“My father shouldn’t be portrayed as a success story because he never got to enjoy anything,” ex-drug lord Pablo Escobar’s son said Thursday, lamenting that many young people dream of following in his glorified father’s footsteps on a series Netflix.
Invited by the municipality of Santiago to a transparency council, Sebastian Marroquin sharply criticized the “drug culture” that he believes is propagated by the media and series such as “Le patron du mal”.
“Today, 30 years after his death, Pablo Escobar is generating more information than when he was alive,” he said during a conference in the Chilean capital.
Deploring the glorification of criminal activity and the character of Pablo Escobar, he said that today “a lot of young people write to me and say: I’ve seen the movie, I’ve seen the series and I want to be like your father”.
Sebastian Marroquin, born Juan Pablo Escobar, assumed this identity at the age of 16 when he and his family moved to Buenos Aires following the death of Pablo Escobar, the late leader of the Medellín cartel, who was killed by Colombian security forces in 1993 took refuge.
“My father shouldn’t be held up as a success story because he never got to enjoy anything. I feel a lot richer than my father because I’m a free man,” he said, adding that he is now friends with most of the children of drug dealers who were his father’s enemies and asked forgiveness from hundreds of his victims.
When asked how he thinks we can end drug trafficking and the violence that results from it, he said he supports legalizing drug use because “the whole prohibition machine has created that connection.”