This research examines the impact and legacy of Pablo Escobar in Colombia. The research will set forth the context and background in which Escobar's high public profile emerged and then discuss how he was able to consolidate power in the country, with a view toward evaluating present-day attitudes toward him and his activities.
The legacy of Pablo Escobar in Colombia begins with the country's problematic social and political status through much of the 20th century. In his book on Escobar, Bowden says that the modern history of Colombia starts with the 1948 murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a progressive socialist of indigenous Colombian origin whose populist appeal and social-reform agenda ameliorated the sharp political divisions between the country's capitalist and Marxist elites. Gaitán, says Bowden, "seemed poised to lead Colombia to a lawful, just, peaceful future. He tapped the deepest yearnings of his countrymen." In the wake of Gaitán's death--he was shot dead on a busy Bogota street by a "frustrated mystic with grandiose delusions"--massive protest ensued that evolved into rioting so massive that it developed a life of its own, well beyond the control of the Colombian leftists on whom the government blamed it. Fidel Castro, then a student and budding revolutionary, was in Bogotá and had been scheduled to meet with Gaitán the day of the murder; in part because Colombian leftists were unable to exploit the riots for revolutionary momentum, Castro left town.
El Bogotazo, the name initially given to the rioting, spread from Bogota to other cities, and although the rioting was quelled in the short term, it morphed into what would be called La Violencia. Indeed, despite brief periods of respite and attempts at social reform over the next 40-plus years, Colombia was distinguished by a critical mass of violence implicit in the persistence of income maldistribution, lack of upward social and economic mobility, the creation ...