Romancing Pablo Escobar

Chapter 3 focuses on Pablo Escobar’s former “trophy woman” (“mafia doll”), the 1980’s television celebrity Virginia Vallejo, whose autobiography details her tumultuous affair with the capo. It explores how Vallejo negotiates her own position vis-à-vis Colombia’s war on drugs, including the issue of culpability and her own victimhood once Escobar’s influences began to falter and how Vallejo became the subject of a multifold harassment that ended her career. Hers is the first melodramatic take on Escobar, an account that mobilizes the traditional tropes of female sentimentality wherein the Capo appears to be an alluring lover capable, nonetheless, of the most horrid acts. This chapter also examines Colombia’s infatuation with machismo and the figure of the classic Latin American strongman, whose brutality was part of their mass appeal. A substantial section of this chapter is devoted to the discourses born around Vallejo’s self-exposure as Escobar’s former lover, where public outrage, misogyny, sexism, and private interests reveal as much about Colombian society as about the memoirist.