Gustavo Gaviria Was Pablo Escobar’s Right-hand Man in the Medellín Cartel

It’s been argued that Pablo Escobar holds the title of the world’s most powerful drug trafficker of the 1980s and ‘90s. He was a drug lord and leader of the Medellín Cartel, which became extremely violent under Escobar’s reign of terror through Colombia. 

But he didn’t do it alone. 

Escobar’s cousin and right-hand man, Gustavo de Jesús Gaviria Rivero, controlled the Medellín Cartel’s finances and trade routes—he was often considered the brains behind Escobar’s operation, the architect responsible for its survival.

But unlike his infamous cousin, Gaviria kept a more private life, and his puppetry behind the scenes isn’t as well known as Escobar’s very public violence. 

Then, the cartel fell apart after Gaviria was killed in a battle with Colombia's Elite Corps of the National Police in an operation on August 11, 1990. The police unit was raiding one of the cartel’s luxury apartments in Medellín. 

His death came a month after the cartel called a truce in its terrorist campaign, saying it was yielding to Colombia’s desire for peace. In response to the peace, the cartel called on Colombia’s government to stop extraditing its members to the United States. 

Gaviria was wanted in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges.

Gaviria was three years older than Escobar and the two were inseparable in their early years. 

Both came from educated, middle class families, but despite that, they were attracted to an outlaw lifestyle—they were desperate to do anything that would make them money. Their criminal careers started with low-level crimes such as stealing tires from parked cars.

“Pablo began his criminal career as a petty thug in Medellín and he and Gustavo were partners in a number of petty criminal enterprises—stealing headstones from graveyards and holding them for ransom, stealing tires, cars,” Mark Bowden, author of Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, told The New York Times.

By the mid-1970s, Escobar and Gaviria moved from petty crimes to kidnapping and dealing cocaine, feeling the demands from the U.S. for the product. It was around that time that the Medellín Cartel started to form, with Escobar using his money to influence and manipulate the Colombian government. 

Come the 1980s, Escobar was worth more than $20 billion. He owned a 7,000-acre estate called Hacienda Nápoles in Colombia. The estate had a soccer field, a tennis court, lakes, a bullfighting arena and an airstrip. Escobar also owned his own mini-zoo with giraffes, hippopotamuses and camels. In 1982, Escobar funded several projects to aid the poor, which led to him winning an election to an alternate seat in the country’s Congress. 

While Escobar was more focused on the violent side of running a cartel, Gaviria oversaw the actual trafficking and business operations, including controlling the cartel’s income of about $4 billion per year. Police also said that several of Escobar’s properties were registered in Gaviria’s name. 

Gaviria was still running the cartel when he was killed in the shootout on August 11, 1990. Escobar thought the official narrative of a shootout was a farce.

“When Gustavo was killed, the police claimed it was in a shoot-out, but Pablo always claimed he’d been kidnapped, tortured and executed,” Bowden said. 

Gaviria’s death was considered the “beginning of the end” for Escobar and the cartel. Escobar went on the run, then, in June 1991, turned himself in. 

The Colombian government allowed Escobar to build his own prison, La Catedral, which included a nightclub, sauna and soccer field. He had access to phones and computers. Eventually, other cartel members were incarcerated with Escobar. 

Escobar then killed two of his own cartel members and was supposed to be transferred to a different prison, but he escaped in July 1992, before his transfer. 

He was fatally shot after authorities found him in Medellín in December 1993.