Killing Pablo

This weekend, I'm reading Mark Bowden's "Killing Pablo," which I picked up for $1.99 yesterday while DW was purchasing the new Harry Potter book. We tend to focus on the Middle East when we think of terrorism, but Pablo Escobar used terrorism to hold a modern state of nearly 30,000,000 people hostage, and he nearly destroyed the legal system and government of Colombia in his heyday. Bowden focuses on the hunt for Escobar by Colombian and U.S. elite forces, who hunted the narco-terrorist down while vigilantes--likely acting on intelligence supplied by the Colombian forces, and quite possibly in cahoots with the Cali cartel--methodically killed off and/or terrorized Escobar's top-level subordinates, effectively destroying the Medellin cartel. The book ends with the reflections of a DEA agent who was involved in the hunt for Pablo. The agent expressed mixed feelings, and hoped that the message of the manhunt was not "the ends justify the means."

Bowden places Pablo Escobar in the context of Colombia's long history of political violence (the 1950s, for example, are called simply "la violencia"), and also in the context of the insatiable hunger of Americans for cocaine. It was the first Bush Administration's decision to go against the source of that cocaine and the Colombian government's eventual realization that the country could not have peace while Escobar was alive that led to the manhunt that everybody involved knew would end in Pablo's death. To the Americans, the hunt for Escobar was part of the futile "War on Drugs"; to the Colombians, it was part of a struggle for control of the country. A great read for anybody interested in Latin America and/or organized crime.