The unofficial tours frequently stop at the Monaco Building, an eight-story brutalist apartment tower of reinforced concrete, in the affluent Poblado district, that Escobar built for his family. In 1988, his rivals in the Cali drug cartel placed a powerful car bomb outside the Monaco; Escobar’s mother, wife, and children were inside the tower, and though they sustained no serious injuries, they fled and did not return. Gutiérrez said that he planned to demolish the building and create a park in its place. He’d needed to win over the Medellín police, who had wanted to refurbish it as an intelligence headquarters. Gutiérrez told me that he was waiting for one last signature. When he got it, he said, he would invite me to watch the demolition.

In a gruesome scene from the first season of “Narcos,” Escobar murders two trafficking partners, whom he suspects of withholding money. He kills the first one by beating him to death with a pool cue; when he is finished, his face and clothing spattered with blood, his men beat the other one to death. The story on which the scene is based is hardly less gruesome. According to Popeye’s testimony, the two victims, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, were shot, cut into pieces, and incinerated in a fire pit.

Both the imagined scene and the real killings took place in La Catedral, the prison where Escobar was held after striking a deal to turn himself in, in 1991. An unused drug-rehabilitation center that was renovated to house Escobar, La Catedral occupied a secluded spot on the forested edges of the Envigado plateau, with spectacular views of Medellín. In the deal, Escobar agreed to spend a few years there, in exchange for the government’s commitment not to extradite him to the United States. The prison did little to restrain him; his sicarios served as guards, and he remained involved in the cocaine trade. The key intermediary for his surrender was Rafael García Herreros, an octogenarian priest who had previously accepted Escobar’s gift of a “very beautiful hacienda” on behalf of his church, and had gone on television to insist that he had done nothing wrong. “When one fulfills the will of God, there is no corruption,” he said.

The road to La Catedral is winding and steep, full of switchbacks and narrow bridges that hang over mountain streams. On the morning of my visit, clouds obscured the valley, and everything was damp. La Catedral, at the top, is now a charitable home for elderly people, run by a Benedictine abbot, Elkin Ramiro Vélez García. On the exterior wall, a billboard-size photograph shows the place as it was in Escobar’s day; a picture of him, wearing a Russian fur hat, bears the caption “He who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it.”

In the main plaza—a parklike area with naïve mosaic murals—several dozen residents warmed themselves in the morning sun. Others drank coffee in a cheerful mess hall, adorned with mounted bull’s heads and old Coca-Cola advertisements. The visible remnants of the prison were set back, at the edges of the forest. There was what remained of Escobar’s bedroom—a concrete pad, overgrown with jungle—and two guard towers. A large brick structure, once a video arcade for Escobar’s men, had been repurposed as an administration building. The plaza had once been a soccer field, where Escobar played with his men.

Father Elkin, a clean-shaven man in his early fifties, wearing a black soutane and a large crucifix, waved me into his office next to the mess hall. He said that Escobar—Pablo, as he called him—had chosen the site for his prison because he knew it well: it was an area where he used to have people killed and their bodies disposed of. “He did many, many, many bad things here,” Father Elkin said. “But he also did wonderful things.” This was a tendentious view but not an uncommon one, especially in Escobar’s early years. The Semana story had spoken of his “desire to be the country’s number one benefactor.” Old comrades told me that they were attracted by his professed commitment to building a “Medellín without slums.” Popeye insisted that Escobar “was really a socialist—he just had a different kind of socialism in mind, where everyone would have his own little car, his own little house.” He had paid for the construction of a neighborhood that became known as Barrio Pablo Escobar: five hundred houses and several soccer fields.

After he was pushed out of Congress, though, his largesse became a more direct exchange of money for influence. His bribes went to police officers and judges, but also to residents of the comunas. Father Elkin recalled that once, on a soccer field in a nearby community called El Dorado, he’d watched Escobar hand out money to the poor. “He did many things for those who were helped by no one else, and he did so always in the company of the Church. The priest would go to see Pablo and always leave with his briefcase full. Was this evil? We would have to define evil to decide that.” He raised his voice, as if speaking from the pulpit: “The Church has also done bad, bad things in the name of God! It will be God who judges us.”

Father Elkin said that Popeye—“a very good friend of mine”—came frequently to La Catedral, bringing tourists and a crew of bodyguards. Most of the narcotours were “pure silliness,” he said. “The guides tell the tourists anything that comes into their heads. For instance, I made an outdoor oven to incinerate the diapers of the old folks. Then I found out the guides were telling their tourists that it was where Pablo burned people!” He shook his head. “Popeye, on the other hand, tells his tourists the truth. For example, he talks about the asado de los Moncada”—the Moncada barbecue. When Escobar’s men burned the bodies of Moncada and Galeano, they arranged to have a barbecue the same evening, to disguise the smoke and the smell.

The killings, it turned out, helped dislodge Escobar from his comfortable imprisonment. When the visitors did not return from La Catedral, rumors spread that Escobar had killed them. A few weeks later, in July, 1992, the government attempted to move Escobar to a more secure facility, and he escaped in the process. For more than a year, he was pursued by a coalition of his enemies: the D.E.A. and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command; a Colombian police team called the Search Bloc; and a death squad of criminal rivals that called itself Los Pepes—short for People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.

On December 2, 1993, police traced a phone call between Escobar and his son, Juan Pablo, to a safe house in the Los Pinos neighborhood of Medellín. Colombian special forces swooped in. Escobar was killed at the house, felled by three bullets as he stood on its red tiled roof. He was bearded and barefoot, in jeans; a photograph circulated of him lying face down, his belly spilling out of a blue polo shirt. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero, noted for his fleshy, whimsical portrayals of people and animals, reimagined the scene in a heroic oil painting. “The Death of Pablo Escobar” shows him standing on the rooftop with gun in hand, while bullets whiz around him, like insects pestering a giant. It hangs in the Museo de Antioquia, in downtown Medellín.

“I’ll go in and look at stuff, but I won’t read any signage.” Facebook

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It is an item of faith among Escobar’s family members that he killed himself before the authorities could get to him. Father Elkin wasn’t even convinced that Escobar had really died. “If you ask me whether Pablo is dead, I would say I don’t believe he is,” he said. “He was a sagacious, astute man.” He waved his arms around, as if to suggest that Escobar could be anywhere, still in hiding. He said that Popeye had told him that there were still bodies buried around La Catedral, in graves dug on his orders. (Popeye denies this.) Some of the elderly residents believed that La Catedral was haunted, Father Elkin said. They had seen and heard things. “Ghosts?” I asked. “Not ghosts—spirits,” he clarified. They had appeared to him, too. Sometimes they tapped him on the shoulder.