Medellín city hall has begun demolishing a house that once belonged to drug lord Pablo Escobar in the Diamante 2 neighborhood of the El Poblado district in the capital of Antioquia. The property, one of the many owned by the head of the Medellín Cartel, who was killed in 1993, had been abandoned, although authorities say it was being used to hold satanic rituals, for sexual activity, and for drug use. It had also become a security problem in one of the city’s most tourist-heavy neighborhoods. On Tuesday, the local administration began intervening on the site.

The property covers a total of 1,854 square meters and was acquired in 1979 by Escobar’s wife, Victoria Eugenia Henao. In 2004, 11 years after the criminal leader’s death in Medellín, it entered an asset-forfeiture process with the Prosecutor’s Office and, in 2018, it was transferred to the Fund for Rehabilitation, Social Investment and the Fight Against Organized Crime (FRISCO), managed by the Special Assets Society (SAE). Because the site was abandoned, it began to be used for activities that alarmed residents in that part of the city.

At the time of the intervention, authorities found inside the building remnants of damaged children’s toys, old shoes, used pillows, masks, a decapitated doll and pieces of wood and metal. The interior spaces of the house were for the most part eaten away by damp and filth, while the exterior areas were dominated by weeds and vegetation. On one wall there was a six-pointed star with a cross in the center, spray-painted in red. There was also a phrase, in the same color, that read: “Si lo miro, lo mato (If I look at him, I’ll kill him).” The severely degraded condition of the house and the misuse of the property led residents to repeatedly ask city authorities to intervene.

After demolition began, Medellín’s acting mayor and secretary of Security and Citizen Coexistence, Manuel Villa Mejía, said the intervention is another step by the city administration against places that recall and glorify its criminal past. “We are reclaiming the city and closing the door to any expression that seeks to turn our narcotrafficking past into an object of admiration,” he said. Villa Mejía added later: “We will not allow these places to continue serving as settings for activities that undermine the community’s peace.”

The demolition of Escobar’s house in El Poblado adds to other interventions at his properties in the city in recent years. One of the most notable was the destruction by implosion of the Mónaco building, also in El Poblado, in February 2019 during Federico Gutiérrez’s first term as mayor. That building, associated with the worst years of violence and drug-related crime in Colombia, served as Escobar’s residence in the city and was the target of an attack by the Cali Cartel in 1988. In its place the Parque Inflexión was built, in memory of the victims of narcotrafficking.

In 2023, under Mayor Daniel Quintero, the city ordered the demolition of the Pablo Escobar museum in the Loma del Indio area, which was run by Roberto Escobar, the drug lord’s brother. The intervention was ordered by a judge because the building did not have the permits required for a two-story structure. Underlying it all, however, was the city administration’s goal of eradicating so-called “narco-tours” and any form of tourism that glorifies the figure of the most notorious criminal in Colombia’s history — a case that, nonetheless, still has several unresolved issues.

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