The unrecognized son of a hero killed on the orders of Pablo Escobar who could become vice president of Colombia

Until the day that Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, his father, died on an important avenue in Bogotá, under the bullets of a group of hit men paid by Pablo Escobar, Rodrigo Armando Lara Sánchez had seen him only a couple of times and always surrounded by people, never alone, never as father and son; today, when he is very likely to become Vice President of Colombia and after a political career that even his opponents praise, he feels that perhaps he would be proud of him.

On April 30, 1984, in Bogotá, assassinated the then Minister of Justice of the government of Belisario Betancur, Rodrigo Lara Bonila, who had dared to declare the war on drug trafficking and, in particular, Pablo Escobar, in Bogotá. The leader was traveling in a white BMW when he was intercepted by two men on a motorcycle. He was 37 years old, much less than his son does today. He was hit 14 times, shot by Iván Darío Guisado, a gunman from the Medellín cartel, two of his escorts were injured.

The assassination unleashed the largest persecution against organized crime ever undertaken in the country. That day, their oldest son was 13 years old and he learned of his father's death from the cries of a neighbor who came out screaming in the street: “Rodrigo Lara was killed, Rodrigo Lara was killed”. Lar Sánchez remembers that she cried all night over the loss of that father who had seen little, who never called him on the phone, who did not want to acknowledge him, but for whom he felt a particular appreciation.

He doesn't quite know what happened between his parents that led them to never talk to each other again, but he says he would have liked that life had given him more time to meet that man that everyone talked wonders about and who became a hero for the country, but that for him he was an absent father he only saw on television.

“I didn't know my dad, I rarely saw him; I didn't know him as a father, like that person next door, as I was with my children, I didn't, but not because I have resentment because I have a deep admiration for what my dad was,” said Lara Sánchez in an interview with Blu Radio.

In 2000, before turning 30, he decided that he had rights and was going to enforce them. Everyone in Neiva, his hometown, accepted that he was Lara Bonilla's son, to the point that when his father was appointed to the cabinet, his schoolmates began calling him “minister”. “How so I am the son of the Minister of Justice and I don't have justice, justice must say that I should have my mother's last name and my dad's last name,” he told journalist Federico Benítez, from the program Los Informantes, in an interview.

He asked his brothers (with his wife, Nancy Gutiérrez, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had three other children, including Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, the current senator of the Republic) to take a DNA test; at first they refused, but, finally, faced with the possibility of a judge ordering the exhumation of the body of everyone's father, the brothers Lara Restrepo agreed and, with their samples, plus a few drops of blood taken from a couple of books that the minister was carrying on the day of his murder, science and justice proved him right.

By that time, Lara Sánchez had already become a surgeon at a public university, far from the social and economic advantages he could have had from being the son of a political figure the stature of his father.

Tensions with his brothers grew stronger when Rodrigo Armando decided to become mayor of his father's hometown, as part of a coalition supported by Sergio Fajardo, facing, at that time, the candidate of the Radical Change party, led by his brother, Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, who accused at that time of having taken advantage of their father's surname to engage in politics.

Today, when Rodrigo Lara Sánchez is officially running for Vice Presidency for the center-right movement led by Federico Gutiérrez, everything seems to have changed. He is now the contender of whoever was his tutor and his friend Sergio Fajardo, presidential candidate of the center block, and confrontations with his brother seem to have been left behind, who only had praise for him when his nomination was announced: “The country will have the opportunity to meet a great person, a virtuoso professional and a being transparent and with many merits,” said Lara Restrepo.

Lara Sánchez says he doesn't have any resentment, just a great nostalgia for not having been able to share with his father his great achievements in life: his degree as a surgeon, his marriage, the birth of his children, his time in the administration of Neiva, where he was called the “most pilous mayor in Colombia” (the most judicious) and, now, his candidacy for the Vice - President, which would surely have made the minister proud to whom he could never call father.

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