Pablo Escobar’s personal photographer confronts the drug lord’s complicated legacy

They hadn’t seen each other in 15 years, but Jiménez’s host immediately recognized him. “It’s been too long,” Pablo Escobar said.

The head of the notorious Medellín cartel told Jiménez he was looking for a photographer to create a registry of the giraffes, hippos, elephants and camels that roamed his private zoo. Jiménez agreed to help.

He would end up working as the drug lord’s personal family photographer for the better part of a decade, shooting photos of First Communions, weddings, birthday parties, campaign events, quiet moments around the house. He would bear witness to the Escobar few others would see as the kingpin assassinated politicians, terrorized Colombia and became one of the richest men on earth.

The photographer, now 72, embodies the ambivalence many in Medellín feel toward the legacy of its most famous son — and how to tell his story.

“Pablo Escobar is a myth, and how are myths built? With their stories and their images, their experiences,” said Luz Helena Naranjo Ocampo, a university professor and former assistant secretary of tourism in Medellín. “There are all kinds of efforts to maintain the myth and there are all kinds of efforts to minimize the myth.”

Decades later, Jiménez still lives with his mother and sister in the same apartment complex, in a working-class neighborhood blocks from the former homes of many of Escobar’s hit men. And in his office are binders full of images of that lavish and terrifying era, photos of a man who continues to draw equal parts intrigue and revulsion.

Next month, Jiménez and a local journalist plan to publish a book of his photos alongside the story of his life as Escobar’s personal photographer.

To the journalist, Alfonso Buitrago, Jiménez is an example of an exceptional witness, someone who was close to Escobar but never involved in his criminal activity. “It’s as if Pablo Escobar had kept a diary,” he said.

Why did Escobar hire a personal photographer in the first place? In part because of his own vanity, Jiménez said, and his belief that he would be remembered long after his death.

So by promoting the photos now, is Jiménez giving Escobar what he wanted?

Maybe, Jimenez said. But he’s also providing a record of the era, of the “opulence that someone like Pablo could have.” The photos of Escobar’s life, Jiménez said, help illustrate how the war on drugs managed to turn cocaine into such a profitable — and violent — industry.

But it’s a story that many in Medellín want to forget.

Since Escobar’s death in a shootout with police in 1993, the city has become a magnet for narcotourism, with guides offering foreigners an up-close look at sites from his life (and, more recently, scenes featured in the hit Netflix series “Narcos”). City officials have pushed back, tearing down Escobar’s former home, replacing it with a memorial to his victims, and seeking to promote other aspects of local history and culture. In the Memory House Museum in Medellín, dedicated to understanding the local history of violence, the only reference to Escobar is a single small photo of him.

For some, any attempt to satisfy the global curiosity around Escobar is simply glorifying a terrorist. “He is the worst thing that’s happened to Medellín. He’s a bandit, a thief, a killer,” said a woman outside the memorial. “It infuriates me that people want to turn him into a hero.”

Medellín was the murder capital of the world at the peak of Escobar’s control of the drug trade. The city recorded 6,000 homicides in 1991 alone. While the city has seen much less violence in recent years, Escobar left behind a more organized and sophisticated criminal structure that continues today, said Santiago Tobón, an economist at Medellín’s EAFIT University who studies organized crime.

But Buitrago and Jiménez say erasing Medellín’s drug cartel history isn’t the solution.

“The bandits are part of that history,” Jiménez said. “If you don’t like someone, you have to try to understand them.”

Escobar’s legacy is “disastrous,” Jiménez said. Living in the neighborhood that became the “cradle of the hit men,” he says, he remembers the young men who felt their only way to make a living was to join the cartel. He remembers the fear nearly every Medellín resident felt when stepping outside in a city of shootings and car bombs. But he also remembers the neighborhoods Escobar lifted out of poverty, the homes he built for hundreds of desperate families in slums.

In his studio, with a photo enlarger in the corner and an orange tree outside the window, his stacks of albums show the stadium lights Escobar installed for soccer fields in working-class neighborhoods. The school Escobar donated to the city of Puerto Triunfo, near the Hacienda Nápoles.

They are filled with photos of peacocks, rhinos, kangaroos, and Escobar’s two original hippos — before they multiplied and became the largest invasive species on the planet. There’s the First Communion of Escobar’s niece, the birthday party of one of his sons. There’s the group photo of Escobar’s hit men. The family photos in a house that was eventually burned by “Los Pepes,” the vigilantes who waged a war on Escobar. There’s the cousin that was later killed, the brother-in-law who was also murdered. Sometimes Jiménez wonders how he, too, wasn’t killed by Escobar’s enemies.

Jiménez met Escobar in their first year in high school. The boys came from similar worlds. They were the same age, they each had six siblings and they lived in working-class neighborhoods. Jiménez’s dad was a taxi driver, his mom a seamstress. Escobar’s father was a farmer who later became a security guard with a machete and a whistle. His mother was a teacher.

Escobar wasn’t a particularly strong student. At one point, he managed to get a copy made of a key to the room where teachers kept tests. Before they were graded, Jiménez said, Escobar and his friends would sneak into the room and replace the tests with corrected ones. Some friends from those years now deny ever having known him, Jiménez said.

Jiménez discovered photography late in high school, after his brother gave him a small Fuji camera. He got his start shooting birthday parties and chess tournaments. In the 1970s, as Escobar was building his drug-smuggling empire, Jiménez started taking photos for political campaigns associated with the left-wing National Popular Alliance. He soon joined and took photos for the Colombian guerrilla group M-19, an organization that appealed to his interest in the leftist movements then sweeping Latin America.

When he met Escobar, Jiménez was mostly living off photography gigs at occasional weddings or First Communions. The millionaire kingpin paid him more than three times what he would have charged for a typical photo shoot.

To Jiménez, it was just another job. He would usually keep to himself at Escobar’s family parties and gatherings. But every once in a while, Escobar would invite him to sit at the main table at Hacienda Nápoles. Some days, Jiménez would join in on a game of soccer.

The photographer says he was one of the few players who would dare knock Escobar down. Others would just let him take the ball, saying “Go for it, Patrón.” One time, as Jiménez helped Escobar up after a tackle, he says, the kingpin said “Take it easy!” and chuckled.

More than a decade after Escobar’s death, documentary producers started asking Jiménez for his photos, and local guides started inviting him to talk to tourists.

He has not reaped the financial benefits of that fascination, his daughter says. He still works occasional Communions and weddings to make ends meet. But in places where admiration for Escobar endures, he is something of a local celebrity.

In the drug lord’s namesake neighborhood, it’s not unusual to meet families with shrines dedicated to the man who gave them their homes. A large mural of Escobar and the Medellín mountains welcomes visitors to the “Pablo Escobar neighborhood,” a name that city officials have refused to accept.

A hair salon next to the mural doubles as an Escobar gift shop, where Jiménez’s photos can be found on mugs, magnets and the walls. A signed copy of one of Jiménez’s most famous photos, showing Escobar sleeping in bed, was a gift to the salon owner.

Jiménez first visited the neighborhood, where Escobar was building homes for hundreds of poor families, to take photos for an issue of a monthly newspaper controlled by the kingpin. The cover photo showed families living under pieces of plastic and metal, surrounded by trash in an area known as “el basurero” — “the dump.”

“Here is where they live,” the headline said. On the back of the newspaper was a photo of the homes under construction. “Here is where they will live.”

As Jiménez walked by the Escobar mural on a recent morning, a young man stopped him. The man had recently moved to the neighborhood, but recognized Jiménez from a feature about his book on a recent news program.

“You were Pablo’s friend, right?” he said.

“From 13 years old until he died,” Jiménez said.

“So what do you think about all of that?” the man asked. “Do you think he was good or bad?”

It’s a question Jiménez confronts as he promotes his photos, images that show a human side of Escobar. But his goal isn’t to answer that question. It’s to show a more complete portrait of a man inextricably tied to his city’s history.

Jiménez says he doesn’t regret spending those years capturing the kingpin’s life. If Escobar were to ask the photographer to work for him today, Jiménez said, he would probably say yes.

“I always knew who Pablo was,” he said. “But I’m a photographer. If someone hires me … I’ll go.”

Diana Durán contributed to this report.

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