Mark Bowden: Killing Pablo
Atlantic Monthy
$23.95
The bizarre photograph shows a group of soldiers toting machineguns and
grinning cheerfully - like hunters with a prize deer - by the body of a man
lying twisted on the tiles of a roof.
Hard to believe that their "game" was once one of the richest men in the
world and one of the most powerful in Colombia.
Journalist Mark Bowden first saw the photo framed on the wall of a United
States military source. "What's that?" he asked. "That, my friend, is Pablo
Escobar," the military man said. "I keep that on my wall to remind me that
no matter how rich you get in life, you can still be too big for your
britches."
Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and a journalist with the Philadelphia
Inquirer, had until then been unaware of the extent of US military
involvement in the hunt for Escobar, who had run a ruthless terror campaign
alongside his billion-dollar cocaine cartel while a fugitive from Colombian
authorities.
The photograph sparked his interest and he began researching a series of
newspaper articles which would eventually become the book Killing Pablo.
The bulk of the book rests upon interviews Bowden conducted with Americans
and Colombians involved in the pursuit of Escobar from 1989 until his death
on December 2, 1993.
He was also able to obtain more than 1000 pages of mostly secret cables
sent from the US Embassy in the Colombian capital, Bogota, to Washington.
The documents amount to a daily record of the manhunt through the eyes of
the Americans who took part.
The book is a portrait of perhaps the most notorious criminal of modern
times, as well as a fascinating insight into how the US operates on foreign
soil.
Pablo Escobar, from the northern Colombian city of Medellin, was born in
1949 and by the early 80s was a billionaire, controlling the notorious
Medellin cartel that flooded the US with cocaine.
In 1989, Forbes magazine listed him as the seventh-richest man in the world.
Escobar killed anyone who crossed him, including hundreds of judges, police
officers and politicians - and became one of the world's most feared
terrorists.
But, Bowden writes, while he was a vicious thug, he had a social
conscience, having set up a group called Medellin Without Slums which
helped to house the poor.
He was a brutal crime boss but also a politician with a winning personal
style that, at least for some, transcended the ugliness of his deeds.
At his death, he was mourned by thousands. Crowds rioted when his casket
was carried into the streets of Medellin.
At his height, Escobar built small, remote-controlled submarines that could
carry up to 2000kg of cocaine from the northern coast of Colombia to waters
just off Puerto Rico, where divers would remove the shipment and transport
it to Miami in speedboats.
He would send fleets of planes north, each carrying 1000kg of cocaine.
Eventually he was buying Boeing 727s, stripping out the seats, and loading
as much as 10,000kg a flight. Customs intercepted only a fraction of the
shipments.
Escobar was above the law, and in Medellin he created a dual system of
justice. The violence committed in the course of his business - the murder
rate doubled in the city during this period - was ignored by the police.
Escobar regarded murders committed by his hit-men, or sicarios, as matters
of no consequence to society at large. It was strictly business, a grim
necessity in a state without a strong legal system.
He considered it his right to use violence on his own account, and on
occasion did so publicly, binding a worker he had caught stealing from his
estate hand and foot and personally kicking him into his swimming pool in
front of horrified guests.
By the early 80s, much of the ruling class in Bogota had made its peace
with drug trafficking. Some saw cocaine simply as a new industry, one that
had created a wealthy, young social class.
The narcos, as the cocaine bosses were called, wanted the state to
legitimise their enterprise, and given the money they were ready to spread
around and the building boom going on in Medellin, some intellectuals saw
the cocaine trade as potential economic salvation for Andean nations.
Bowden says Escobar could have continued pulling strings in Colombian
politics through a long lifetime, but the mistake he made was to covet a
public role - hedecided to enter politics himself.
In 1978 he was elected as a substitute city council member in Medellin. In
1982 he successfully ran for Congress, again standing as a substitute.
The post carried automatic judicial immunity, so he could no longer be
prosecuted for crimes under Colombian law. He was also entitled to a
diplomatic visa, which he began using to make trips to the US with his
family. Escobar told his friends he intended some day soon to be President.
But his brush with politics was short-lived, and he retired from public
service in 1984, when political rivals revealed his link to drug
trafficking and his previous criminal convictions.
Around this time the US began moving against cocaine billionaires.
President Ronald Reagan created a Cabinet-level taskforce to co-ordinate
efforts against drug-smuggling, with Vice-President George Bush in charge.
The drug lords would become not just law enforcement targets but military
ones - an important distinction. In 1986 Reagan signed a national security
directive which for the first time declared drug trafficking a threat to
national security, opening the door to direct military involvement in the
war on drugs.
At the same time, mainstream attitudes towards cocaine use underwent a
dramatic shift. In June 1986, basketball star Len Bias collapsed and died
after snorting cocaine.
The decade-long flirtation with the white powder by affluent young
Americans had begun to sour anyway, but Bias' death sealed it.
Colombia had signed a treaty that recognised the shipment of illegal drugs
to be a crime against the US. As such, it called for suspected drug
traffickers to be extradited for trial to the US. The prospect struck fear
into the hearts of men like Escobar, who declared "better a tomb in
Colombia than a prison cell in the United States".
So Escobar effectively went to ground in his hometown of Medellin, moving
between safe houses and protected by crooked police and officials.
He continued to run the Medellin cartel and carried out a series of
murders, assassinations, kidnappings and bombings that kept Colombia in a
constant state of seige. No one was immune from his wrath, and victims
included the Justice Minister and a front-running presidential candidate.
In 1989 the Colombian Government set up a special search team to hunt down
Escobar and other cocaine kingpins. Colonel Hugo Martinez was appointed its
commander, a post considered one of the most dangerous in Colombia.
In the first 15 days, 30 of the colonel's 200 men were killed. Escobar's
army of hitmen picked them off one by one. But Martinez bravely stuck to
the task, and would be there four years later when Escobar was finally killed.
At the same time that the search team was being set up, a secret US Army
unit specialising in electronic surveillance was sent to Colombia to help
to track down Escobar. Codenamed Centra Spike, the unit's speciality was
finding people.
Eavesdropping on radio and telephone conversations from the air, its
members were capable of pinpointing the origin of a radio or cellphone call
with amazing accuracy within seconds. The unit began tracking Escobar using
a small aircraft stacked with millions of dollars of electronic gear.
Each time Escobar phoned or radioed a friend or family member, the unit
would track the call and the search team would be dispatched to take him out.
But, incredibly, Escobar was able to avoid capture for years, despite
having the US Army and its most sophisticated equipment on his tail. He did
this through talking in code on the radio, tips from corrupt officials and
bumbling by the search team.
There was a brief reprieve for Colombia in 1991 when Escobar came to an
agreement with the Government which led to him being imprisoned in a "jail"
of his own making. It was in fact a mansion, and the guards were on his
payroll. He was able to come and go as he pleased and continued to run his
cocaine operation.
After a year, the Government decided to move him to a proper jail, but when
troops were sent to get him, he escaped and went back into hiding for the
last year of his life.
The pressure on Escobar became intense during this period. Rival cocaine
cartel members and families of his victims formed a vigilante group called
Los Pepes, which systematically went about murdering Escobar's associates
and members of his extended family until he became isolated.
Los Pepes boasted that they killed up to 300 people. Crucially, they were
fed information by the search team, which was closely aligned with Centra
Spike, raising the likelihood that the US was involved in the murders of
Colombian civilians.
In the end it was a combination of hard work by the search team and sheer
blind luck which caught Escobar. The team had been listening in to his
coded radio conversations with his son for several days.
Colonel Martinez's son, a member of the search team who was a radio expert,
was tracking the signal in a Medellin suburb when he suddenly saw Escobar
standing at a window.
Dozens of team members surrounded the house, and Escobar was shot after
climbing out a window on to a roof. It appeared he may have been shot in
the leg first, then executed at close range - a bullet had entered at the
centre of his right ear and exited just in front of the left ear, passing
straight through his brain.
Hundreds of millions was spent on the hunt for Escobar, but his death did
not stop the flow of drugs to the US. Rival cocaine cartels simply took
over the business.
But the killing was a major coup for the authorities who had hunted him for
so long and brought to an end a terror campaign of incredible savagery: 30
judges killed, 457 policemen, 20 murders a day for two months. Finally
Colombia could move out from Escobar's dark shadow.
No wonder the soldiers in that photo could not suppress wide grins.
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