When Roberto Escobar Learned the Truth

AlArabiya English

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00:00How did you find out, and what was that moment like when you found out who your birth father was?

00:05Yes, it was 1989, and my adopted father, who was an MI6 secret agent operating in Colombia,

00:13also had an office in Madrid, and I was living on the Costa del Sol in the southern coast of Spain,

00:20designing golf courses with Peter Alice for an urbanization down there.

00:25And I was like, let me think, how old was I, 24 years old, getting on with life.

00:31I knew I'd had an interesting childhood.

00:33Obviously, you remember things, and I'd had an extremely volatile, violent childhood living in Colombia.

00:40But, you know, we didn't have the Internet.

00:43I'd got on with my life, and I was living down there, and my adopted father rang me up and said,

00:47I need you to come out to Madrid.

00:50I've got some stuff to talk to you about.

00:51So I went up there, and we had a nice long chat, and we went to see Full Metal Jacket, the movie.

00:58And he started to talk to me about stuff.

01:01And, you know, he basically broke it in easily, like something like, you know,

01:05do you remember the guy we used to go and see in Medellín, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

01:08And he slowly but surely started to reveal stuff.

01:10And then he said, well, of course, that guy was your father.

01:13And I'm a grown-up, so I understood adoption and who my father was.

01:18But we didn't have the Internet.

01:19You can't just Google, oh, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, and just suddenly know everything.

01:24We didn't know anything back then.

01:25We just replied on the newspapers and stuff like that and what we heard on the news.

01:29So I didn't really know what a – I knew what a drug dealer was, but I didn't have this – I mean,

01:36if you mention Pablo Escobar to someone today, they'll know instantly who you're talking about.

01:40But back then, we didn't really know anything.

01:41So it wasn't a dramatic shock.

01:44It was a shock to me that the guy that we used to meet who used to put his hand on my shoulder

01:48and say, mi hijo, my son, and that turns out that he was my father.

01:54This started a conversation which went on right until my adopted father's death in 93,

01:59which is the same year as my real father died.

02:02And he was taking me through my life, basically.

02:05Does that help you a bit?

02:07What are your first memories of being in Colombia?

02:10My very, very first memories are just fleeting glimpses of a milk bottle on a windowsill

02:18and some lime green paint peeling off a wall.

02:22That's some very early memories.

02:25Later on, my adopted father explained those things to me,

02:29which I wrote about in the first chapter of my book in great detail

02:34because they're very early memories that had no explanation behind them

02:37until I had these conversations with my adopted father many years later, you know, in 1989.

02:44And we started talking about these things and what they meant.

02:48And also, I used to have, I still do a few, but I used to have a lot more nightmares

02:52and woke up screaming and all this sort of stuff and couldn't sleep properly.

02:56And I had all these sort of problems as a child.

02:59And it is all to do with the violent start of my life.

03:03And so, to answer your question, the memories aren't, you know, whole memories.

03:08They're violent noises and sights that I saw.

03:12I mean, you know, I still remember today.

03:16You know, I don't know if you've ever seen someone be shot in front of you through the head,

03:19but it's a horrific experience.

03:21And when you see that right in front of you as a child, you kind of, you never forget that.

03:26It's the lack of animation in the human body as it falls to the floor

03:30and the blood spurting out onto the wall behind.

03:33You never forget that sort of thing.

03:36And this is, you know, the drama and the trauma that I grew up in as a child.

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