Drug lord’s home now a zoo

[Judi Lynn]

Drug lord’s home now a zoo
Rory Carroll and Sibylla Brodzinsky

Tourists flock here to gawk at the ruins of Pablo Escobar’s hubris

Hacienda Napoles was once the playground of the world’s most notorious drug lord, a bacchanalian expression of criminal wealth and power, but today it stands as a monument to his extinction.

Pablo Escobar used this 1,500-hectare ranch in central Colombia in the 1980s to host wild parties and strike business deals, as well as to house his collection of exotic animals — and fake, life-size dinosaurs. Colombian authorities hunted down and killed the billionaire narco-trafficker in 1993 and now the hacienda embodies his downfall. The mansion is gutted, the swimming pools are empty and the site has been turned into a heritage park and zoo. Tourists flock here to gawk at the ruins of one man’s hubris.

An exhibition of photographs, culminating in Escobar’s bloodied, chubby corpse sprawled on a Medellin rooftop, is titled “Triumph of the State.” A museum narrative tells how Colombia overthrew the drug lord and was reborn with “new values.” In a surreal touch, speakers hidden in tree stumps fill the air with dinosaur moans and roars.

The message is clear: Escobar and his kind are gone.

“That’s all history now. I’m actually more interested in seeing the animals than Escobar’s old stuff,” said Eduardo Torres (22), a tourist, while feeding carrots to a hippo. Recent events, however, suggest Escobar’s legacy is far from extinct. A new generation of drug traffickers has emerged and energetically applied his strategy of corrupting politicians and security forces to smooth cocaine’s passage overseas. “After the death of Pablo Escobar we were told that the days of the big capos were over. That was clearly a lie,” said Gustavo Duncan, a political analyst.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/11/27/stories/2008112753301300.htm

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Some of his 16 rare "Colombian" hippos.