here hate to speak his name. I will tell you so you understand the violence we witnessed and the fear we lived in.”
She explained how Pablo was raised in a poor neighborhood and dropped out of elementary school, but dreamed of being the Colombian president one day. At the age of 12 he was already stealing things and turning them for a profit and just a few years later he was doing the same with vehicles. By the time Pablo started dealing with narcotics, he already had made a small fortune. It was time to put his dream into action–the only problem was that he was uneducated, and needed support to be voted in as congressman. Pablo came up with a plan, one which some people still love and adore him for today. On the outskirts of Medellin, there was a very poor neighborhood where he had once lived. The people had no means to find jobs, let alone homes. Pablo built 700 homes for these people, and bought taxi cabs for them so they could make an income (mainly through him). These taxi drivers would later become his hitmen.
While many of us probably know a general brief history about Pablo Escobar (thank you Narcos) the most memorable and emotional part of the day was when Maria told us about her own experience during Pablo’s rule.
“I remember in high school, our building was surrounded by a middle school and elementary school. As we were leaving, a car bomb went off right between two of the schools and everyone was screaming. It was terrible. My classmates were killed. There were children.” She went on, “In school, there was a beautiful girl in my class, she could have been Angelina Jolie, she was gorgeous. Pablo found out about this girl, and he sent for her. He wanted her for himself. She was a good girl, she didn’t want to go, and she refused. A few weeks later she went missing. Her body was found chopped into pieces in a suitcase.”
Maria paused before vehemently spewing “I hate Bill Clinton, really, he destroyed my country. He exposed the Cali cartels and the Medellin Cartel business and dealings and this is what started the war between the two cartels, this is what brought all the bombings and violence to this city.”
She explained how, after Pablo was elected as congressmen (thanks to the poor people’s vote), he was soon removed from his position when his criminal background was exposed. This is when he really got into his narcotics dealing, and when the violence started. He was at war with his own government, eventually killing three presidential candidates who had promised to rescue the city from the violence of drug trafficking. People began disappearing, bombs went off, and he paid 2 million pesos to anyone who would kill a police officer.
Maria explained how her father lost his engineering job (somehow in relation to this) and began supporting the family as a cab driver. He was approached one night by Pablo’s men, who told him he would now work for Pablo. Maria’s father refused, and the next day she was pulled out of school and her family fled to the mountains to escape Pablo’s wrath. In the hills, they made a home and she even made friends with the two neighbor boys, whom she played with every day.
“One day after class, I was walking home and before I could get there I could see the blood everywhere. I could see their bodies. I could see them, my two neighborhood friends, dead in their driveway,” she sobbed, wringing her hands, “They were only 12, 13 years old.” She wiped her face, and one of the boys from the group wrapped his arm over her shoulder, gently encouraging her.
I wiped away my own tears and looked around at the motionless group, horrified and surprised by this woman’s vulnerability, and the details she was willing to share with us.
“People want to know about Pablo, he was a bad man and he caused so much pain and suffering.”
She went on to explain his demise, how the government and the US trapped him by capturing his family in Germany after he had escaped his own prison. He made the mistake of making two phone calls, to ensure his family was safe. This is how the government traced him, how they found him in a house in the middle of Medellin, and how they chased him down on the roofs where he was shot and killed.
“Pablo was killed a few houses from where I lived. When I heard the news of his death, I ran to see his body. I had to see it for myself, to know for sure that he was gone. And I did. I saw him.”
We sat in silence, unsure of what to say, one by one moving forward to hug Maria, and thanking her for sharing her story with us.
She smiled and said, “this is not how I am normally, I am happy, and I live a happy life. Let’s go to lunch.”
We ate lunch a little ways away from Pablo’s mansion, in a restaurant that offered souvenirs with Pablo’s face on it (no one bought any).
From there, we piled into a boat, and headed towards a remote island where we spent the afternoon swimming and diving off rocks (Maria screamed the loudest when we yelled at people to jump).
Eventually, we headed towards Guatapé.
It was about 4 pm when we arrived, the town was bustling with street music and puppies, vendors catering to tourists. We stopped to take pictures in the square and wander the town. Maria insisted she take us to the best coffee in town, and after getting lost three times we finally made it (it was pretty good).
The final stop was the rock of Guatapé, 750 steps to the top, but worth it. We spent thirty minutes taking in the views and snapping pictures for Insta before starting the knee jostling journey back down.
When we arrived back in town, Rosa (a girl from Barcelona who was on the tour) and another girl from the hostel, accompanied me to dinner.
After eating, we went to meet a friend from college, Andy Keller(!!!), who had seen my insta story and had messaged me that he was In Medellin as well. Turned out his air bnb was directly behind our hostel. Andy was there with his two friends, Jack and Cullin. The six of us tossed back a few drinks and decided to hit up some clubs.
The first place we went to was packed. We bought a few rounds of shots (hid our to go boxes) and hit the dance floor. It turned out that there was a bachelor party from Portland (what are the chances??) and one of the guys told me how they had tried to check in to their air bnb earlier, and were told they couldn’t stay there anymore because there had been a party there with underage girls and some of them had been murdered. (WTF).
The night continued, we met up with more people from the tour and at around 3 am, Andy and his friends and I were ready to leave. Alex, a German guy I befriended, looked at me in disappointment.
“Really? You’re going to sleep now? What’re you going to remember, going to sleep now or going out and having a blast?” (To be fair, I wasn’t sure how much I would remember in either situation, but this was a line I had used on my friends many times @jenica so obviously I wasn’t going to bed anytime soon).
We wound up at a club far away from the hostel, in an area I was sure was desert but was probably just off a dirt road. There, I ran into the guy whose air bnb I had gone to a few nights before, as well as a few guys from the hostel.
Let’s just say I made it home by 7 am and I was accurate about how much I would remember.
Gypsy&Dragon 