The drugs trade still flourishes at Medellin where these cocaine bricks were seized last month. Photo / AP Expand

The drugs trade still flourishes at Medellin where these cocaine bricks were seized last month. Photo / AP

Juan Escobar was a teenager when he first challenged his father, the most notorious and brutal drug lord in Colombia's history.

"I confronted him about the deaths attributed to him on the TV news," he recalls now. "He started calling me 'my 14-year-old pacifist son'. But no one could stop my father. Not all of Colombia, together with the help of the CIA. So what could the son of Pablo Escobar do?"

Nearly two decades later, Pablo Escobar is long dead, gunned down in 1993 on a rooftop in Medellin, home of the drug cartel that made him one of the most feared men in Latin America. His son now lives in Buenos Aires and has changed his name to Sebastian Marroquin.

But the murders and horrors of the past have never ceased to haunt him. And in an act of immense emotional courage, the 32-year-old Marroquin has decided to revisit them, searching for a kind of forgiveness and a form of expiation.

Marroquin has revealed the motivation behind a documentary, Los Pecados de mi Padre (The Sins of my Father), which culminates in an attempt to make his peace with the sons of two prominent Colombian politicians, murdered at his father's behest.

"A great deal of young people want to live the life of Pablo Escobar," he said, "but if they knew what that really meant nobody would dare do that."

Rodrigo Lara, a former Colombian Minister of Justice, and Luis Galan, a charismatic presidential candidate, had both dared to take on Escobar at the height of his power, publicly opposing the drug baron's ambitions of becoming President of Colombia during the 1980s. Their bravery cost them their lives.

Escobar was making billions of dollars as his cartel pumped a never-ending supply of cocaine into the United States and ordering the assassinations of hundreds of opponents.

The Medellin drug cartel had cornered 80 per cent of the world cocaine market. In 1989, Escobar was rated the seventh-richest man in the world by Forbes magazine. "My father called the shots in Colombia," said Marroquin. "He was running the country."

Lara was shot by Escobar's henchmen in 1984, soon after setting fire to US$1.2 billion of seized cocaine; Galan was killed while campaigning in 1989.

"How do you write to the sons of families that your own father hurt so much?" said Marroquin.

It was remarkable in itself that he had come to the point of asking such a question.