Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo

Rodrigo Lara Bonilla was born on August 11, 1946 in the Colombian city of Neiva . He graduated from the law faculty of the University of Colombia and at the age of 23 became the mayor of Neiva. After becoming Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara launched a wide campaign against investing “dirty” cocaine money Pablo Escobar in the election race. As a result, Pablo Escobar was expelled from the Colombian Congress in January 1984. Through the efforts of the Minister of Justice, his political career rolled once and for all. However, Escobar was not going to leave quietly and decided to take revenge on the minister. On April 30, 1984, two gunmen on a motorcycle and several others in a car ambushed Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla for a limousine and shot him on a street in northern Bogotá. Although a few days before the attack on politics, the left partisans launched a series of attacks that killed three policemen, there was little doubt that Lara Bonilla was killed because of his campaign against drug trafficking. Security officers chased militants, killing one of the men on a motorcycle and capturing the second alive. Byron Velazquez, born in 1964, was suspected, and he told police that he was paid $ 20,000 to kill the minister. The Medellin cocaine cartel , represented by Pablo Escobar and Carlos Leder , was accused by the Colombian government of organizing this murder ^{[1] [2]} .