Doug’s World

Plata o Plomo

A few years ago, I read Mark Bowden’s “Blackhawk Down,” the story of the disastrous incident in Somalia in 1993 that effectively ended American military operations there. (Tom pointed out to me that Amazon has cleaned up the entry for Jimmy Carter’s latest book, so I guess I’ll start linking to them for books again.)

I thought “Blackhawk Down” was great (and from the Pulitzer Prize that Bowden received for coverage of that incident I guess I’m not the only one), so when I was looking around at the Sydney airport yesterday for reading material for the SYD-LAX flight and saw another book by him, “Killing Pablo,” I bought it. I figured I’d just start it on the flight, but I liked it so much I wound up reading it straight through.

It’s the story of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian druglord whose name is generally associated with the Medellin cartel. Most of the book, as the title implies, is the tale of the hunt for him and how he was eventually found and killed, covering events that took place between 1990 — when Escobar was the 7th-wealthiest person in the world, right up there with Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei — and his death on December 2, 1993.

The sheer magnitude of Escobar’s criminal success is something I hadn’t appreciated. As he did in “Blackhawk Down,” Bowden makes only passing references to the gory details (only a few sentences in the entire book mention Escobar’s legendary sadistic cruelty, for instance) but masterfully conveys the personalities and interactions of all the characters involved: ruthless bad guys, naive fools, corrupt cops, military hardasses, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and many others.

The tale of Escobar’s final years builds like carefully crafted fiction. First he amasses this amazing criminal empire, while conning a large percentage of the Colombian public into believing he’s an idealistic socialist revolutionary like Che or Fidel when really he’s just a self-centered thug with a knack for manipulating the media. Then, after his true nature is exposed in a way that instantly kills his political ambitions, he starts a campaign of terror that eventually brings all of Colombia to its knees. The daily killings leave leaders of business and government literally begging for him to stop, willing to cut any deal he’s willing to accept.

So he “surrenders” — on terms he defines — and checks himself into a jail of his own design, where he lives like a king until a bizarre escape. That’s when the intense manhunt begins, and the Colombian and American governments are eager to find and kill him because everyone knows there will never be justice for him if he’s captured alive. His violent tactics flare back up, and soon there’s a nationwide vigilante backlash. After a while an average of 20 people a day are dying violent deaths in Colombia’s big cities, for many months in a row, all related to the hunt for Pablo.

For those who don’t remember the punch line, I’ll give away the ending: the authorities find him and kill him. By that time he has gone from wealthy mafioso-style kingpin to a hunted animal hiding in the city, and Colombians of all types are so tired of his antics that the government, the citizens, and competing criminals are all trying to bring him down, each in their own way.

I just noticed the reviews on Amazon for this book, after writing my thoughts above. Very entertaining. A Colombian nitpicks a bunch of little details in a way that reminded me of Escobar’s lawyers constantly debating the syntactical details of laws while ignoring their obvious intent. An American reviewer sadly observes that it may be “overly optomistic” to think that this book “might help America rethink its drug startegy.” And another reviewer complains “while this will definitely whet your appetite for knowing about Escobar, at the end of the book you would not know much more than what was done to kill him.” (Gee whiz, and to add insult to injury Bowden had the nerve to entitle the book “Killing Pablo.”)

Speaking of titles, the title of this post is an expression that means “silver or lead,” and was widely used in Colombia to describe Escobar’s style of doing business. For example, he would offer a judge the silver (a bribe) and if the judge didn’t immediately accept it he’d get the lead (a bullet).

Man, there were sure a lot of bad guys named Guillermo in this book. What’s that all about?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 9:27 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.