He was able to control eighty percent of all trafficked cocaine. He became a ruthless man who controlled the media and part of the government. Who would’ve thought that someone who was born in a poverty environment, and once thought of becoming the President of Colombia would end up becoming the biggest criminal in Colombia’s history. He became a merciless murder drug lord. Pablo Escobar went on to become the biggest drug kingpin in the history. He was born on December 1, 1949, in Envigado a small town close to Medellin, Colombia, in a poor neighborhood where he grew up in poverty. When he was a teenager he moved to the city of Medellin, where his criminal activity resembled. Pablo started to become a criminal by stealing tombstones, sandblasting …show more content…
After buying the coca paste him and his brother Roberto Escobar would refine it and eventually smuggled it in small planes to Panama. His business was starting to grow. He was smuggling $500,000 worth of coke into Panama. According to Hutt, “The costs of this small-scale smuggling were high though. Bribing managers of airports could cost up to $300,000 for a round trip, which meant larger shipments were needed for big profits.” Escobar needed to smuggle more cocaine in order to become powerful and that meant he needed to start his own cartel. In 1975 Fabio Restrepo, a drug trafficker from Medellin was murdered, most likely under Pablo’s orders, Escobar later took charge of Restrepo’s cartel. Along with the Ochoa brothers, Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Jorge Jr, they took over the Medellin drug trade and the Medellin Cartel was born. In 1976 Pablo Escobar and some of his men were arrested coming back from Ecuador with a shipment of coca paste. After many failing attempts to bribe the judges, the arresting officers were murdered, this helped Escobar to avoid prosecution, that would not be the only time Escobar would be behind bars, he would later be reencounter with