TV series on Escobar written by victims' children

BOGOTA , Colombia – A new Colombian TV series about the arch-criminal Pablo Escobar has a key ingredient that is apt to ensure an unsympathetic portrait of the infamous cocaine kingpin.

Two of the scriptwriters for "El Patron del Mal," or "The Boss of Bad," which was previewed for the press Tuesday, are children of victims of the late trafficker who terrorized this South American nation.

One is a son of the crusading newspaper editor, Guillermo Cano, who was slain by Escobar's men, and the other is the daughter of a woman they held hostage for seven months.

The editor's son, Camilo Cano, said the series done for Caracol Television will center on the people like his father who confronted Escobar.

They include Rodrigo Lara, the justice minister who first stood up to the drug lord, and Luis Carlos Galan, a presidential candidate. Both men were killed on Escobar's orders.

In addition to ordering the gunning down of Guillermo Cano in 1986, Escobar also bombed the offices of his newspaper, El Espectador, three years later.

To press his fight against extradition to the United States, Escobar also ordered kidnappings of prominent Colombians including journalist Maruja Pachon, the mother of Juana Uribe, another of the writers for the news series.

Those abductions became the basis for "News of a Kidnapping," a non-fiction book by Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Uribe, who also is the series' executive producer, said both she and Camilo Cano felt "the need to tell the story as it had never been told before."

Cano, who is also a producer of the series that is to begin airing in late May, said he will consider the show a success if it makes Colombians want to know more about the brave men and women who stood up to Escobar.

The drug boss was killed in 1993 by police who shot him on the roof of a house in Medellin, home to his cartel of the same name.

Escobar's fight against extradition was marked by the killing of police, judges, prosecutors and journalists as well as with indiscriminate car bombings.

The series is based on a book by Alonso Salazar, a journalist who was Medellin's mayor in 2008-11.