Books About Colombia: Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

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.

Books about Colombia: Law of the Jungle by John Otis

If you are looking for a primer that summarizes recent Colombian history in a colorful way, this is the book for you. John Otis is a Bogota-based reporter who has written for various newspapers on Latin American events, and was once South America bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. Ostensibly the book is about the capture of three gringos who get kidnapped by the FARC, but Otis uses that merely as a starting point, and explores nearly every angle possible about their capture and rescue. The result is a dizzying kaleidoscope and panorama about the conflict in Colombia, with enough barely believable magical realism to convince you that this could only have happened here.

The book starts with the story of the three Americans: retired airline pilot Thomas Howes, former air force analyst Marc Gonsalves, and former marine Keith Stansell (pictured above from left to right). They were hired by military contractor Northrop Grumman to do the kinds of work that the Pentagon increasingly outsources to the private sector, in this case flying over the jungle to find and take pictures of clandestine cocaine labs, evidence of which would then be handed over to the U.S. government. The salaries for this type of work, in the six figures, make up for the high risk, at least in the mind of these guys looking to pay off mortgages and credit card debt. Unfortunately, the money that pays for their salaries is made up in cutting corners elsewhere, and the Cessna plane that the contractors were flying in only had one engine, despite several internal memos at the company warning of the dangers of having no backup engine in case one fails. While flying over the jungle on February 13th, 2003, the three men (and two others who were shot by FARC when they were discovered) crashed after their engine dies, deep in FARC territory. The men are kidnapped, and ended up being held for 1,966 days as prisoners of the guerrilla group.

Their ordeal is fascinating enough: they walk through the jungle shackled in chains, even sleeping chained together. Their families wait for years in agony for any scrap of evidence they are alive, and deal with mostly unresponsive bureaucracies in the U.S. government and at Northrop Grumman that seem to have a “shit happens” lack of urgency in their communications with the families. Stansell, without knowing a thing, finds his life unraveling out in the real world, where his American fiancée finds out about the Avianca stewardess he had gotten pregnant, and leaves him for another man.

But Otis zooms out, covering the stories of other kidnapping victims who stay in the same camps as the Americans. There is the amazing story of policeman Jhon Pinchao Blanco, the only person to have ever successfully escaped from the FARC. After eight years as their prisoner, and after whittling away at his chains with a piece of wood for about a year at night when nobody could see him, he manages to break free and scamper away in the darkness before the guerrillas notice. Dodging FARC patrols, he swims down river, surviving on bugs and leaves for two and half weeks until miraculously running into an anti-narcotics squad in the tiny jungle town of Mitu.

There is also former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt (above), who had ventured in to FARC territory without the proper security detail and against warnings not to do so. She proves to be a lightning rod for strong opinions; Blanco says she was his inspiration to escape, while Stansell calls her a “spoiled bitch." Otis stays admirably neutral, describing the French ex-husband who flew over the Amazon jungle dropping thousands of leaflets proclaiming his support, and the mother who called into a radio show nearly every day to send her messages of love and hope. Ingrid’s campaign manager, Clara Rojas, has her own adventures in the rain forest, eventually having the first child born in FARC captivity (by cesarean! Ouch!) with a guerrilla as the father. It was Blanco’s escape that led to Colombian authorities knowing about the child and Betancourt’s location, setting the table for the eventual rescue.

Then there’s the platoon of Colombian soldiers assigned with searching for the kidnapping victims, a hapless group that ends up getting lost in the jungle and subsisting on monkeys and bats cooked over a spit. Their fortunes change, however, when they stumble on a FARC cache of millions of dollars, in both American and Colombian currency. After some deliberations, they decide to pocket whatever money they can for their troubles, and eventually make their way back to civilization. Their commander tells them not to go on a spending spree and get noticed, but once they are contact with other people the money flows freely. In the city of Popayan, they buy electronics and new clothes, and pretty much take over the whorehouses. Some of the smarter soldiers mail their families the money hidden in newly bought televisions, but before long word spreads and a number of soldiers are caught and jailed, while others are killed by FARC as revenge for the theft. Amazingly, about half of the soldiers are still at large with the money they took. This story alone could be a book by itself, and indeed was later turned into a hit Colombian movie called “Soñar No Cuesta Nada."

After years in captivity, Blanco’s information gives the authorities something to work with in terms of an attempted rescue of the hostages. Painstakingly, the Colombian military worked on first eavesdropping and then intercepting FARC radio communications, eventually placing a mole in the group. The government then created a fake humanitarian non-governmental organization to take the hostages to see FARC commander Alfonso Cano; the soldiers involved in the fake organization took acting classes and wore Che Guevara T-shirts to make their roles seem like the real thing. Then, once the hostages were in a helicopter with the soldiers and several FARC members, the soldiers subdued the guerrillas and flew the hostages to safety. It was a total bait-and-switch, and it worked. The mission, called Operacion Jaque (Operation Check, as in chess), is an elaborate piece of strategy that will make any war buff swoon.

I haven’t even touched on all of the historical background Otis crams into this book; there are mini-histories of the rise of FARC and the paramilitaries, an explanation of how the drug trade works and collaborates with these illegal armed groups, and the time that FARC’s leaders were wined and dined by various European governments in the hopes of seducing them out of the jungle and into peace with champagne and caviar. The book is packed with gossip and top-notch reportage; Otis has seemingly interviewed everyone with even a passing appearance in this tale. Even Colombian news junkies will find new nuggets of information here, but newbies to the world of guerrillas and kidnapping will learn a lot and be highly entertained at the same time. The book can be purchased here.