Photos | This is how Victoria Eugenia Henao, Pablo Escobar’s widow, has changed

Victoria Eugenia Henao grew up in a humble neighborhood of Envigado and it was in that environment that she met her future husband and father of her two children, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, at that time, 1973, a young man who was just beginning to take his first steps with drug trafficking.

He, just 24 years old, and she, a girl of just 13 years old and the sister of one of his best friends, Carlos Mario Henao Vallejos. Despite the age difference, they were married three years later, on March 29, 1976. Eleven months later Juan Pablo was born, the first of their two children. The second, a girl named Manuela, would arrive in 1984.

Together with Pablo Escobar, FatherAs she was known to her relatives, she saw the power of the drug trafficker grow, who managed to be one of the most dangerous and powerful men in Colombia.

Escobar died on December 2, 1993, at the age of 44, surrounded by his enemies, alone and cornered, while stumbling barefoot on the roofs of a house in Medellín. One of his policemen who participated in the operation in which he was discharged (although his son maintains that he committed suicide with a bullet behind the ear), posed with his companions with a piece of Escobar’s mustache, like a war trophy.

In an exclusive interview that Victoria Eugenia Henao gave Infobae in 2019, she revealed details of that day that marked her life forever.

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After Escobar fell, his enemies wanted to kill his son, thinking that he could be the heir, the widow said.

“We gave them everything we had, we negotiated. But the life that my son led showed them that he was going to be on the side of good, no wars or following the bloody legacy of his father, “said Henao, who is now called Maria Isabel Santos.

About his book My life and my prison with Pablo Escobar, published in 2018, commented that she was very angry with her husband in the middle of his process of catharsis and introspection when she wrote: “I felt a lot of pain and many times I asked him: ‘What did it mean when you told me so many times that everything you did was for your family?‘”.

Pablo Escobar’s widow also confessed that, after the drug’s death, they were some outstanding balances with other drug traffickers and not for debts but for revenge. Henao says that they forced her to have a meeting with them and give them several properties, even those that had been seized by the State.

This was related by the woman, who assured that the charges made for Pablo Escobar’s debt with other cartels amounted to more than 120 million dollars. According to the woman, paying this sum would ensure that she and her family would not be killed. Those in charge of collecting said money demanded payment as forgiveness for everything they had spent in the war with him and for the damages that he caused them with kidnappings, murders, damage to their properties, among others.

Henao says that he had to enter into a negotiation with “the main drug lords in Colombia,” including the heads of the Cali cartel, the brothers Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, José ‘Chepe’ Santacruz and Hélmer ‘Pacho’ Herrera. This process began in February 1994 and lasted at least eight months, until the woman was able to pay the full balance. Several of the meetings were held at the Club América de Cali headquarters.

Account Henao:

“The meeting was long and tedious, because they dedicated themselves to choosing one by one the 62 goods included in the list that I brought. But unlike our first meeting, it seemed another good sign that they agreed to receive 50% of the debt in seized assets and the remaining percentage in properties ready to market, that yes, free from legal constraints. This appropriation of ‘troubled’ assets had an explanation: their connections in the higher spheres of the State would help them to ‘wash’ Pablo’s assets, leaving out his heirs. What evidently happened “.

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Victoria Eugenia Henao changed her legal name to María Isabel Santos Caballero and moved with her family to Argentina. From there she leads a quiet life as a writer and lecturer. In addition, he says on his Instagram account that he is a specialist in ontological coaching.

On his Instagram account, Pablo Escobar’s widow has more than 187 thousand followers.