![]() "If all that fails to work, this last button emits a frequency that destroys the eardrum," he once told her.īut after a year together, their relationship started to corrode when Escobar confessed to a chilling reprisal on a previous girlfriend who became pregnant by another man. So they liked huge animals and all his huge toys were spread around the ranch." These included what Escobar called his "James Bond car" – it had a dashboard studded with buttons that set off tear gas, oil slicks, smoke, explosives and even a flame-thrower. "It was corny because these people had no taste. When I ask about Escobar's famously lavish spending, she laughs. I also saw what he was doing for poor people." Everyone in my country smoked contraband Marlboro and it felt like selling contraband cigarettes. "No one knew about all the killings, the addicts. "In those days cocaine was more innocent," Vallejo claims. Penelope Cruz plays Virginia Vallejo in the film Loving Pablo. He dyed his hair blond for one and wore glasses and a goatee beard for another, while a friendly Saudi prince had obtained one for him. He became so confident with Vallejo that he showed her his collection of 14 passports. Once asked by a journalist which woman he would most like to bed, the drugs kingpin replied: "Margaret Thatcher." Then his goons followed anyone making a call, finally locating the gang leader and grabbing his entire family.Įscobar wanted help with improving speeches for his political career, but Vallejo says "he never learned to talk properly – he was a criminal". You must realise kidnapping was a plague, with 3,000 a year at the time in Colombia." Escobar tracked down the kidnappers of one friend's sister by placing men beside all 800 phone boxes in Medellin at the time of an agreed call. He told me he had killed 200 kidnappers and then he bought me a Beretta pistol. "I realised then he was not a normal politician. She replies it was soon after their first meeting, "when he put a gun to the head of my ex-husband to force him to sign my divorce papers". I asked Vallejo, now 68 and living in Florida, when she realised Escobar was a crook. Vallejo is dismissive of Escobar's wife Victoria ('she was very small, dark and frankly unattractive') and bitterly dislikes portrayals in dramas such as the Netflix hit Narcos, in which the character of Valeria Velez is clearly based on her. "We did not meet in front of all his hitmen like in those awful television series." "He was married and I was a celebrity," says Vallejo. ![]() She insists they were discreet, often meeting in a flat in a middle-class suburb of the capital Bogota. Vallejo estimates she spent "1,000 hours by his side and maybe another 1,000 in his arms". She describes their affair as "a love story" – they were to meet 220 times over the next five years. He was popular in the city for spending cash on homes, jobs and sports facilities. He took her to meet poor families scraping a living on a stinking dump in the city of Medellin, speaking passionately as a newly elected politician about the need to help such people. Photo / SuppliedĮscobar saved Vallejo from drowning when she was sucked into a whirlpool while swimming during that first encounter at Hacienda Napoles, but she did not fall for him until carrying out his first television interview. ![]() TV reporter Virginia Vallejo interviewing infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1983. ![]() She saw his spectacular rise to become the planet's seventh richest man – then watched his plunge into paranoia as he was hunted like an animal by ruthless paramilitary gangs, Colombian troops and US drug enforcement agents. Few people alive today knew him as well as Vallejo – her book of their time together, Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, has been turned into a film starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as the unlikely couple. "He was a monster but he's been turned into a legend."Ĭertainly there seems an insatiable appetite for books, documentaries and dramas about the man she described to me as "an ugly, fatty peasant" but who became the world's most wanted criminal after cornering the global cocaine market. "I loathe him," she says of the gangster who controlled 80 per cent of world cocaine trade, a man who raped her and even stole her savings to stop her leaving Colombia. Yet ask this former television presenter what she thinks now of Escobar – shot dead by special forces nearly 25 years ago after slaughtering hundreds of innocent people while waging war on Colombia's government – and she takes a very different view.
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