It is amazing how violent Colombia was only twenty-five years ago. A major reason for that violence was Pablo Escobar, who is quite possibly the most famous Colombian of all time (sorry Gabo). To claw his way to the top of Colombia’s narcotics trafficking industry, and to stay there, he killed anyone and everyone in his way – judges, newspaper editors, even presidential candidates. He was, for a time, the richest man in Colombia, and the seventh richest man in the world according to Forbes Magazine. He built restaurants, discos, a zoo, roads, electric lines, public soccer fields, and housing developments for the poor, with some media outlets heralding him as a Paisa version of Robin Hood. He was a congressman and owned several mansions in Florida.
Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo describes the life and eventual death of this most notorious of drug kingpins. Pablo is described as not particularly intelligent or special – his main personality trait, the one that makes him Colombia’s top narco, is his ruthlessness. He was pudgy, loved smoking weed, and enjoyed having sex with teenage girls. The author excerpts a bunch of Pablo’s correspondence, mostly angry missives aimed at the media and government, saying how unjust it is that he is being persecuted. He comes across as a guy who believes in power and little else. From Pablo’s perspective, the government and military is coming after him because they want the power that he has, and it is inconceivable to him that anyone could believe he is being chased because they think drugs or violence is bad. It is a cover story, and he is enough of a meglomaniac to believe that he is the only person helping the poor and taking on the powerful Colombian elite.
Pablo has so much money that he was able to stay out of jail by bribing almost every level of the government in Medellin, and killing anyone else too honest to accept his “plata o plomo” (money or lead) policy. The weak central government of Colombia was powerless to stop him. When he started killing members of the richest families in Bogota in retaliation for the police´s attempts to arrest him, the elites and general public alike both begged for a deal with Escobar to end the carnage. Then-president Cesar Gaviria offered Pablo a bargain where Escobar would accept being charged with one crime of being the middleman in a drug sale transaction in exchange for turning himself in. Then, in one of those “Only In Colombia” situations, part of the deal for Pablo’s surrender is that he could build the prison in a location of his choosing, on a hilltop overlooking Medellin. The prison is essentially a mansion, and Pablo fills it with luxuries like jacuzzis and big screen TVs. He smokes copious amounts of pot, throws huge parties, and even leaves the prison whenever he feels like it, at one point being seen in Bogota to do some Christmas shopping. And of course, he continues running his drug empire from inside the jail. Colombia’s government seems unable to stop him, at one point even deciding that all of his possessions inside the jail are technically legal. After all, the regulations say that he is entitled to have a bathtub, and who can say that a jacuzzi is not a bathtub? When the Colombian government finally decides that enough is enough and tries to move Pablo to a real jail in Bogota, the attempted trasfer is bungled and Pablo escapes.
Bowden is also the author of “Black Hawk Down”, about a covert US operation in Somalia that went awry, leaving 19 American soldiers dead. American covert forces were also heavily involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar. President George Bush (the first one) expanded the role that the American military could play in intervening anywhere that drugs might be manufactured and readied for shipment to the United States. Special operations forces such as Centra Spike and Delta Force were dispatched to Colombia to gather intelligence and aid Colombian forces in the apprehension of Escobar. Technically, these operations forces were only supposed to be training and assisting the Colombian forces, but the rules were bent and American soldiers ended up accompanying the Colombians on raids in search of Pablo; Bowden even suggests the possibility that an American soldier delivered the shot to Pablo’s head that killed him. There is a certain gee-whiz quality to the descriptions of the surveillance hardware used to track Pablo’s cell phone and radio messages, and how these are used to actually track Pablo’s location. If you’re into that sort of geeky armchair warrior stuff, there is plenty of it here, although I found those parts of the book to be the most dull. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was an enormous waste of money with questionable legality, and that as much of evil bastard as Pablo was, maybe this shouldn’t have been the U.S. government’s mission.
As the book notes in its epilogue, cocaine exports to the United States actually increased while Pablo was being hunted down. As Pablo’s Medellin cartel was being attacked and dismantled, the Cali cartel moved in to take its place. They bribed the police and government officials while all the attention was on Pablo, and the cocaine continued to flow out of Colombia and into the United States. So killing Pablo made little difference in the cocaine business overall. In the hunt for this one man, over a hundred police officers were killed, and many more innocent bystanders were massacred in Pablo Escobar’s retaliatory bombing campaigns and assassinations. When a vigilante group known as Los Pepes begin killing people in Pablo’s inner circle, members of Colombia and the United States’ militaries are alleged to have collaborated and shared intelligence with them, even as their murders were completely illegal, and members of Los Pepes included Cali cartel drug kingpins and soldiers in outlawed paramilitaries. Bowden describes all of this in a fairly neutral manner, and the reader is left to make up his own mind about whether this was all worth it.
As for me, I wondered: Since the cocaine business was essentially unchanged overall by Pablo Escobar’s pursuit and death, was all the killing and money spent worth the trouble? Is there another way to tackle the problem of cocaine consumption in the United States besides killing the salesmen in other countries? What kinds of covert operations are we running against drug barons in other countries today? Would decriminalizing cocaine reduce this sort of violence and misery?
Thankfully, we are no longer in Pablo Escobar’s Colombia; it is Mexico that seems to have the most drug-trade related violence in the world right now. Drug traffickers in Colombia today could never get away with as much as Pablo did. This book is an excellent reminder of how not so long ago, Colombia was a much different place, and of how much it has rebounded from being a completely failed state. It also will make you wonder how any self-respecting Colombian or tourist in the country could go around wearing a t-shirt with Pablo’s face or name on it.
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