Virginia Vallejo was the most important Colombian radio anchorwoman and television presenter in the late 1970s and ’80s. In 1982, she met Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel. In 1983, they began a romantic relationship that ended in 1987, six years before his death.
In July 2006, she offered her testimony against a former justice minister on trial for conspiring with Escobar in the assassination of a presidential candidate. That same month, the DEA took her out of Colombia, on a special flight to save her life, so she could testify in other leading criminal cases.
Originally published in 2007 by Random House Mondadori, Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar (Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar) became a number one international bestseller in Spanish. Due to brutal attacks and threats from the Colombian government, paramilitary, and media, she received political asylum from the United States in 2010. She continues to live in Miami, where she is writing two more books.
Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, Diego Zuñiga, and Carlos Fonseca. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s and Vice. She lives in Chile.
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Virginia Vallejo, 2007
English translation copyright © Megan McDowell, 2018
Originally published in Mexico as Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar by
Random House Mondadoria, Mexico, in 2009
Published in the USA by Vintage Books, 2018
All photographs courtesy of the author’s private collection
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 105 1
eISBN 978 1 78689 056 6
Book design by Anna B. Knighton
To my Dead,
to the heroes and the villains.
We are all one,
one single nation,
just one atom
recycled infinitely
always and forever.
Contents
PART ONE DAYS OF INNOCENCE AND REVERIE
PART TWO DAYS OF SPLENDOR AND FEAR
Two Future Presidents and Twenty Love Poems
The Seventh-Richest Man in the World
Not That Pig Who’s Richer Than Me!
PART THREE DAYS OF ABSENCE AND SILENCE
Introduction
IT IS SIX IN THE MORNING on July 18, 2006. Three bulletproof cars from the American Embassy pick me up from my mother’s apartment in Bogotá to drive me to the airport, where a plane headed to some place in the United States is waiting for me with its engines running. A vehicle with security personnel armed with machine guns precedes us at top speed, and another one is behind us. The night before, the embassy’s head of security had warned me that there were suspicious people at the other end of the park that the building overlooks, and he informed me that his mission was to protect me; I shouldn’t get close to the windows for any reason or open the door to anyone. Another car with my most precious possessions left one hour earlier; it belongs to Antonio Galán Sarmiento, president of the Bogotá City Council and brother of Luis Carlos Galán, the presidential candidate assassinated in August 1989 under orders from Pablo Escobar Gaviria, head of the Medellín Cartel.
Escobar, my ex-lover, was shot to death on December 2, 1993. To bring him down after a hunt that lasted nearly a year and a half, it was necessary to offer a reward of twenty-five million dollars and to employ a Colombian police commando unit specially trained for the purpose, plus some eight thousand men from the state security organizations; the rival drug cartels and the paramilitary groups; dozens of agents from the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, the Navy SEALs, and U.S. Army Delta Force; and U.S. planes with special radar as well as money from some of the richest men in Colombia.
Two days earlier, in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, I had accused the