The man who killed Pablo Escobar

A policeman accused of drug trafficking haha ironies.

In December 1993, Colonel Hugo Aguilar rose to fame for having killed Pablo Escobar, the most dangerous drug trafficker in the history of Colombia. The photo traveled the world: Aguilar, smiling, with the rifle in one hand and lifting Escobar's body with the other, looked proudly at the camera.

The Colombian Prosecutor's Office has arrested him for alleged money laundering and illicit enrichment.

They shot him down a day after his 44th birthday. Escobar had been locked up in a residence located in the west of the city. He seemed like he had no escape. Álvaro de Jesús Agudelo, alias “Limón”, one of his assassins, waited for the troops with a submachine gun, but was shot down. However, this gave Escobar time to escape through the roofs of the houses.

Steve Murphy, one of the DEA agents present, recalled in his book Manhunt: How We Got Pablo Escobar, that Pablo “climbed barefoot out the window and onto the roof of the next house trying to escape. He kept close to the wall of another dwelling, which was to the right of the window. That wall protected him a little from the agents on the ground, but not from those who were chasing him. Escobar was carrying two pistols and fired at the officers behind him as he walked across the roof. Those men and those on the ground returned fire and hit Escobar several times.

One of those men was Aguilar. Having assassinated Escobar made him a hero and catapulted him to political stardom: he was a deputy and later ran for governor of the Department of Santander, where he is from. He won. However, he was later found guilty of doing “para-politics”, that is, of using the force of the paramilitaries to win the vote, and he ended up in jail.

In 2013, Hugo Aguilar Naranjo was sentenced to nine years in prison. When he had served three quarters of his sentence, he was released, on the condition that he pay US$1,326,000 to paramilitary victims. He did not pay them, he declared himself financially insolvent, although weeks later, the media released an image of him driving a US $ 73,000 Porsche.

As a result of that, an investigation was initiated that verified that he had an immense fortune in the name of third parties. So they took away all the benefits he had obtained, and he had to go back to jail. He was released for serving his sentence five months ago, in August 2022.