'The assassinations, the bribes, the violence and the corruption will continue, because the business (drug trafficking) will continue,' he said." (Ambrus, 1) This has proven both prophetic and insightful with respect to the drug war's relative futility
It grew to embrace thousands of Andean peasants who cultivated the coca leaf in Peru and Bolivia, smugglers who brought coca paste to Colombia for refining and shipped it out as white powder and distributors who spread it to dealers in the United States, Europe and Japan." (Boudreaux, 1) and without question, there would be an inexorable rise in both Escobar's notoriety and success, and in the intensity of the War on Drugs
Escobar would be forged in the fires that were meant to burn him, with the inception of unique structure ambitions necessitated by the accelerated pressure on his business upon Nixon's aggressive intervention. (Eldredge, 12) With a sense of their own vulnerability now evident by the unwelcome foreign intervention "Escobar and other traffickers formed the Medellin Cartel in the mid-1970s and turned it into a multinational industry
According to a text by Grant (2001) on Escobar's life and legacy, he "was a drug emperor of such unquenchable savagery that sometimes it all palls, the statistics and paragraphs of brutality that come and go like the stuff of snorted dreams: 30 judges killed, 457 policemen, 20 murders a day for two months." (Grant, 1) for these rough approximations, Escobar is a legendary villain, acting with a temperament and impunity that might well have been molded by the chaotic tenor of the broader drug war
His economic savvy in an industry of great importance to many Colombians would win him a seat on the nation's Chamber of Commerce. (Pearce, 4) and more than the support that it would demonstrate had been engendered by resentment against the Americans, it would suggest that many of the public voters and officials who helped to place Escobar in this position would themselves be intimately engaged in the drug trade in some regard