Sebastián Marroquín
Owning the Sins of My Father
“Forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil.”
—Pope John Paul II
Sebastián Marroquín was born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1977. His earliest memories of his father are typical: learning how to swim, playing board games together, decorating the Christmas tree. His father was always loving and attentive, expressing his feelings freely, wanting only the best for his son. But as Sebastián grew older, he began to realize that his father’s life was far from normal. The family lived on a large compound. There were no telephones. They rarely traveled, and when they did, they were surrounded by bodyguards. Then his father began to appear on the news, sometimes for his public projects—funding the construction of a school or soccer stadium—and sometimes for his less altruistic projects. Sebastián’s father was the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
As Sebastián grew older, he became increasingly aware of the violent empire his father had built—and the many people who were killed in order to sustain it. He voiced his disapproval, telling his father, “I love you, but I don’t believe in what you are doing. I think you are causing a lot of harm to a lot of people. You should find a way to leave everything behind and find peace for yourself and for the family you have.” For Escobar, there was no turning back. This left Sebastián in a torn reality, drawn toward the gentle father he loved but alienated from the brutal drug trafficker who was terrorizing the nation. He explained to his father that he had no intention to follow in his footsteps; if his father used violence to prove his points, Sebastián would use his heart and words to build a very different world.
In 1993, Escobar’s reign of terror ended when he was shot down in a gunfight with the Colombian police. That’s the official story. Sebastián is sure that his father ended his own life. Escobar had promised his family—as well as his enemies—that he would never be captured alive; he himself would be the one responsible for the bullet in his head. On the day of his death, Escobar used the phone ten times to contact his family. Sebastián had been raised to never use the phone; the police could trace the calls too easily. His family was being closely monitored by police after their attempts to flee the country had failed. Escobar used those calls to let his family know that he loved them. It is clear to Sebastián that his father ended his own life to protect the lives of those he loved the most. “He knew in his heart that if he didn’t appear dead, the next ones would be his own family. His wife and sons.” When asked if he has any anger toward his father for taking his own life, Sebastián says, “I see that my father’s suicide was perhaps his biggest act of love for his family. He knew that the only way to set us free was to kill himself.”
But his father’s death didn’t end the legacy of violence.
When Sebastián learned of his father’s death, he was overcome with rage. He swore to a journalist—on live radio—that he was going to kill the men who had killed his father. Only ten minutes later, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. He immediately apologized to the Colombian people, declaring, “If one day I can do what it takes to bring peace to this country, I will do it.” He then sent a message to all the men employed by his father, asking them to end their violence and refrain from harming anyone else. Despite this, his father’s rivals put a $4 million bounty on his head. For Sebastián, this was a time of constant fear; he couldn’t trust anyone, not even the police. He and his family fled Colombia—first to Mozambique, and then to Argentina. It was then that the loyal son who had been named Juan Escobar after his father had to change his name.
To escape his father’s legacy, Sebastián decided to assume responsibility for his father’s crimes—crimes he had no part in—and appeal to the victims for forgiveness. He documented this process in a film called Sins of My Father. This project allowed him the opportunity to approach the families of his father’s victims and to ask for their forgiveness on behalf of his father. “I really believe that I have to take some kind of responsibility for my father’s actions. Even if I didn’t commit any crime, I felt responsible for asking for their forgiveness.” His friends told him he was crazy to embark on this mission of forgiveness, saying his father’s victims would never forgive him—he would just be opening old wounds and subjecting himself to their revenge. But Sebastián needed to try.
He first approached the families of two of his father’s most prominent victims: the political leaders Rodrigo Lara and Luis Carlos Galán. As Colombia’s minister of justice, Lara was determined to expose Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. He was gunned down in 1984 by one of Escobar’s assassins. Galán, a popular presidential candidate and outspoken critic of the drug cartels, was shot dead at a campaign rally in 1989. Both families welcomed Sebastián with open arms and open hearts. His willingness to assume responsibility for his father’s actions, and the families’ willingness to forgive, marked a turning point in the culture of retribution that had dominated Colombia for decades.
Sebastián next reached out to the victims of Avianca Flight 203. The commercial plane crashed in November 1989 after a bomb detonated on board, killing all 107 crew and passengers. Escobar had planned the bombing in the attempt to assassinate another presidential candidate hostile to his cartel. Again, the families accepted Sebastián’s plea for forgiveness. I asked him what he would do if someone told him that they wouldn’t forgive him for his father’s actions. He said that he would respect their decision: “When you ask for forgiveness, you shouldn’t expect answers.” He believes that people have accepted his plea for forgiveness because they know that he is coming from a place of love, and not politics.
In 2009, Sebastián spoke publicly about forgiveness for the first time. Many Colombians were surprised, as forgiveness and reconciliation were not commonly discussed in the country. For decades, the mentality was “Shoot the guy and that’s it, game over—that’s how we solve things in Colombia.” But today, when Sebastián walks the streets of Colombia, strangers often stop to thank him for the work he is doing. The positive effect it has had on the nation has been huge. For him, the documentary about his father was just the beginning of a conversation—between victims and their attackers—that continues today and promises to lift both groups from the trauma of the past and restore a path to reconciliation. Sebastián truly believes that peace is possible, even in Colombia.
When Sebastián embarked on this journey, it was not only important to him to ask for forgiveness on behalf of his father; it was also important to him because he hoped one day to have a son. Sebastián knew what it was like to deal with the hate directed at him because of his father’s crimes, and he didn’t want to pass this legacy on to his son. “For the future of my son, I have to do everything that is necessary to leave him at least a better world.” He waited more than twenty years to have a child because he and his wife wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be pursued by the victims of his father’s crimes. He says, “My son is a guarantee that I’m going to behave for the rest of my life.” Sebastián wants to be honest with his now six-year-old son about who his grandfather was and the crimes he committed. But he also wants to share with his son how loving his grandfather was with his family. He knows that if his father were alive, he would give his grandson the same unconditional love that he’d showered upon Sebastián. He wants his son to know the real Pablo Escobar, and not just the gruesome caricature so often portrayed in the media. This is what fuels Sebastián’s passion for recording his father’s life in books and films. He wants to leave his son a positive legacy—a legacy based on truth that inspires him to follow a path of love and forgiveness. He says that he prays every day that his son “won’t ever dare to be like his own grandfather.”
I asked Sebastián if he forgives his father for the crimes he committed and for leaving his son with such a terrible legacy. He responded that he never felt that he had to forgive his father: “I’m not God, so I don’t have the power to judge him. Second, being part of him—that doesn’t give me neutral perspective about things, because I’m very close to him. To be honest, my father only gave me love. I only received love from him. So how can I hate, or how can I put myself in a position to say, ‘I will forgive you for this or for that’ or ‘I condemn you for that or this’? I really don’t think that’s the way a son should behave. I never think about the possibility of judging my own father. I think that’s God’s job, and it is society’s job.”
Sebastián still travels throughout Colombia, making amends with families affected by his father’s violence. He has seen the positive effect this journey has had on the families he has met. “After the forgiveness process, of course, they felt better. They felt that they could renounce, in a way, all the hate and the pain. I think that forgiveness is not about forgetting things. Perhaps it’s about feeling. It’s not about telling someone, ‘You need to forget something.’ It’s about healing. It’s about abandoning the hate that makes us feel sick.”
Today, Sebastián is an architect, the author of two books, and a two-time documentary filmmaker. But he knows that part of his identity will always be that he is the son of Pablo Escobar. He knows that his journey of forgiveness will never end. This is his life’s mission. He has had the chance to become friends with the families of his father’s victims, and this gives Sebastián hope. Whenever he goes back to Colombia, he visits with these families and they welcome him into their homes and into their hearts. “That leaves me a lot of hope. This cannot change the past, but I’m changing the present, and that of course will affect the future.”
I reached out to Sebastián after seeing his documentary and reading about the great work he was doing. I knew that a man who dedicated his life to asking for forgiveness on behalf of his father must be a man who understood the process intimately, who knew the remarkable healing power of making amends. What surprised me was how deep Sebastián’s love for his father had been and how profoundly the act of forgiveness had transformed his life and the lives of countless Colombians.
Sebastián’s decision to travel the world seeking forgiveness from complete strangers, yet never knowing the response he might get, showed me how forgiveness is not really about two parties coming to a conclusion to forgive. Instead, what’s important is the very act of expressing forgiveness. Whether we ask for forgiveness or give forgiveness, we are often afraid of the response we might get. Sebastián’s journey showed me that the act of requesting forgiveness is never easy—even when you are doing it on someone else’s behalf—but the gesture of doing so is what makes all the difference. And that can leave you feeling lighter moving forward.
Sebastián’s public appeal for forgiveness has helped transform one of the darkest chapters in Colombia’s history into a story of hope. It taught me that forgiveness is a power that transcends generations and can heal rifts that once tore a whole country apart.