Titans of History

Suu Kyi’s political career began in 1988, when a telephone call summoned her back to Burma to care for her mother, who had just suffered a stroke. “I had a premonition that our lives would change forever,” her husband later recalled. As she nursed her mother in Rangoon (Yangon), Suu Kyi was surrounded by the upheaval at the end of General Ne Win’s twenty-six-year-long dictatorship. When, instead of the referendum he had promised, Ne Win implemented another military coup, in which human rights were further eroded and thousands of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred on the streets, Suu Kyi started to speak out. So began her road to becoming heir to her father as politician, a path also trod in the region by Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) and India’s Indira Gandhi (1917–84).

Within months of her return to Burma, Suu Kyi had helped to found the National League for Democracy (NLD). In the much-vaunted elections of May 1990, the NLD won by a landslide, gaining 82 percent of the available seats. Suu Kyi, as the NLD’s general secretary, was Burma’s democratically elected leader. But it was a result that Burma’s military government chose to overrule.

Just over a year after her return to Burma, Suu Kyi was, with her NLD colleagues, arrested without charge and placed under house arrest—a situation that has persisted, with breaks, ever since. She was released for five years in 1995 and for another year in 2002. On each occasion, however, the popularity of the nation’s chosen leader, her command over its oppressed people and her inspirational addresses prompted the military junta to re-imprison the woman whose presence and personal sacrifice represent the greatest threat to their dictatorial rule.

In 1989 Suu Kyi stood alone in front of an army unit with its rifles trained on her. She had motioned her NLD colleagues to step aside, presenting herself as a lone and easy target. Under house arrest she endured a hunger strike, refusing to accept any help from the government that had imprisoned her. This rendered her so malnourished that her hair fell out, her heart began to fail, and she developed a condition in which her spinal column began to degenerate. Every time she has been released from house arrest the fearless Suu Kyi has immediately spoken out against the government, calling loudly and repeatedly for democracy and liberation in a tyrannous state that violates human rights more than almost any other in the world.

The presence of one of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience—and one who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991—became an increasing embarrassment for Burma’s military government. In 1999 her husband died of prostate cancer, denied the chance to visit his wife one last time despite every diplomatic effort. At the cost of untold personal suffering, Suu Kyi refused every government attempt to bribe her with liberty in return for her permanent departure from the country.

“It’s no use standing there wringing your hands saying ‘My goodness, my goodness, this is terrible,’” Suu Kyi once declared when asked how she responded to suffering. “You must try to do what you can. I believe in action.” In 2012, the regime surprised the world by releasing some prisoners and allowing semi-free elections: she was released and elected to parliament—possibly the beginning of a new era in Burma.

ESCOBAR

1949–93

The ingeniousness of my brother was extraordinary.

Roberto Escobar

The most powerful, wealthy and murderous criminal of the 20th century, Pablo Escobar was the paramount Colombian drug lord who became the mastermind and kingpin of the international cocaine trade. He accrued billions of dollars, and in the process was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings and murders. A godfather figure of unrivaled magnitude, and a law unto himself, Escobar threatened the very integrity of the state of Colombia.

Escobar was the son of a peasant and a schoolteacher, and grew up in a suburb of Medellín. He became involved in criminal activities from an early age, stealing cars and even, it was said, gravestones, which he sandblasted before selling them as new. He graduated to minor fraud, selling contraband cigarettes and forged lottery tickets, and then in the late 1960s, as demand for cannabis and cocaine multiplied, he saw an opening in the drug trade.

During the first half of the 1970s Escobar became increasingly prominent in the Medellín Cartel, in which a number of crime syndicates cooperated to control much of Colombia’s drug-trafficking industry. In 1975, a leading Medellín crime lord, Fabio Restrepo, was assassinated, and Escobar soon took over his operation.