Colombia’s Virginia Vallejo is a peculiar woman. Born in 1949, blessed with remarkable beauty, she has been a television host, model, actress and reporter. In July of 2006, a DEA airplane took her from her native country to testify in the United States in the trial of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers. She was also a key witness in the murder of a presidential candidate, and in the Palace of Justice massacre.
Distinguished more for her love life than for her professional qualifications, Virginia was a true diva. Courted by men of power and money, in 1982 she fell deeply in love with another singular celebrity: drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cartel. For more than five years, she was his lover.
In the heat of their intimacy, the television host became deeply familiar with her beloved capo’s life and works – and also those of many of his friends, including important politicians. She thus found out about the strong bonds between drugs and the current president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe.
After Pablo Escobar’s death, Vallejo kept quiet for 20 years. Finally, in 2007, she published Amando a Pablo (“Loving Pablo”), a scandalous book – not because of the romantic adventures she relates, but because it presents a dramatic X-ray of the links between drugs and politics in Colombia.
Exiled in Miami, she declared last year to the newspaper El País that “the narco-state Escobar dreamed of in Colombia is more real than ever.” According to her, “drug traffickers prospered in Colombia not because they were geniuses, but because presidents were sold very cheaply.”
Virginia Vallejo claims that Pablo Escobar idolized Álvaro Uribe. When the man who is now president was director of Civil Aviation, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug trade’s infrastructure was built. “Pablo used to say,” she told the Spanish newspaper, “that if it weren’t for that blessed little boy, we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos.”
http://www.narconews.com/Issue51/article3036.html