On July 2, 1994, Andres Escobar gathered his friends and stepped into Medellin at night. He needed to get out, be with people, let loose—he needed the catharsis of a club with music and drinks and dancing and friends.
Because, just six days before, Escobar had watched from the grass as his attempted sliding clearance redirected John Harkes’ cross past Oscar Cordoba in the Colombian goal, the terrible understanding writ clear on Escobar’s face. Escobar’s own goal would not only cost the Cafeteros the game against host nation USA, it effectively ended Colombia’s anticipated challenge for the 1994 World Cup.
At 3 a.m., alone in the parking lot of El Indio nightclub, his friends dispersed for the night, and Andres Escobar was shot six times, each bullet fired along with a morbid slander—GOL! GOL! GOL! GOL! GOL! GOL! The optimism surrounding the Colombian national died along with Escobar that night.
Nearly 20 years later, Colombia are about to embark on another aspirational visit to the World Cup. After failing to qualify for the last three tournaments, a new golden generation has emerged, capturing the attention of the football media and the excitement of a nation desperate to break free from its own history. The team’s roster is a sort of rolling tapestry representing over two decades of the country’s football diary, with green talents like Luis Muriel and Juan Fernando Quintero preparing alongside 42-year-old Faryd Mondragon, a man who can remember playing alongside Andres Escobar.
“He was loved by everyone. He was like the baby of everyone. He was a very important part of who we were,” the then-Philadelphia Union keeper Mondragon told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2011. “We’d stay up late in the hotels just talking and laughing and he told the best jokes. He knew how to get your mind off of the bad things that were going on.”
Many of the players will be asked to remember Andres Escobar, the benevolent spirit that stands over the growing story of these talented Cafeteros. The incident of his tragic and untimely murder is a seminal moment in World Cup history; for a game that so readily cyphers cultural and historical expression, football has rarely experienced a collective event that represented a place and time so keenly.
Colombia in the ’80s and ’90s was, by decree of global perception, the world’s violent drug dealer. With a government composed of bought-and-sold politicians and bureaucrats in a perpetual power flux and a low-intensity-high-frequency decades-long conflict between left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries, a stratified society with many poor and indifferent rich, Colombia became the world’s sieve for cocaine and dollars.
At the forefront of Colombia’s drug trade was Pablo Escobar, a man whose operation at one time was responsible for distribution of 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, making an estimated $60 million dollars per day. At the height of his power, he would win legislative office, lose it, wage war on his government, repeal extradition laws through bribery, turn himself in, and serve time in a prison under his own control from which he would eventually walk out of when he saw fit. Escobar was also a devoted football fan; he purchased Atlético Nacional and funded them towards a Copa Libertadores title in 1989—a match that saw a young Andres Escobar score in the penultimate shootout.
Escobar and his kingpin contemporaries like Millonarios owner Gonzalo Gacha flooded the Colombian league with cash for both the practicalities of money laundering and the extravagant egoistic competition. It also suited Escobar’s image as the Robin Hood of Medellin. He came up from the barrios, poor but ambitious, and not at all averse to crime—arcing from boosting cars to stealing weight to head of cartel by his late-twenties. His passion for the game would go with him to the grave: after his run-and-gun death on Dec. 2, 1993 (just months before the U.S. World Cup), Pablo would be buried with a Nacional flag.
The death of Pablo Escobar only served to fracture the order of crime in Colombia, sending the country into a bloody tumult, where every competing interest from the government, to the cartels, to the militaristic factions would contest the vacuum left by El Patron’s demise. The unrestrained animus of brutal greed would infect Colombia’s performance at the 1994 World Cup. After a shock 3-1 opening loss to Bulgaria, players received death threats in their hotel rooms from programmed televisions, manager Francisco Maturana was warned of bomb attacks on his home, Chonto Hererra’s brother died in a car crash. The fear consumed them, and it was evident throughout their loss to the US, right through Escobar’s own goal.