Pablo Escobar’s Personal Hitman Reveals How Many People He Killed
In an interview with The Mirror, Pablo Escobar’s personal hitman John Jairo Velásquez has opened up about the years he spent working for the notorious drug lord.
Explaining that he was first hired (at just 17-years-old) as a bodyguard for one of Escobar’s mistresses, John (known as Popeye) stayed on even after the relationship ended. As he explained:
“When I first met Escobar it was like I had seen a God. He had this huge presence, like an aura around him.
He had incredible magnetism but was exaggeratedly plain. The day I looked in Pablo Escobar’s eyes I knew there and then I would die for him if need be.”
Over the following years, Popeye personally killed 300 people - among them journalists, politicians, members of rival cartels and “traitors” of Escobar’s own - and orchestrated the deaths of up to 3,000 more. He was the mastermind behind countless car bombings, and was also responsible for various high-profile kidnappings. In 1988, he was the one to kidnap (and eventually murder) Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos (below), and he also once kidnapped mayoral candidate Andres Pastrana.
He doesn’t, however, feel any remorse for the lives he has taken:
“You have to understand I was a professional killer. Whenever I took a life, I didn’t feel anything. Not shame, not sadness, not happiness, it was simply like a day at the office carrying out Don Pablo’s orders.
Killing was too easy. I was in a war and they were killing my family, my friends and my colleagues. I found them beheaded and with hands and limbs cut off.
They put my friends alive in the incinerators, they were throwing them from helicopters from more than 1,000ft in the rainforest. I found my friends with their knees, teeth and brain drilled.”
Popeye accompanied Escobar to prison (during the five years he served in Colombia), and the killing continued from there. Giving an example, Velásquez explained that Don Pablo discovered some of the men in his cartel were siphoning off profits, and so invited them to the prison for “a chat”. But there wasn’t a lot of talking. As Popeye explained:
““I cut off their legs and arms, then burned the bodies. They wronged, we righted it.”
Velásquez surrendered in 1992 (the year before Escobar was killed) and has served 22 years in prison (for the murder of politician Luis Carlos Galan - the only one he was ever convicted of). He was released last year, and now lives in a top secret location, under 24-hour guard.
He believes that there is around an 80% chance that his enemies will one day find and kill him.
H/T / Image Credits: The Mirror, The Telegraph
