In order to build a different future for his family and for himself Juan Pablo Escobar, the only male son of Colombian drug trafficker and criminal Pablo Escobar, He decided to get away from his father’s murky businesses and embrace a path of redemption and peace. He is currently an architect, industrial designer, writer, pacifist and lecturer. His determination for spreading a message of peace has led him to give talks worldwide, where he shares the terrible consequences of drug trafficking and advocates non -violence.

Rarely a story manages to unite, in the same story, the most feared words of a country, the weight of a surname turned into myth and the silent miracle of someone who decides to break with everything that is expected of him. Juan Pablo Escobar, son of the most feared and powerful drug trafficker of the twentieth century, tells his story not to justify, but to warn. Not to exalize, but to explain.

We were able to listen to him in the first LQDVI Corporate Congressof the foundation what really matters. A meeting in Madrid that brought together professionals from the world of the company with the premise of disseminating values ​​as emotional tools to strengthen leadership, promote corporate culture and reflect on social issues of relevance. Thus explained Pilar Cánovas, its director, the motivation of this meeting to Reason.WHY:

During an intimate and brave talk, Escobar shared his experience with a mixture of honesty, pain, memory and hope. His intervention was much more than a testimony: he invited the Reflection on identity, power, emotional inheritance and the value of choosing a different path. And it is that theirs is a deeply personal story, but that resonates beyond its history: it is the example of how each of us can decide who we want to be, even when everything seems dictated beforehand.

From Reason.WHY We were able to chat in private with Juan Pablo Escobar minutes before his speech. An interview in which he spoke, for example, how he has managed “the most negative brand” in the world. Here you can read the full interview.

“I grew between the tenderness of a father and the ferocity of a bandit, in a world of ostentation, luxury and enjoyment, surrounded by money, but at all solitude “. Thus condenses Juan Pablo Escobar who has been The history of your childhood. But “Unlike my father, I chose the path of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. Because forgiving free and reconciling us restores us. Inviting forgiveness is not inviting to oblivion. It is avoiding sickness of revenge, resentment and pain.”

Break the inherited narrative

At 16, Juan Pablo Escobar was condemned to live exiled, with false identity, without a passport and without homeland. The heritage of his father They were not properties or fortunes. It was a debt of blood, fear and silence. A last name that opened headlines but closed doors. “When my father died, I made one of my life’s greatest mistakes. I said in an interview: “I swear I’m going to kill them all”. Five seconds of fury and a few words that, according to him, could have cost him life. “I quickly understood how, however little we say, we are transforming our reality with the words.”

What said that day was not a threat, but an echo of the violence in which he had grown up. But that echo changed everything and it was the turning point. So instead of becoming the “Escobar 2.0”, decided to break the narrative. He understood that his identity did not have to depend on his last name, he chose to be something else and apologized.

“I am a bandit”

One of the chapters that marked his childhood, as Juan Pablo Escobar tells, happened when he was only seven years old. A moment when he received a confession from his father who would mark his life forever. Pablo Escobar looked him in the eye and said bluntly: “I want you to know who I am, son. I am a bandit and this is what I do to live.”

The child still did not understand that that word implied. Bandidos, in their imagination, were characters with mask and horse. But soon he would understand that his father was the leader of one of the most ruthless criminal organizations in recent history. And while other children played, he I received home lessons about which drugs destroyed more lives. His father even gave him a practical formation: he put all the drugs on the table – hero, LSD, crack, marijuana – and explained its effects one by one. “He told me: cocaine is a poison to sell, but not to consume. So I never tried it.”

That duality, that of the father who did taught him to ride a bicycle but, at the same time, he ordered murders, marked a heartbreaking childhood in the form of a constant paradox with a high emotional invoice.

THE PARADOJA OF THE RICHER NARCO SON IN THE WORLD

There are times when stories become metaphors without wanting it. Juan Pablo remembers in this sense an especially raw episode: the police surrounded his house while he and his family remained hidden, without being able to light a light or make the slightest noise. “We were surrounded by millions of dollars in cash, literally on the home floor. But we had no food because we couldn’t leave. Just a rotten soup that we reheated again and again.”

The contrast is devastating: The son of the most wanted and millionaire man on the planet, dying of hunger in silence. That scene, worthy of a novel by García Márquez, made him understand something fundamental: money, without freedom, is worth nothing. And even more: money without love is just paper. “I looked at those millions and told you: you are here to bring food and love. And I’m starving, without love, with nothing.”

In his story, luxury has no brightness. Only empty. From the exotic animals of the Hacienda Naples Even his birthday piñata full of dollars -which unleashed an avalanche of adults desperate for hunting tickets -, everything in his life has responded to the same truth: having everything does not mean having what is important.

Childhood between luxuries and fear

The images of his childhood are cinematographic, but not because of their beauty, but for their brutality. Real scale dinosaurs. Private airports. More than 700 employees in the family farm. Own gas stations in the house garden. Several helicopters. But opulence did not avoid fear. The bombs also arrived.
The most brutal, in January 1988: The first drug trafficking bomb in Colombia It was directed against the Escobar family. Juan Pablo says he was 11 years old.

“The first victim of drug trafficking was my family. I, my sister, my mother. No one talks about that. But it was so”. That episode not only physically marked the beginning of the war in Colombia. He also symbolized the definitive fracture of his childhood. There was no going back. Every day was a flight, a loss, an emotional exile. And yet, despite living surrounded by luxury, Juan Pablo remembers only one thing clearly: loneliness. “I would have changed all those luxuries to a humble house, with my mother, my father and my sister. Just that.”

Reconciliation as a revolution

Of all the decisions he made, perhaps the most revolutionary was this: look for the children of his father’s enemies to apologize a few years later. Highlighting the son of the head of the Cali cartel, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, directly responsible for the attack that almost costs his life. “I could have been wielding a weapon. If the culture of revenge had followed, I would have done it.”.

But Juan Pablo Escobar decided to hold his hand. Traveling to Cali, gather face to face with the son of the man who ordered the bomb against his family and hug him. Today he says they are friends. They have spoken, shared, cried and together they have chosen break the legacy of hate. “We had to take a foot from that circle of violence and choose a path absolutely unknown to both of us.”
This gesture is not just symbolic. It is a political, emotional and almost spiritual act. In a world where the conflict is often inherited as if it were genetic heritage, breaking the chain is an act of extraordinary courage.

One of the most significant moments in Juan Pablo Escobar’s public career was his participation in the documentary “My father’s sins” (2009), a brave work that broke with silence and traditional narrative around his family. In the documentary, Juan Pablo not only tells his personal history, but also takes an even more important step: he asks for forgiveness, in the first person, to his father’s victims. It does not justify, it does not minimize, does not negotiate pain. It recognizes the damage caused and assumes a gesture of moral responsibility that very few heirs of infamous public figures have had the courage to do. Through that act, not only seeks to honor those who suffered, but also reaffirm their own commitment not to perpetuate hatred or violence that destroyed so many families in Colombia.

Thus, “my father’s sins” was not just a documentary: it was the first great public act with which Juan Pablo Escobar consolidated his role as a spokesman for a new narrativebased on reconciliation and recognition of damage. In the film, Juan Pablo personally apologizes to children of direct victims of narcoterrorism promoted by his father, such as Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, son of the murdered justice of justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla; and Guillermo Gaviria Jr., son of former governor of Antioquia Guillermo Gaviria Correa, also killed in the middle of the conflict. From that moment on, his voice ceased to be only that of the son who survived a criminal’s legacy to become that of a man committed to breaking the hate cycle he inherited: “I undertook a forgiveness that will only end when I could ask my father’s last living victim. On the way, nobody has yet closed the door.”

Choose who you want to be

The great teaching of Juan Pablo Escobar is not that of someone who wants to redeem himself. Is that of someone who He understood that his story could not be repeated. That the last name is an inheritance, but not a conviction. “If I had cling to the last name Escobar, today it would be something else. But I understood that I could choose who wanted to be”.

The message is powerful because it does not support prefabricated phrases. Born from experience, pain and introspection. And it is projected, without forcing it, in the present of many people who, without having grown up in a hacienda with exotic animals, also load with names, environments or expectations that they did not choose.

And how can this be applied in a professional environment? Not from superficial motivation, but from the deep:

• Leadership: Some questions can be asked frequently, such as what kind of leader do we want to be, the one who repeats the model learned or the one who questions it?
• Organizational culture: Many companies inherit ways of operating based on fear, imposition or silence. Changing it requires courage. And time.
• Purpose: Juan Pablo’s story is a reminder that having resources without purpose is like having a piñata full of dollars and having no one to hug when the party ends.
• Reconciliation: The work world is full of underground wars, inherited egos, unsolved conflicts. Sometimes, the most disruptive is not to climb the tension, but reach out.

Peace, identity and legacy

Juan Pablo Escobar’s talk ended with an emotional image: a photograph of The first communion of his father. He says that he is the only one who retains, together with his mother’s, arguing that this image represents the only moment of honesty of Pablo Escobar.

Because, in the end, even among the rubble of a life marked by violence, there are truth fragments. And that is where Juan Pablo Escobar has decided to rebuild himself, without denying the story, but without surrendering to her. “I don’t seek to justify my father. I’m just looking for anyone else to have to go through what we are going through”.

Its history does not end with a moral, or with a formula, but with an choice: to be light when it has grown in the shadow.