In July 2006, a DEA plane took Virginia Vallejo out of Colombia. Her life was in danger because she was a key witness in the two most important trials of the second half of the twentieth century in her country: the trial for the murder of a presidential candidate and the trial for the takeover of the Judicial Palace, where about a hundred people lost their lives, including judges, rebels, and civilians.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Virginia Vallejo was a television presenter in Colombia and a model appearing on the covers of major magazines. In 1982, she met Pablo Escobar, a mysterious thirty-three-year-old politician who, in reality, was pulling the strings of an unimaginably wealthy world, where a large part of the continuous flow of money—from cocaine trafficking—was channeled into charitable works and presidential campaign funds for candidates he chose himself.

This book is the passionate story of a love that turned into a chronicle of horror and shame, and it describes the evolution of one of the most diabolical criminal minds of our time: his ability to instill terror and promote corruption, the ties between his illegal businesses and various state officials, the murders of presidential candidates, and the war that plunged the entire country into darkness. "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar" is a unique personal look at the character and life of the legendary drug lord, full of glamour but also imbued with the heroine's longing for survival, not without humor. Virginia Vallejo tells this harsh story as no one else could.