Who is Carlos Mario Henao Vallejo?

Carlos Mario Henao Vallejo is best known as the wife of Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar. She married him at the age of 15 and spent a luxurious life but now her life is on the run.

She spent her 17 years of life in a relationship with Escobar until his death. Their marriage lasted for a long time period, despite her husband’s criminal activities. Escobar was a cruel and cold-hearted drug dealer to the world but for his family he was a great husband as well as a caring father. His loss severely affected his whole family and left a gaping hole in his wife and children’s lives. 

The article is based on Mario’s marriage to a scandalous drug dealer and how hard she gets along with him and without him after his death. 

Carlos Mario Henao Vallejo Wiki

Early Life & Parents

Mario’s life history is not much open to the media. Her parents are Carlos Henao Vallejo and Leonor Zuleta. She was born in 1961 and her birth place is Palmira Valle Del Cauca, Colombia. Carlos Mario Henao Vallejo has two siblings, brother, Carlos Mario Henao Vallejo and sister, Pastora Henao Bayen. Her brother Carlos worked for Pablo and he became the reason for her sister Mario Victoria Henao’s marriage with Pablo. She was a great lover of dancing and this is something that she still does and enjoys in her spare time.

Marriage with Pablo Escobar

Mario was just 13 years old when she first met Pablo Escobar and her brother introduced her to Pablo. They started dating and fell in love with each other. At the age of 15, she married Pablo and that she mentioned him her “soulmate”. Maria described adorable things about her husband in her own book “My Life and Prison with Pablo Escobar”. She said Escobar used to give her several presents and wooed her with romantic ballads. She also admitted “He treated me like a fairy princess and I was convinced he was my dream boy and charming prince”, she says. 

The couple’s relationship wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. Maria’s family was vehemently opposed to their union because her brother, Carlos’s involvement with Pablo opened all the secrets of Pablo’s criminal activities. But the couple wanted to marry so they were forced to elope. After their marriage, they started to live happily as a married couple and Maria gave birth to her first child, Juan Pablo Escobar and that time she was just 16 years old. She faced a hard time during her son’s birth because her parents and her siblings never supported her and left her when she tied the knot with Pablo Escobar. Maria’s daughter Manuela Escobar was born after seven years of her son’s birth.   

Was Mario Also Involved in Her Husband’s Drug Business?

It’s not really confirmed that she knew about her husband’s business earlier than her marriage with him. Also, it’s totally fake information that she was ever involved with her husband’s drug business or any other criminal activities. There are few rumors that Maria’s brother Carlos worked with Pablo Escobar so her sister Maria Henao was aware of all his drug dealing and wrong activities. She wrote a few lines about Pablo in her book where she claims that she was kept in the dark and understood that she and her children will be in trouble when her husband ratchets up the cocaine business. 

Maria believed that her husband was in the real estate business and she had blind trust in him. It’s still a mystery whether her selection was turning a blind eye or she was unaware of all wrongdoings of her husband and believed in his innocence earlier to Escobar’s arrest in 1977. Her husband Pablo Escobar told her that he runs a real estate business. But after that he was accused of trying to smuggle cocaine into Ecuador and busted for that. At the time of arrest, his reaction to Maria was as he feigned and gave her statements to prove him innocent. He said that he was framed and his friend was the one who had been responsible for that smuggling.

Maria was simple and innocent but she recognized her husband and believed that he was not that man that she considered him. Once, Pablo had arranged a day for the assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, she says, “I still remember the day when we were in a huge mess. My life and the life of my children are going to be hard”.

She shared her emotions for her husband that proved, she still loved her husband and believed that she was his wife and the mother of his children. It was her duty to be a good mother as she was a good wife. She had only one choice to ride it out.

Pablo Escobar: Caring Father and Husband

He was a gentleman in his early days and loved to help poor and needy people. On the other hand, Pablo was a genuine father as well as a husband. He was a loving and caring family man who adored his wife and doted on his children. He was so much attached with his daughter, who was by all accounts, “a daddy’s little girl”. Maria recalled in her marriage’s later years that her husband was really affectionate and sweet. She said, “Pablo is a great lover and I fell in love with his compassion for hardship and desire to help people. We would drive to all those places where he dreamed of building schools for poor and uneducated children. He was really a gentleman from the start”.

Mario’s husband death & Life on the Run

Pablo was murdered on December 2, 1993 in Medellin. A group of U.S.-backed Colombian officers killed him on the rooftop in Medellin. During the investigation and in an error in judgment, a scene was located where Pablo made a phone call to his wife to tell her that police traced his location and located him.

After Pablo’s death the life of Maria and her children got really complicated. She felt great fear of retaliation from her husband’s associates. She decided to flee Colombia but it never happened that time. Unfortunately, police seized all of Pablo’s family assets and left Maria and his children broke. 

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