“It was he himself who made me feel that everything I loved would be in danger,” were the words of Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of the founder of the Medellín cartel, Pablo Escobar, in the chapter “Learning to Give Up” of the series Dear Killer Nannies: Raised by hitmenin which he tells what his father’s plan was to kidnap the American singer Michael Jackson.
The series, available on the Disney+ platform, narrates, according to Escobar Henao, “what is experienced inside a family surrounded by violence, by very bad people, and it is a unique look; the rest are crude imitations.”
Although Pablo Escobar died when his son was 16 years old, the series exposes the absence of a “normal” childhood and different episodes of his life that marked him during that stage.
One of those episodes was the celebration of one of his birthdays. Escobar Henao mentions that, during the preparation of his party, the boss made the decision to try to hire Michael Jackson, since he was a big fan of the artist.
His fanaticism was so great that he went so far as to ask the hitmen who took care of him to paint a mural with the singer’s face in one of his rooms.
When the boy found out that Jackson would be at his birthday party, according to what he himself says, he felt very excited, since he would meet one of his idols.
However, that happiness faded as the days went by, because little Juan Pablo overheard a conversation in which his father indicated that he would pay three million dollars to have the “King of Pop” in Colombia, a figure that he would recover with the ransom for the singer’s kidnapping.
The main reason for the kidnapping was that Pablo Escobar had a great hatred towards the figures that represented the United States.
This conversation motivated Escobar Henao to modify his relationship with the artist, and he told his parents that he was no longer a follower of the singer or American music; However, he said this to prevent the plan from being carried out.
In the series he also explains that he had to give up several things he liked for fear that his father would destroy them.
Furthermore, the boss’s son says that he did not have friends when he was a child, because of the fear that other people had of his father.