
In this article:
- Sebastian Marroquin is a 45-year-old architect and writer currently living in Buenos Aires. Though his life today seems fairly unremarkable, Marroquin is known for being the son of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
- Marroquin grew up living a lavish life at his father’s many mansions but he remembers having a heavily restricted childhood, likely due to Escobar’s safety protocols for his family members.
- Despite his father’s fearsome reputation, Marroquin remembers him as a good father who taught him the right values even though, as he admits, his own father did not live by the values he taught his son.
- Today, Sebastian Marroquin lives in Argentina with his family where he works as an architect and writes about his past. He has reached out to many of his father’s victims to apologize for what sees as Pablo Escobar’s sins.
In 2015, Netflix released Narcos, a hit crime drama about the Colombian drug trade during the 1980s. The series was packed with tense face-offs between rival cartels, police, and American DEA agents set against the backdrop of the city of Medellin. At the center of it all was Pablo Escobar, founder of the Medellin Cartel, who had a rough start in life before he became one of the richest criminals in history.
But if you’ve seen the show, you already know what happens to Pablo Escobar. The real question is what happened to everyone else. The fallen king of the Colombian drug trade left behind a family — a wife and two children — who had to flee Colombia following his death.
This is the story of Sebastian Marroquin, a Colombian architect who once went by Juan Pablo Escobar Henao.
Sebastian Marroquin Grew up as the Son of Infamous Drug Lord Pablo Escobar

Sebastian Marroquin is the only son living son of Pablo Escobar. He was born on February 24, 1977 to Escobar and Maria Victoria Henao, who was only 12 years old when she met Marroquin’s father.
According to Henao, Pablo Escobar was an affectionate gentleman when they first met. She also says she fell in love with him because of his compassion for other people’s hardships and that they would often drive to places where Escobar dreamed of building schools for the poor.
This surprisingly gentle side of Pablo Escobar may have been influenced by his mother. Though he never finished college, Escobar seemed to have valued education. His mother was a teacher and he had dreams of becoming the president of Colombia.
The drug lord was even known locally as “Robin Hood Paisa” because of his immense generosity to the people of Medellin which involved building homes for the homeless, putting up power lines, and creating soccer fields just to name a few.
Henao fell in love with this version of Pablo Escobar and in 1976, she married him against her family’s wishes.
That said, even Henao’s Escobar isn’t a squeaky clean family man. The two had met when Henao was only 12 years old. The 23-year-old Pablo showered her with gifts and would kiss her even though, as Henao herself puts it, it made her “paralyzed with fear“.

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Henao became pregnant at 14 years old and Escobar brought her to a back-alley abortion clinic where she would lose their first child. She married him a year later, at 15 years old, and had Juan Pablo Escobar Henao and Manuela Escobar.
The two siblings lived a lavish life at the resort-like Hacienda Napoles as well as Escobar’s many other properties throughout Colombia and the U.S. Hacienda Napoles was the family’s palace. The property boasted not one but three zoos full of exotic animals, ten separate houses, and a helicopter landing pad.
While Manuela, who was born in 1984, had no idea at the time about her father’s second life as Colombia’s most infamous drug lord, Juan Pablo was old enough to notice that his father acted strangely. He says that he remembers his father as being just like any other father.
Except Pablo Escobar didn’t get up early to go to work.
He also had no idea exactly what his father did for a living. Clearly, there was money, lots of it, in fact, but Juan Pablo hardly saw his father working though he did see his name on the news a lot.
People who knew Juan Pablo as a child, back when his father raked in as much as 50 to 70 million USD per day, say that they never saw Juan Pablo wearing the same clothes twice.
Marroquin, meanwhile, vividly remembers his father stuffing thousands of dollars into his birthday pinatas. Manuela, who was Escobar’s princess, once received a unicorn for her birthday. In reality, the unicorn was a white horse that Escobar ordered his men to staple a horn and wings onto for Manuela’s amusement,
The horse later died of an infection.
Sebastian Marroquin Took His New Name (And Second Life) From a Phone Book

Life couldn’t stay good for the Escobars forever, especially since their father had made enemies of just about everybody. Marroquin says he and his family were blindfolded by his father’s employees and brought to different safe houses and hideouts.
Once they arrived, they would be asked to inspect every area of the location to see if they could recognize it. If they did, they would be moved to a different one until they settled on a place that none of Escobar’s family members could identify.
This was done so to render the capture and torture of Escobar’s family pointless. If they didn’t know where they were and where Pablo Escobar was, they could never reveal it even under the threat of death.
Juan Pablo shared his memory of his last moments with his father in a documentary, “I remember we were at Casa Azul, where we were hiding with my father at the time. Before we left, he came towards us, hugged me, he wanted to speak but he couldn’t utter a word.”
“It was the first time I saw him cry.” Marroquin said, “When we were about to leave, I went towards the Altos building and my dad followed us in a car. We turned to go into the building, he honked a couple of times and carried on his way. That was the last time I saw my father alive. It was like a final goodbye.”
On December 2, 1993, the family’s tense life of luxury came to a screeching halt when Pablo Escobar was gunned down by Colombian police on the rooftops of Medellin.
Juan Pablo Escobar, as he was known back then, suddenly found himself thrust into the limelight. He was Pablo Escobar’s eldest and only son. At only 16 years old, he became the inheritor of the largest drug empire on the planet.
Though he had always wanted his father to turn away from a life of crime (Pablo had ironically raised his son to be a pacifist), the heat of the moment moved him to swear that he would “kill those bastards” that shot his father.
Now responsible for his mother, sister, and the Medellin cartel, Juan Pablo’s destiny hung between the civilian life his father raised him for and what he would later often refer to as the cycle of violence in Colombia’s underground.
“Those five seconds of threats ended up becoming 25 years of exile.” He later said. Juan Pablo and his family were forced to flee from Colombia, evading his father’s enemies who were all hot on the trail of Escobar’s now defenseless family.
Because of Pablo Escobar’s crimes, no country would accept the Escobars. Mozambique, South Africa, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and even the Vatican all said no to the Escobars’ plea for asylum.
Part of the problem was their surnames. Without Pablo Escobar’s protection, being an Escobar was a dangerous affair and no country wanted to be seen as their protector. They each took on new names, ones that erased Pablo from their family history.
Sebastian Marroquin chose his name from a phonebook.
Not Everybody Was Convinced: Argentina’s Money Laundering Probe on Sebastian Marroquin and His Mother

The family eventually made their way to Argentina in 1994. For a time, it seemed like their glamorous yet dangerous past was behind them. That was until Victorian Henao Vallejos and Sebastian Marroquin, as they were then known, were arrested in 1999 for falsifying a public document, illicit association, and money laundering.
Juana Manuela Marroquin Santos, born Manuela Escobar, was the only one who wasn’t arrested. Manuela was only 9 years old when Pablo Escobar died and, even when her brother and mother were arrested, is the only Escobar to not be accused of or implicated in a crime.
The arrest of Manuela’s brother and mother sunk her into a deep depression and, not entirely unfounded, paranoia. According to Marroquin, his sister refuses to step into the public eye because she remains deathly afraid that her father’s enemies will come out of the woodwork to kill her and her family.
Sebastian Marroquin also says his sister continues to have a host of mental health problems and lives with him and his wife for her own safety.
The Escobars faced charges a second time in 2018. The charges were related to money laundering as Argentinian authorities believed the family was still sitting on millions in drug money.
Marroquin said it was little more than judicial bullying by Argentina and that they were being put on trial not because of anything they did, but because of their connections to the late Pablo Escobar.
Today, He Warns People About the Reality of Who Pablo Escobar Was

Sebastian Marroquin emerged from the shadows in 2009 when he agreed to re-enter the limelight to talk about his life and his father in the documentary Sins of My Father.
Director Nicolas Entel said it took him six months to convince Marroquin to speak about his father and his upbringing. He and his mother eventually agreed on the condition that his sister will not be contacted regarding the Escobar crime legacy.
Marroquin seems to have reconciled the two versions of his father that exist in his mind, the fearsome drug lord and the loving father. Though he maintains that Pablo Escobar was a loving father who instilled good values in him, he also insists that Escobar was a cruel man who did not live by the principles he taught his son.
In an interview with El Pais, Marroquin said that Narcos misrepresented his father by not depicting him as a crueler man.
“He terrorized an entire country.” Marroquin reminded the public.
Marroquin published a book in 2016 titled Pablo Escobar: My Father where he revealed that his father would often “prank” people by holding them at gunpoint.
What’s Sebastian Marroquin up to Now?

Marroquin has since gone on to apologize for his father’s actions. He has toured Latin America to deliver anti-violence talks in and has worked to de-glamorize his father’s legacy.
He’s also clearly unhappy with Netflix’s Narcos and had this to say about the show, “The show creates a culture where being a drug trafficker is cool. Young people all around the world write to me saying they want to be drug dealers and asking for help.”
When asked whether people expected him to take up the reins of the Medellin cartel, Marroquin acknowledged that he would have come Pablo Escobar II.
“It was much harder precisely because of this to succeed in separating myself from that past, that violent legacy. Anyway, I also think my father’s enemies, who were the most qualified to judge whether I was doing the right thing or not, finally realized that I was not a threat to them or to the country…and let me live because of that,” he said in an interview with Luis Garcia Casas. “If not, I would be dead, there is no question about that.“

You can get a copy of Pablo Escobar: My Father here.
How do I talk to Pablo’s son
Hi Hamish! I believe Sebastian Marroquin can be contacted on Twitter as @sebasmarro though I am not certain whether he’s accepting messages.