Who Killed Pablo Escobar? The Rooftop, 2 December 1993

The single most-asked question about Pablo Escobar is not about his money, his cartel or his politics. It is about the rooftop.

On 2 December 1993, one day after his 44th birthday, Pablo Escobar was shot dead on a red-tiled roof in the Los Olivos neighbourhood of Medellín. This is a plain-language account of who was there, who fired, and what the record — Colombian and American — actually says.

Who fired the shots

The shots were fired by Colombian National Police officers of the Bloque de Búsqueda — the Search Bloc — the joint Colombian task force created in 1989 specifically to hunt Escobar. The exact identity of the officer or officers whose rounds proved fatal has never been publicly established, and this is not an accident. The Search Bloc's operational protocol was to remain anonymous; Escobar had a working policy of killing the family members of officers who took public credit.

The Colombian officer usually named in reporting is Colonel Hugo Aguilar Naranjo, then a Search Bloc field commander, later Governor of Santander (2004–2008). Aguilar has consistently declined to say whether he personally fired the fatal shots, and has stated that the group of officers on the roof acted collectively.

Who was on the roof besides the Colombians

Two American DEA agents — Steve Murphy and Javier Peña — had worked with the Search Bloc from 1988 onwards as US liaison. They were not on the rooftop when the shots were fired. Both have said publicly, and repeatedly, that they arrived at the scene shortly after the fatal shots, that the operation was Colombian-led and Colombian-executed, and that they had no shooting role.

Their book Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar is the primary US-side operational account.

What actually happened that afternoon

The tactical facts as reconstructed from Search Bloc records and later Colombian government reporting:

On the morning of 2 December 1993 a Search Bloc electronic-surveillance team traced a phone call Escobar was making to his son, Juan Pablo Escobar (then a teenager in Bogotá), to a middle-class house in the Los Olivos barrio of Medellín. The call was longer than Escobar's normal operational security allowed.
A Search Bloc assault team surrounded the house and moved in. Escobar and his bodyguard Álvaro de Jesús Agudelo — known as "El Limón" — attempted to escape across adjoining rooftops.
El Limón was killed on the roof first. Escobar was killed seconds later while still on the tiles, shot in the leg, torso and, fatally, behind the left ear. The wound behind the ear is the one that has fed decades of "who fired" speculation. Colombian forensic reports have described it as consistent with a Search Bloc rifle round from the assault team's position.
The body was photographed on the tiles. Those photographs — Colombian officers standing over Escobar in civilian clothes and body armour — are the single most-published images of the entire Colombian drug war.

The three unresolved theories

Three competing theories about the fatal round have circulated for three decades. All three remain unresolved in any public forensic filing.

Theory 1 — Search Bloc. The official Colombian government position. The fatal round came from a Search Bloc weapon on the roof. This is the account Colombian institutions have consistently maintained and the one most consistent with the reconstructed positions.

Theory 2 — DEA. Occasionally repeated in US popular sources. Not supported by Murphy, Peña, or any DEA operational record. Both agents have gone on the record naming this theory as wrong.

Theory 3 — Suicide. Advanced primarily by members of the Escobar family, notably his son Juan Pablo Escobar in his memoir. The theory holds that Escobar, cornered and out of ammunition, fired the fatal shot into his own head to avoid capture. This is consistent with the wound location and inconsistent with the Search Bloc's own account. It cannot be definitively verified or refuted from the surviving forensic material.

The three theories have coexisted since 1993 and will likely continue to.

The larger context: Los Pepes and the parallel war

Escobar was not being hunted only by the Colombian state. From January 1993 onwards, a paramilitary group calling itself Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar — Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) had been systematically killing his lawyers, accountants, sicarios, family members and property caretakers. Los Pepes was founded by the Castaño brothers — Fidel and Carlos Castaño — with the operational backing of the Cali Cartel.

Los Pepes killed approximately 300 people connected to Escobar in the eleven months preceding his death, effectively destroying the human infrastructure that had kept him alive for the previous decade. By 2 December 1993 Escobar was operating with a handful of trusted people, a diminishing radio budget, and increasingly frantic calls to his family.

The Search Bloc took the credit — accurately — for the actual killing. Los Pepes made it possible.

The doctrine that runs from Lehder to Escobar

The Search Bloc was created in 1989 in the wake of the Galán assassination, five years after Carlos Lehder's extradition had established the doctrine that US-Colombian cooperation could reach Colombian citizens on Colombian soil. The 1993 rooftop is the operational culmination of the doctrine the Lehder extradition began.

Every subsequent Latin-American cartel decapitation — the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers in 1995, Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1997, El Chapo's 2016 recapture, Rafael Caro Quintero's 2025 extradition — rests on the doctrinal chain that runs Lehder → Search Bloc → 2 December 1993 → present.

Killing the individual, in every case, was easier than replacing the market. The market did not shrink.

The photographs and the myth

The rooftop photographs made Pablo Escobar the most-recognised drug trafficker in history, more than a decade after his actual peak. They are also, arguably, the single most successful piece of drug-war state marketing the Colombian government has ever produced. What the photographs do not show is that the man on the tiles was, by December 1993, no longer running the industry he had built.

The Cali Cartel had already taken the wholesale market. The Mexican organisations were already staging themselves as the next generation. The doctrine that killed Escobar was already being applied to the successors.

The rooftop is a photograph, and it is an ending. It is not, and never was, the ending it appeared to be.