Eight decades ago, Chicago-area criminal and capitalist Al Capone took advantage of the opportunity provided by alcohol prohibition to get rich. Providing bootlegged alcohol to willing consumers at prohibition-level high prices, Capone built up the US branch of the Mafia into a richer and more powerful organization than it had ever been before. Despite his penchant for violence, Capone became a folk hero to many, with his name and visage still showing up in pop culture references today.

For awhile in the '80s and early '90s, Pablo Escobar was Colombia's Al Capone. Despite the killings he ordered of hundreds of prominent Colombians during the height of Colombia's US-inspired drug war, many regarded him as a modern "Robin Hood" for the charity he doled out. Escobar's ranch is now a major theme park operating under the guise of a crime museum. More than any criminal since Capone, Pablo Escobar used the profits made available by drug prohibition to become a folk hero and superstar.

One Colombian who wasn't convinced was his son, Juan Pablo Escobar, known for most of his life as Sebastian Marroquin. A documentary about Marroquin, "Sins of My Father," in which he seeks out and apologizes to children of his father's victims, is generating a media frenzy in Colombia, according to an article in Variety. In "Sins," Juan Pablo he writes letters of apology to the sons of the people his father killed in Colombia's prohibition wars, while taking the messages to them in person, according to Variety. Cine Colombia will send the picture out December 10 in Colombia on 20 prints, the widest ever for a documentary, the trade newspaper reports. It is beyond unprecedented -- according to Cristina Gallego, a producer at Bogota-based Ciudad Lunar Productions, which was not involved in the project, "Documentaries are rarely released in Colombia, and if they are, it is only on one print."

"Sins" follows Juan Pablo Escobar as he tells the story of his father, whose Medellin Cartel cornered 80% of the world's cocaine market. Though cocaine is technologically cheap to produce, prohibition drives up the prices the drug fetches because of the risk that those providing it take to do so. The billions that consumers paid for the drug made Escobar a rich man, and an enemy of the US government. Under Escobar, Colombia's prohibition wars targeted the government, and the murder rate surged in Colombia until Escobar was killed in a gunfight with US-supported forces. Juan Pablo, with his mother and a sibling, fled to Argentina, where Juan Pablo changed his name to Sebastian Marroquin.

Gustavo de Greiff, who as Prosecutor General of Colombia led the effort to stop Escobar, blames the violence of the Escobar era on prohibition. "Colombia, I think, is the country that has suffered most from the war on drugs," he told the Drug War Chronicle newsletter. "Many people have died in the fight... This has been recognized by the acting Minister of the Interior of Colombia, who said that with legalization the problem of drugs for Colombia would be terminated."

"Sins" is backed by Discovery Latin America, Colombia's RCN, France's Arte and the U.K.'s Channel 4, according to Variety, and will have its world premiere at the Nov. 7-15 Mar del Plata Film Festival before screening at the Nov. 19-29 IDFA fest in Amsterdam.