This Friday will be demolished the building of Monaco, emblem of Pablo Escobar

Three seconds It is precisely this moment that should delay the demolition of one of the emblematic symbols of drug trafficking in Colombia: the Monaco building, the last big home of the bloodthirsty Capo Pablo Escobar family, a safe haven for the famous "narcotours" and where the war began between the posters of Medellin and Cali.

The eight-storey white structure, nowadays abandoned, located in one of the most exclusive areas of Medellin, El Poblado, has existed for more than 30 years. After pbading through several landlords, the authorities finally decided to demolish it to pay homage to the nearly 50,000 victims left by the narco war.

"We can not ignore the story, but we can leave room for other protagonists in this story, to let people know that we live in a time when up to 10 bombs a month." In the last three months of 1989, the country suffered 100 bombings. ", justified Manuel Villa, private secretary of the office of the mayor of Medellin.

The Monaco building was built in the mid 80's on an approximate area of ​​5,000 square meters, after Escobar bought two mansions in the San Maria district of Los Angeles, to build a luxurious and eccentric residence for his family, where his family would stay. his wife María Victoria Henao and her children Manuela and Juan Pablo.

The residence was the embodiment of the eccentricities that characterized the drug traffickers of the time. Billiard rooms, rooms with private Jacuzzi, a basement with a collection of vintage cars, another collection of works of art and even tunnels arranged for a possible escape.

Everything changed on January 13, 1988, two years after its construction. The Cali cartel detonated a car bomb containing 80 kilograms of explosives at the entrance to the building. The structure, with reinforced columns, rooftop bars and panic rooms, withstood the impact. While the windows were destroyed, about four blocks.

Several works of art and cars from the Escobar collection have suffered from the attack, but his family has survived. Although he left three dead and 10 wounded. It was the official start of a war to the death between the drug cartels, which subjected the country to a wave of bloody violence, which ended only during the badbadination of the capo on December 2, 1993.

The building became the headquarters of the Christian Associa- tion and Reintegration Association (Asocar) until 1997, when the National Narcotics Directorate of the time entrusted it to Carisma, an institution dedicated to rehabilitation. addicts. And in 1999, he was transferred to the administrative and financial section of the prosecutor's office, where he would again be in a war situation.

On February 19, 2000, a group of heavily armed men entered their facilities and opened fire on their windows. A few minutes after leaving the building, he blew up a bomb containing 40 pounds of explosives during an attack against officials of the Technical Investigation Corps (CTI) of the prosecutor 's office.

Finally, in 2008, Monaco was again the subject of a domain extinction and was entrusted to the national police. Now, the building will become a three-day park that will be delivered in November of this year. Some will show how the city was before the era of violence under Escobar, a second will be a wall in the center of the square to remind the 46,200 victims of drug trafficking and the last a kind of urban forest.