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The devil finally got evicted.
Medellín officials started tearing down a long-abandoned house tied to Pablo Escobar on Tuesday, after the decaying compound devolved into a nighttime hangout for drug users, hookups and what authorities describe as satanic rituals.
The property sits on a roughly 20,000-square-foot lot in El Diamante No. 2, a pocket of the upscale El Poblado district.
Escobar’s wife, Victoria Eugenia Henao, bought it in 1979, back when the cocaine king was building an estimated $30 billion fortune by supplying as much as 80% of the planet’s cocaine.
City officials reported finding graffiti and other items pointing to occult activity inside, along with signs of drug use. Photos of the interior show a red star daubed on a tiled wall and floors buried in trash.
Neighbor Lina María Echeverry said groups regularly met at the house for sex, rituals and drugs. Its notorious history also drew foreigners and other visitors on so-called narco-tours, which cash in on the Escobar legend.
“In Medellín there is no place for glorifying drug trafficking,” acting Mayor Manuel Villa Mejía, who also serves as the city’s security secretary said.
Villa said the city can’t keep letting “places tied to the criminal past” be used to promote narco-tourism, and framed the teardown as a step toward leaving behind spaces that feed “notions of violence, of darkness and worship of criminal structures.”
The government has been circling the property for two decades. Prosecutors froze it in 2004, and in 2018 it was handed to Frisco, a state fund for seized criminal assets run by the Special Assets Society, or SAE. A court finalized the forfeiture in 2020.
Before crews moved in, the city’s disaster risk agency inspected the structure and gave its blessing, and a local coexistence inspector signed the final demolition order. The land stays with the SAE for now, though it could eventually pass to the city for an infrastructure project.
It’s not the first Escobar landmark Medellín has wiped off the map. In 2019, the city imploded the Monaco, the eight-story concrete fortress where the drug lord’s family lived in the 1980s, using 180 detonators as roughly 1,600 people watched.
The site was slated to become a park and memorial, and then-President Iván Duque said history would now be written “in recognition of the victims.”
Escobar was killed on a Medellín rooftop in December 1993 during a joint US-Colombian operation.