Pablo Escobar’s widow revealed who got the drug lord’s fortune

Pablo Escobar’s widow, Victoria Eugenia Henao, confessed that, after Pablo Escobar’s death, the boss’s enemies summoned her to settle scores. The drug trafficker died with some outstanding balances with other drug traffickers and not for debts but for revenge. CHenao says that they forced her to have a meeting with them and hand over several properties, even those that had been seized by the State.

This is how the woman related it in her book My life and my prison with Pablo Escobar where he assured that the charges made to him 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 of 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 …

Victoria says that she had to enter into a negotiation with “the main drug lords in Colombia”, led by 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.

For the negotiation, he had to organize a team of seven lawyers and two accounting advisers to put together the list of assets with which he was going to pay what the drug traffickers were asking of him. In the end, they managed to make available 62 assets that Escobar had left, several of them were seized by the government.

Victoria Account:

“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 to me that they agreed to receive 50% of the debt in seized assets and the remaining percentage in properties ready to market, of course, 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 “

This is how the woman divided the properties given to the drug traffickers:

– Paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño, at the request of his brother, Fidel Castaño, he was left with a nine hectare lot located in the Montecasino mansion. The Castaños also took over at least a dozen lots in downtown Medellín, where they built several hotels. Those two paramilitary chiefs were also left with two paintings worth more than 3 million dollars.

– Several capos, of whom he did not give the names, divided up a complex of apartment towers in El Poblado and a farm in the Llanos Orientales, which had a landing strip.

– To ‘Comandante Chaparro’ he gave two farms, one with a landing strip and the other next to a river, along with this, machines from the Hacienda Napoles, among them, an expensive motor grader and a power plant.

– Leonidas Vargas told the widow that her husband owed her a million dollars. For this reason, she gave him a plane from Pablo Escobar, which the Prosecutor’s Office had ordered to return to the capo’s family, after being confiscated for 10 years. He also gave him some light airplanes and helicopters, as well as Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes Benz cars, high-cylinder motorcycles, boats and jet skis, they were also part of the negotiation.

According to Forbes magazine calculations, and from a profile published in Vanity Fair in 1992, Pablo Escobar earned $ 100 million a month.

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