Anniversary of Escobar murder marks eventful journey for troubled country

To watch it now, you would never guess it would dominate the story of Colombian football for 20 years.

When United States midfielder John Harkes crosses from the left edge of the penalty box, 25 yards from Colombia’s goal, Andrés Escobar senses the man behind him at the far post. Facing the wrong way, the defender mistimes the block and diverts the ball into the goal that Oscar Cordoba has vacated with a dive to the left. For a few moments Escobar lies flat on the grass, considers his disaster, gets up and carries on.

It was an own-goal notable only for its lethargic simplicity. The 2-1 defeat was Colombia's second loss of that 1994 World Cup and would more or less eliminate a gifted side containing Carlos Valderrama, Freddy Rincón and Faustino Asprilla. "Life doesn't end here. We have to go on. Life cannot end here," Escobar, the team captain, would write afterwards in a terrible irony in Bogota's El Tiempe newspaper.

The impact of the early exit would pale alongside that of Escobar’s shooting two weeks later in disputed circumstances, a calamity which the national side is perhaps only now able to face up to with its cathartic run to the knockout stages of this World Cup.

Colombia's meeting with Uruguay tonight takes place on an anniversary of sorts: it was on the first day of second-round matches 20 years ago – July 2nd, 1994 – that Escobar's killing occurred. Only last week, writing in Colombia's El Espectador newspaper, the public prosecutor in the Escobar case, Jesús Albeiro Yepes, gave a bleak assessment of what the country has learned from the killing:

“Colombia has still not escaped this darkness, this ‘anticulture’ that keeps disposing of human life with the same coldness, the same indifference, to the sounds of official silence. The causes of Escobar’s death are the same now as then. Nothing has changed. Here life means nothing . . . It’s a complete tragedy. Twenty years after this crime that sickened Colombia and the entire world, nothing has changed. We are as bad as ever.”

Country’s 50-year war The statistics of Colombia’s progress

concerning crime and poverty offer a more optimistic view. In 2004, 47.4 per cent of the country’s population lived below the poverty line; by 2013 that had fallen to 30.6 per cent. In Medellín, the city where Escobar was killed and which is also infamous through its links to murdered drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (no relation), the homicide rate has fallen from a peak of 381 per 100,000 in 1991, to fewer than 50 per 100,000 now. The epicentres of cocaine production and drug-trafficking have also seemingly shifted, to Bolivia, Peru and Mexico.

Colombia’s appetite for peace could be seen in this month’s re-election of president Juan Manuel Santos for another four years, a result widely considered a mandate to continue talks at ending Colombia’s 50-year war with the Farc guerrillas.

You may wonder what this has to do with the World Cup, but in Colombia you cannot separate the story of drugs and violence from the watershed symbolism of Escobar’s killing. You also cannot fully appreciate the significance of the team’s journey in this tournament, and the joy it will bring, without considering how far Colombian football has travelled.

"We all remember where we were when Andrés Escobar was killed, much in the same way we remember where we were when presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was murdered in 1989," Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, whose novel The Sound of Things Falling won this year's Dublin Impac award, told last month's Paris Review. "It's one of those big moments of unreasonable violence that sticks in your mind. It was the last big murder to happen in a series of big murders that constituted the war between the drug dealers and the mafia against Colombian citizens."

Escobar’s story is not so much one of a player assassinated for scoring an own-goal – a popular but highly disputed myth – but one of a society in which criminals acted with impunity, and drug gangs ran football.

Colombia is a country of strong regional identities, carved up by three Andean mountain chains dividing the country from north to south. Bogotá lies east, Medellín in the centre, and Cali dominating the southwest. In the 1980s, when the country’s drug-trafficking problem was at its peak, Escobar’s Medellín drugs gang had powerful rivals in Cali’s Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, in particular Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela.

The drug barons were football fans who put their money where their interests lay. Pablo Escobar had control of Atlético Nacional of Medellín, the Cali cartel owned América de Cali and Bogotá's illustrious Millonarios club was in the hands of another leading Medellín cartel figure, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha. "By 1987 there was hardly a leading drug trafficker who didn't have his fingers in football," said Ignacio Gómez, who wrote a book on the subject called Los amos del juego.

Bribery and corruption The relationship between drug lords and their clubs was not

a straightforward tale of support and investment. Money was laundered, player registrations snapped up, betting syndicates formed. Desperate violence trailed in the wake of bribery and corruption.

By the early 1990s the situation had if anything become worse, mirroring an increasingly violent society in which judges and officials were murdered. But the money flowing into football in this seamy climate had a favourable impact on the national team, which had never been stronger. In their qualifying campaign for the 1994 World Cup, Colombia won 5-0 in Buenos Aires in a performance so good that it would forever be known in Colombia simply as “El 5-0”. Colombia entered the 1994 tournament as that year’s dark horse, destined to fall at the first fence.

The celebrated ESPN documentary The Two Escobars goes into detail about the night Andrés Escobar was murdered – the first time the defender had gone out with friends since returning from the tournament. They went to Medellín's El Indio bar, had some drinks, and a row broke out. It is difficult to separate claims that the argument was about Escobar's own-goal from the myths that have sprouted subsequently. And in every important sense it doesn't matter: all that matters is that Andrés Escobar was shot six times and killed, and that the people did that to him because they could.

The car linked to the killing was registered to Pedro and Juan Gallón, brothers and drug-traffickers who had left Pablo Escobar’s Medellín gang to join a vigilante group known as the Pepes, who were linked to the Cali cartel. Less than a year earlier, Pablo Escobar had also been been killed. The Gallón brothers were never found guilty of the Andrés Escobar murder; instead their bodyguard, Humberto Castro Muñoz, confessed and was sentenced to 43 years in prison. He was released after 11 years.

Colombia took years to recover. The national team failed to qualify for the 2002, 2006 and 2010 tournaments. It looked like they would never be back. But they are. After so long buried in the past of the Escobar killing it must be wonderful to be able to celebrate the here and now. Colombians are sports fanatics, as seen in the welcome afforded Nairo Quintana after his Giro d'Italia win earlier this month. El Espectador was printed in pink.

You might consider Andrés Escobar, and how far the country has come, when Colombia take to the field tonight. It’s a good time to remember, and a good time to forget.