The collection of art that the Escobar family has kept in Monaco's building

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On the day of the attack, Pablo Escobar rose at 4:30 am to accompany his partner, Jorge Luis Ochoa, to José María Córdova International Airport, who was planning to settle for a long time in Brazil and asked Pablo to accompany him. the first days. Escobar accepted. Dawn saved his life, the capodaud had a well deserved reputation as a night owl: he always made the most important decisions of the organization between three and five o'clock in the morning. It is no coincidence that the Renault 21, loaded with eight hundred kilograms of dynamite and escorted by four Samurai trucks, exploded in front of his house, an eight-storey building in the Santa Maria district of Los Angeles. he called Monaco. at 5:10 am from sunrise.

The bomb in Escobar's bunker and his family not only rocked the south of Medellín. He also discovered another "new bomb" immediately known in the country and in the world: the fortune found inside the building. Precious collector cars in the basement, works of art that were to be destroyed, Greek sculptures, Chinese vases, lamps and imported furniture, objects of superior value to the house she -even.

Today, thirty-one years after the attack on Escobar's mansion, it was announced that it would be demolished, said the private secretary of the office of the Mayor of Medellín, Manuel Villa, "tell the right story," he said. "The fall of the author's symbol and the illegality". Once demolished, a memorial in honor of the victims will be built on the ground.

Let's go back to January 1988, a few hours after the attack.

The luxury of the Monaco building knocked out all those who could go there. The weather He titled on Friday, January 15 "There were works of art even in the washroom" and revealed the detailed inventory conducted by the Criminal Investigation Judges for two consecutive days and recorded in a Memorandum of property of the Escobar Henao family.

On the second floor of the building, a kind of waiting room and meetings. There were works of art. More than ten oil paintings by Fernando Botero (including an autographed painting to the owner of the house: "A Victoria, Fernando"); five of Obregón, one of Francisco Antonio Cano (paintings of Picbado (among these few intaglios and a sepia drawing of the series Erótica and Mujer con sombrero, 1938), a Miró, three of Darío Morales, some works of Enrique Grau, d. Oswaldo Guayasamín, Igor Mitoraj, some of Luis Caballero, David Manzur, and at the back of the floor, the furthest point from the center of the explosion, two paintings of Dalí oil, Dance and silkscreen for a play in small format.

Since the day of the attack, the building was sealed and guarded by the Medellin police to prevent looting. A month later, when the legal process ended, the police removed the security of the place. Escobar asked his brother-in-law, Mario Henao Vallejo, to draw up an inventory of the total damage caused by the destruction, in order to establish that works and objects had been damaged during the attack. .

The critic and art historian Álvaro Medina has told an anecdote about the car bomb that he has known. The photograph of a painting of Darío Morales half-destroyed and whose frame was detached from the canvas appeared in an article by The weather. When the newspaper appears, a friend of Morales sends him to Cartagena. Three days later, Morales called Allvaro Medina in tears and told him that he had never thought of the best painting he had painted: a naked woman, ironing, that Medina had seen in the workshop. de Morales in Paris a few years ago, when they both lived in France, was in the hands of Escobar. He never thought that a gangster was the owner of his best job. Grief ended up securing the cancer that he suffered, he died at the end of this year in Paris.

Although we often repeat that mafiosi, because of their weak academic background, ignored the history of art, capricious or pathological accumulators were victims of scams, adulterations and their bad taste. Some of them have formed vast collections recommended by recognized gallerists or major European and North American auction houses. The magazine Vanity Fair published in mid-1992 a report on Pablo Escobar (In the footsteps of Medellin's drug lord) and his war on two fronts: while fighting the government because of extradition, he was involved in another war against the brothers Rodriguez Orejuela and their badociates in Cali. They were different. Escobar liked to fight, Rodríguez Orejuela preferred to buy information. The magazine states that "Rodriguez has done everything to be socially acceptable." While he was imprisoned in Spain in 1985 for opening drug markets in Europe, he retained the services of a cultural advisor in order not to interrupt his history of art clbades, he sent his children to Oxford, which brought him good dividends. "

Similarly, some dealers or sellers of counterfeits have been executed. Like Mauren José Ramírez, who in the eighties sold to Pablo Escobar four vases of the Chen-Tsung dynasty for about one billion Colombian pesos at the time. The head of the Medellín cartel has asked for a certificate of authenticity from a trusted curator. He refused to say that the vases were replicas made in Ráquira, Boyacá. A few weeks later, Ramírez is shot in a street in Medellín. When Escobar himself was killed, we talked a lot about his Picbados, Mirós and Boteros. In fact, in the second season of the Narcos series, NetflixThere is reference to several works of art that the wife of Escobar bought from a Spanish merchant.

Finally, what happened to the works of art owned by the Escobar Henao family in the Monaco building and its dozens of other properties? Despite the difficulty of retracing the origin of these works and the rarity – and the unreliability – of people or sources who have had the opportunity to know this collection and who have survived the war to the death between the cartel of Escobar and a clandestine group called the Pepes (persecuted by Pablo Escobar); These are the possible scenarios of the antioqueoque capo art collection:

Flight: the Pepes attacked the houses in which Escobar had money or works of art, for example, Carlos Castaño (military leader of Pepes) was found with a picture of Dalí (Dance The Seven Living Arts, an oil – 84 x 116 centimeters – acquired in the United States in the eighties) during an operation in Medellín, like the painting of the Spanish painter, many works were stolen in Los Pepes, that is, middle-ranking police, search block, others.

Cambiazos: Some work was changed during court proceedings, once the police operation completed or legalized. I give you an example, the weapon of Pablo Escobar who changed Hugo Aguilar (then commander of the research block) the day they killed the capodas, this afternoon of December 1993, Aguilar was heading towards the body of the trophy, with Escobar lifeless, he stopped his chronometer at 2:50 in the afternoon and gave it to an officer so that he could occupy a post in front of Dijin. Immediately, he changed his nine-millimeter pistol to Capo's Sig Sauer, which is three crimes: theft, misappropriation of funds and the manipulation of evidence.

War payments: Once the war against Los Pepes ended, the widow of Escobar and her son Juan Pablo had to face the reparation of the conflict. They lost the war and had to pay the fees, they paid the dome of Pepes as it was a real estate fair with listings of properties, buildings, decorations, stables, decorative art and renowned paintings, that's what Juan Pablo Escobar tells in his book Pablo Escobar, my father.

Some factual data and images were extracted from the press archives of The weather, Week of publications, the book The Mrs.ory of Pablo Escobarand private files.

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