Sebastián Marroquín

Biography

The name Sebastián Marroquín entered his life after 1993. Before that the man was called Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, and in Colombia the surname determined almost everything.

He was born on 24 February 1977 in Medellín, the son of Pablo Escobar and Victoria Eugenia Henao Vallejo. His childhood was spent mostly at the Hacienda Nápoles estate, and the family travelled to the United States and other countries. From 1984, after the conflict began between the Medellín Cartel and the state, the house was repeatedly searched, and in January 1988 the family was among those affected by a car bomb at the Monaco building. In 1991 his father surrendered to the authorities and was placed in the La Catedral prison in Envigado; in 1992 he escaped. In 1993 the family tried to leave the country: first for the United States (they were stopped at the Bogotá airport), then for Germany, from where, after questioning in the international transit zone, they were put on a plane back to Colombia. Pablo Escobar died on 2 December 1993; the circumstances of his death are still debated. Juan Pablo was sixteen. In his first remarks to journalists he threatened his father’s killers, and a few minutes later he told the journalist Yamid Amat by telephone that he would not seek revenge. He later described a meeting with representatives of the Cali Cartel and the group Los Pepes, which he attended without expecting to survive. His mother handed over property to her husband’s enemies in exchange for her son’s life.

After several refusals of asylum the family left for Mozambique, but stayed there only a few days, and then settled in Argentina, where they arrived on tourist visas. Before they left Colombia the authorities changed their names and surnames: his mother became María Isabel Santos Caballero, he himself Juan Sebastián Marroquín Santos, his sister Juana Manuela. In an interview with Skavlan he said that he needed a new identity because airlines would not sell him tickets under the name Escobar. What part was played by the decision of the Colombian authorities, and what part by his own choice of a name from the telephone book, is not clear from the available material.

He graduated from university with a degree in architecture and also received training in industrial design. In Buenos Aires he founded the architecture studio Box Arquitectura Latinoamericana and the clothing label Escobar Henao, for which he uses unpublished documents of his father’s. He lives in the Palermo district.

His first public project was the Argentine documentary “Sins of My Father” (2009; in Spain and Latin America also shown as “Pecados de mi padre”), which took five years to make. In it he asks forgiveness of the sons of people killed on his father’s orders. Later he met some of the victims’ relatives.

Under his former name, Juan Pablo Escobar, he published the book “Pablo Escobar: My Father” (2014), followed by “Pablo Escobar in fraganti” (2016). The 2014 book ends with a dedication: “To my father, who showed me the path not to follow.” In 2025 a graphic novel, “Escobar, una educación criminal”, appeared. He gives lectures on the drug trade and its consequences, and in May 2024 he took part in the Serbian talk show “Veče sa Ivanom Ivanovićem”.

He has returned to Colombia twice: to his father’s grave and, according to some accounts, to the premiere of the documentary. He was not allowed into Hacienda Nápoles, which the state confiscated and which is now a park and museum. When a location scout for the series “Narcos” was murdered in Mexico, he said that only the names had changed, and that there was now even more drug trafficking and corruption.