Escobar’s Hitman. Former drug-gang killer, now loved and loathed in Colombia

More South America documentaries - It is not often that you get to meet a man who has personally taken more than 250 lives and was involved in the torture and murder of thousands more. It is even rarer to see such a man in broad daylight, in a city centre enjoying public adulation. John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, . Popeye, is a local celebrity in Medellin, Colombia. In the 80s, the city was home to Pablo Escobar’s infamous, and extremely powerful, drug cartel. Popeye was the kingpin’s ‘hitman’. The Medellin Cartel, which operated from the mid-1970s to early 1990s, reached its peak under Pablo Escobar when it became even more powerful than Colombia’s Government. It made tens of billions of dollars trafficking cocaine and committed tens of thousands of murders, many through terrorist attacks in Colombia. Pablo Escobar was named the richest and most powerful drug lord in the world.