Drug lord's son trying atone for father's many sins

[Lucinda F. Boyd]

Sebastian Marroquin, son of columbian drug dealer Pablo Escobar

CALGARY — In 2007, Sebastian Marroquin set off on a journey of atonement. He sat down and wrote letters to two young men whose fathers were brutally murdered.

"It took me three months to write the letters," says the soft-spoken 35-year-old, as we sit together at the John Howard Society office in Calgary Wednesday afternoon.

Speaking through an interpreter, he adds: "Any wrong word could offend them."

Marroquin didn't have a hand in the killing of their two fathers. When the men were gunned down in the 1980s, he was a child — a child born to one of the world's most feared and most violent criminals.

"It is a belief in my culture that the sons carry the sins of the father," he says. "I wanted to write my own story."

The story of Marroquin's father is a sensational and well-known one. In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar was listed by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh-richest man. It was the way he accumulated a fortune of at least $3 billion US, though, that set him apart from the other heirs and titans of industry on that list.

As kingpin of the Medellin drug cartel, Escobar oversaw a criminal business that raked in billions and terrorized his home country of Colombia. A ruthless boss, he ordered the assassinations of several prominent politicians, heads of the police forces, along with the blowing up of an airliner, the offices of a national newspaper and Colombia's intelligence headquarters.

By the time of Escobar's death in 1993 at age 44, many believed Escobar's victims numbered not in the hundreds, but in the thousands.

Marroquin is in Calgary to show his 94-minute documentary film entitled Sins of My Father, in which he chronicles his story of growing up as the son of a scion of organized crime, along with his meeting of three sons of two of his father's victims, men who have helped him to heal the hurts of the past.

On Friday, he will be featured at a full-day symposium, along with a panel of restorative justice professionals, discussing how individuals can heal from past victimization.

As a young boy, he was blissfully unaware of the violent world he had been born into, says Marroquin, who changed both his first and last names while a teenager on the run.

"It was just our backyard," he says of the family's ranch, which included a full-scale zoo and an airplane landing strip.

"We also had life-size dinosaur models in our backyard. But I didn't know any different," says Marroquin, then known by his given names Juan Pablo, of the home he also shared with mother Maria Victoria and younger sister Manuela.

"My father had a regular office, but he started work each day at 11 a.m. and didn't get home until after 1 a.m."

That all changed in 1984, when after the assassination of Colombia's Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the United States authorized the use of Delta Force and the CIA to bring in their prime suspect after Escobar fled his luxurious prison cell.

"Suddenly, everything changed, we started moving around," Marroquin says of a life on the run that before and after his father's death would take him to Panama, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Switzerland and Argentina — where he lives today with his wife and works as an architect.

"I remember being seven years old, the principal hid me under his desk while the police searched for me. I remember seeing the boots of the officers."

Marroquin makes no excuses for his father.

Although "he was gentle with us, his family," he is well aware that Escobar was also a brutal criminal who committed countless atrocities, earning him worldwide infamy.

When Argentine filmmaker Nicolas Entel approached him, he was apprehensive. "I had rejected many proposals," he says.

It wasn't until Entel wrote out his vision for the project that Marroquin relented. "I felt we could make a difference together."

Today, he continues to try to make amends to other victims, yet not always with the same success.

"It is very hard to talk to someone with a gun on their desk," he says, noting he is well aware "death could come at any time" at the hands of a vengeful family member.

Despite this, he says "I sleep way better now," as a man who speaks out on the healing powers of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Has it healed him, though?

"The scars are still there," he says of his heavy inheritance. "But the wounds are closed. I have hope that peace is possible, in all levels of society."

Calgary Herald

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