Angelo and I have been working on Youtube together for a few years now. Angelo runs They Will Kill You @theywillkillyou and I run World5list. For all these years it had been a remarkably smooth and steady ride, when on December he called me up and told me he needed my help interviewing one of Pablo’s Escobar’s main assassins in Medellín, Colombia; John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez aka “Popeye”. 300 people were murdered at his own hands, while 3,000 more were coordinated by him; killings that were all orchestrated by none other than the most notorious drug lord in history: Pablo Escobar.
Despite the obvious implied dangers, Angelo didn’t ask me if I wanted to go, he told me we were going because, after all, that’s how we work together, and that’s probably one of the reasons we have had a decent amount of success on YouTube.
I could tell on the phone that Angelo was feeling excited, a little scared, and very content all at the same time. I wasn’t feeling anything just yet, but I did realize that this wasn’t something that he was trying to do, this was something he, thus we, would be doing.
To give you a good idea of how far we were getting in over our heads; everything that we had published up until that point on both of our channels, had been lists on a variety of topics. The closest we had been to coming eye-to-eye with a hit man was a list of the most notorious hit men, which was put together from the relative safety of our homes.
Angelo and I talked for a bit and he made it clear that we’d be going some time in the next few month.. It was left at that for the time being. I went to bed and I, in turn, was starting to feel excited while also feeling more than just a little scared. Colombia still has a pretty bad reputation, so meeting up with a stone cold professional killer didn’t seem like the brightest idea.
As I dwelt on it more the next morning and over the next few days, the worries started fading. Some quick research led me to the conclusion that Popeye had been able to start a new life after prison. To put it bluntly, he had apparently turned into somewhat of a celebrity! He was running a Youtube channel that, at the time was closing in on 200,000 subscribers (now over 300,000 strong) and he was featured in multiple documentaries, with a series in the making about his life, which will be available on Netflix this July.
When most (not all!) of the fear had subsided I started thinking about the moral implications of this whole endeavor. Granted, he had apparently already been given a podium by plenty of others, be it TV shows, documentaries, and journalists, aside from which he had succeeded in building his own audience on YouTube. But did we really want to provide a cold-hearted killer like this with yet another podium in the form of a large YouTube channel with almost 1,000,000 subscribers? Did we really want to party with him in Medellín, like he and Angelo had already been discussing?
If I get put in that spot then what am I going to do? Ticking off Angelo by refusing to relax together after a long day of shooting is one thing, but to turn down this guy--who is essentially doing us a favor by making himself available to us for 5 straight days--damn… After all, this is not a man who is used to asking for what he wants, this is a man who is used to getting what he wants.
Let me provide you with a short list of some of Popeye’s “credentials” to give you an idea of the kind of man we are talking about here.
- He killed his girlfriend after she was exposed as an informant.
- He killed 5 bouncers one night in a drunk fit of rage when they wouldn’t let him enter a club.
- He was partially responsible for robbing a nation of its hope in dark days by playing an important role in the murder of then--
presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán. - He was involved in bringing down Avianca flight 203 in an attempt to kill off another presidential candidate, César Gaviria Trujillo. Gaviria wasn’t on the plane, but 113 other innocent people were. They all died a senseless death.
We’ve provided you some exclusive, raw and unedited footage only available here on Steemit in which Popeye goes into detail about drunkenly killing the bouncers at the nightclub:
The list goes on and on and on and on and on...
I was truly torn. I didn’t like the idea of providing this guy OUR podium, and I liked the idea of hanging out with him as if we were bosom buddies a lot less. Angelo, as it turned out, had been working on setting this up for the last few months, so could I really let him down?
I think in the end, I was simply far too intrigued and curious. I could say I didn’t want to let my friend down or that I didn’t want him to have to go by himself, thus making it more dangerous, but I’d be lying. The truth is that my curiosity got the best of me and it’s what made me set aside my moral objections.
I’ll be writing more extensive blogs about this trip on a consistent basis in the coming weeks. I’ll provide everyone who is interested in hearing about it with a detailed account of our trip accompanied by video footage. For now, firstly, I have a question for everyone who has gotten this far. If you did make it this far, I think it’s safe to assume that you are all wondering the same thing by now: would you give this guy a voice and a podium? Or is it disrespectful towards his victims and the tens of thousand that were left mourning? Should he get a chance to tell his side of the many stories with the risk of obtaining sympathy? Or should he be silenced? How is this any different (hypothetically of course) than providing Adolf Hitler a podium, after all Mein Kampf is forbidden for a reason right?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing about what you think. All I can say is that it was an interesting trip. But that I still wonder if anyone should have given or should ever give this man a chance to obtain sympathy, because trust me, he is good at it...