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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The United States on Wednesday lifted sanctions against Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and brother of the South American country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, the Treasury Department reported.

The Trump administration removed several entries listing Rodríguez’s name from the main U.S. sanctions list — the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list — which includes leaders and individuals subject to financial sanctions imposed by Washington. The Treasury did not provide a reason for the change.

The removal of Rodríguez — who has led the Venezuelan legislature since 2021 — from the SDN list comes after U.S. military personnel entered Caracas in January and detained former president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who face charges in the United States of drug trafficking, torture, and repression.

Since then, Delcy Rodríguez has been in charge of the nation and has negotiated, among other matters, a pact with the Trump administration under which the United States will control a large portion of Venezuela’s oil sector. Under the agreement announced last August, Washington will have majority control over one-fifth of Venezuela’s crude oil reserves — the world’s largest, estimated at some 300 billion barrels.

Along the same lines, Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez are expected to amend Venezuelan law to allow more foreign companies to enter the country’s energy sector, according to a report by Reuters.

Rodríguezes removed from OFAC List

In April, the Treasury Department removed Venezuela’s interim president from the list maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Being on the SDN list results in a total freeze on financial and real estate assets, as well as a ban on holding checking accounts, investments, or other assets in the United States.

Furthermore, the U.S. government prohibits companies, banks, or any U.S. citizen from conducting financial, commercial, or business transactions with individuals on the list. They are also barred from entering the country.

After being removed from the list, Delcy Rodríguez traveled to New York in September to participate in the United Nations General Assembly, an event that also marked the thaw in relations between Washington and Caracas with a closed-door meeting between her and Trump.

Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez had been designated in September 2018 along with Cilia Flores and former Venezuelan defense minister Vladimir Padrino. At that time, OFAC reported that these designations were intended to target Maduro’s inner circle. It had placed the then-president on the same list in July 2017.

Regarding the Rodríguez siblings specifically, the Treasury stated at the time: “Maduro has given them […] high-ranking positions in the Venezuelan government to help him remain in power and strengthen his authoritarian regime.”

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It was highly unlikely, but it could be true. The imposing statue of a winged, muscular man with a goat’s head and legs dominated the façade, capping the perimeter wall — at least according to the photos circulating on social media. A sprawling urban conglomerate like Mexico City and its surroundings — which shelters a handful of altars to Santa Muerte, some of them truly colossal, including the one on López Portillo Avenue in Tultitlán — could easily accommodate a statue of Baphomet, the old idol of occultism, the satanic goat. Even if it were in the wealthy Jardines del Pedregal neighborhood, once an emblem of orderly development. In this eclectic, layered city of contrasts, logic rarely applies, least of all when it comes to urban life.

There were elements that, a priori, deflated suspicions about the nonexistence of the Baphomet statue — and they weren’t the most obvious. In the age of artificial intelligence, the enormous horns on a gloomy figure mounted on an otherwise ordinary façade pointed to fakery. But one of the accompanying images fed the opposite idea. The statue’s appearance, a horror-story account declared — the source of the original post — had angered residents to the point that they’d hung up signs demanding respect and asking for it to be removed. In a widely shared photo of one such sign, the irritation showed in the handwriting and the sharp sans-serif font. The adhesive tape that attached the message to some bars was even visible.

At 12.13 p.m. on Tuesday, Iglesia street at the entrance to El Pedregal looked calm and sunny. One of the social media reactions to the statue’s appearance read: “There’s a Legionaries house one block away HAHAHAHAHA.” The comment referred to a house belonging to the Legionaries of Christ, the Catholic congregation whose founder left a damaging legacy for Mexican society. It wasn’t clear how the user inferred the location, but it was worth checking. There is a Legionaries house, Regnum Christi, on Iglesia street. Father Esteban was there just after noon. “Yes, I’ve read the news, but I had no idea about that,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a Halloween decoration become news, because that’s what it must be,” he noted.

It would have been the height of irony if, on Iglesia street a block from a Legionaries of Christ house, a resident had decided to pay tribute to good old Beelzebub. Although perhaps it would have been a legitimate way to criticize the organization’s past. In any case, Father Esteban is somewhat off as concerns Halloween decorations. Every year, Mexico puts together a fine collection of extravagant costumes, decorations, and other Day of the Dead trinkets — installations that would make Baphomet tremble, including displays simulating clandestine graves, kidnapped people stuffed into car trunks, and drug trafficker masks. Amazon even sells bagged fake corpses — “a perfect gift for your friends and neighbors.”

A video accompanying the photos of the statue showed a stretch of Bulevar de La Luz, at the southern edge of El Pedregal, several miles from Iglesia street. Although the video did not show the statue, its inclusion alongside the photos suggested a possible location. On the dried lava of the Xitle volcano, modernity has arrived in the form of sushi restaurants. In the video you can see a stretch of the boulevard wall with part of one restaurant’s name screen-printed on it. After 1.00 p.m., parking attendants were having a good day thanks to a line of pickup trucks running back and forth. “It really is the devil!” one said when he saw the photo. He shouted so loudly another came over. “Oh, it’s just around the corner; we went this morning to take a picture, but it wasn’t there anymore,” he said.

The second parking attendant pointed to a house covered with large stickers — notices of suspension of activities from the local government. When someone starts work without a permit in Mexico City, or opens a bar or sells alcohol without a license, inspectors arrive and post those stickers. Nothing can be moved there. But it didn’t matter: the house the attendant described bore no resemblance to the one in the photos. Right next door is a preschool. The security guard and a woman staffing the gate at lunchtime knew about the case and suggested it might be on a private street. Jardines del Pedregal, separatist in spirit, was built more than 70 years ago as a gated neighborhood. The city later annexed it by force, but afterwards some streets installed barriers at their entrances.

If Baphomet is on one of those streets, its location seems unclear. Maybe it was just a joke, the security guard and the woman remarked. “Or maybe not,” she said, “because they do do things like that.” There is no certainty regarding the existence of the statue of the human goat in El Pedregal. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that its name stems from a misunderstanding. A Flemish nobleman who took part in the Crusades in the 11th century mistakenly confused the name of the prophet of Islam upon his return. Instead of Muhammad, he said what he said. Centuries later, that ancient fear from the Crusades took the form of a goat-like figure, later adopted as a satanic goat. Perhaps its appearance now is the same thing — a misunderstanding.

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