Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

Resumen del Libro

In 1983 Virginia Vallejo was, at thirty three, Colombia’s number one television star. A sophisticated socialite, the multilingual professional beauty had been courted by the country’s traditional billionaires when she met and fell in love with a man named Pablo Escobar. The ambitious politician of humble origins -also thirty-three – introduced the elegant anchor-woman to a new world of unbelievable wealth in which never-ending floods of money poured into his charitable works and the campaign of the Presidential candidate of his choice, at a time when both Forbes and Fortune listed him as the seventh richest man in the world. This book describes the birth of the cocaine industry and the evolution of one of the most powerful criminal minds of all times, Escobar’s legendary capacity for corruption and terror, and the links between his trade and the Caribbean dictators, the Colombian Governments of the past quarter of the century, and the U.S. Secret Service. In the early stages of what later became a multi-faceted and stormy romantic relationship, the television journalist who inspired the drug baron’s passion also became his witness of choice for his capacity to subdue presidents and dictators, the extreme right and the extreme left, and everyone who crossed his path in what he considered a fight for a nationalistic cause. The love story of five years between the screen diva and The Colombian Robin Hood is one of glamour and joy, but also one of enduring suffering and shame. It goes from her luxurious suites at the most elegant hotels in the world, New York and Beverly Hills, Venice and Zürich, Mexico and Rio, the Hamptons mansions and the Park Avenue penthouses, to Escobar’s ranch, a 6,200 acre spread, a tiny island in the Colombian Caribbean and the Berlin Wall in 1989. After her relationship with Escobar ended in 1987 -and especially after his death in 1993- Virginia Vallejo became a social pariah: she was blacklisted, threatened, scorned and…