n 1998, I traveled to Medellín, Colombia, to adopt my son. At the time, the city still carried the shadow of the drug war. Although Pablo Escobar had already been dead for several years, fear remained present in daily life. We rarely moved around freely and experienced Medellín as a tense and uncertain place.

When I returned in 2014, I encountered a very different city. Medellín felt more open, more alive, and far safer than I remembered. Yet traces of the past were still visible beneath the surface.

In 2018, on the 25th anniversary of Escobar’s death, I visited Barrio Escobar, a neighborhood where he had built hundreds of houses for poor families. While most Colombians remember Escobar as a symbol of violence and terror, I discovered that in this neighborhood his memory still lived on in a very different way.

Many residents, including young people born long after his death, continue to speak about him with admiration. They call him Pablito — the man who gave their families homes, dignity, and the feeling of being seen.

I found myself wondering how someone responsible for so much violence could still be remembered with tenderness. But memory is rarely simple. In places shaped by poverty and inequality, gratitude and trauma can exist side by side.

These portraits are not about Pablo Escobar himself, but about the lingering presence of his myth and the generations growing up in its shadow.