Manuela Escobar: What Is Pablo Escobar's Daughter Doing Now?

According to J.D. Rockefeller (the modern author, not the 19th-century oil tycoon), when Manuela Escobar innocently asked her father how much a billion dollars was worth, he supposedly told her, "The value of your eyes, my princess." Coming from the mouths of most other parents, that statement would sound so sweet that it would give your ears diabetes. But Manuela's father wasn't like most parents, most people, or even most monsters. Pablo Escobar was like the J.D Rockefeller (the oil tycoon, not the author) of narcotics. 

It couldn't have been easy being the daughter of a guy who, as head of Colombia's Medellin cartel, was responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine that entered the United States during the 1980s, per Biography.com. He worked in a brutal criminal enterprise in which people wanted to kill him, and according to CBS, he was reportedly behind an estimated 7,000 killings himself. Obviously, the children of such figures aren't typically open books. But let's try to sift through the few redacted pages of Manuela Escobar's life that we can find in hopes of learning a bit about her life as Pablo Escobar's daughter and what might have become of her after he died. 

Born in 1984, Manuela Escobar was Pablo's only daughter. She was the apple of his eye, and he used his prodigious wealth to spoil her rotten. She once wanted a unicorn, which is technically impossible but sort of feasible if you're evil. Pablo produced an evilly feasible "unicorn" by having a horn stapled to a horse's head. The animal soon died of an infection. Another instance of grim sweetness occurred when Pablo went into hiding with his family and Manuela fell ill. The Vintage News reports that to keep his daughter warm, Pablo set about $2 million in cash on fire.

When Manuela was nine, her father was fatally shot during an attempted rooftop escape from his hideout. Afterward, she, her brother, and her mother went into hiding in Argentina, and Manuela Escobar adopted the moniker Juana Manuela Marroquin Santos. Her alias came to light in 1999, and All That's Interesting reports she was "struggling" to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Her brother, Juan Pablo (pictured with his father as a child), who didn't shy away from the spotlight, alleged that Manuela suffered from depression at points and attempted to take her own life. In 2015, Juan Pablo said that his sister lives in constant fear of retaliation from one of their late father's enemies. Hopefully she's managed to stay safe.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).