It is, I think, a common misconception that Pablo Escobar was a creature which rose from the depths of big time illegal drug trade. For while it is true, as depicted in this book, that illegal drugs were what made him big, as in fact at the highest point of his criminal career he was one of the world’s richest men, illegal drugs alone would not have made this possible. It was rather the culture of violence, prevalent in Colombian society and where Pablo Escobar was born into and grew up in, which made him what he was.

Violence permeated his world. The country’s two major political factions fought eight civil wars in the 19th century, one of them leaving more than one hundred thousand dead and practically crippled the government. With this, the ordinary people learned to distrust the government and instead found heroes in outlaws and bandits who roamed the countryside defying everything. These ‘bandidos’ became role models and idols of worship to the many powerless, terrorized and oppressed poor.

“Terror became art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi-religious aesthetic,” wrote the author. Violence is OK, even the gory and sadistic kind. It was in this society where Pablo Escobar grew up.

He started, not as a drug dealer, but as a thief. He robbed banks and anyone who caught his fancy, then went into carnapping, kidnapping for ransom, murder and protection racket. He was ruthless, charismatic and had ambition. Soon he became a local legend, a modern day Robin Hood, murderous but with a social conscience ( perception he nurtured by his well-publicized acts of charity).

This book entertainingly narrates his beginnings, his rise to power, the zenith of his career (when he almost practically brought down the government), his nail-biting, prolonged cat-and-mouse game with the authorities (aided by the US) and his eventual capture, his body riddled with bullets. Even with the most sophisticated tracking devices supplied by American operatives the hunt for him was very difficult because he had tremendous aid and support not only from people under his employ, but from the common people as well.

Fighting illegal drugs while promoting disrespect for the law and a culture of violence and impunity is, I think, a very bad idea. It is like burning a house to kill a mouse hiding in it. Worse, if the whole enterprise is but a pretense because the ones ostensibly fighting the menace are themselves neck-deep into it.

This book was a historical account of the incredible efforts taken by the Colombian and American governments to eliminate Pablo Escobar, who was not only a cocaine kingpin, but also a violent criminal responsible for the death of hundreds of people who were either innocent or members of a rival cartel. The book starts by explaining how Escobar got his Empire started and then tells how it slowly started to crumble. There is no one set main character; although in the beginning one might say that Pablo is one and near the end a member of the Centra Spike organization was another. The pacing was not fast or slow but it was kind of difficult to pick up where I left off after not reading the book for a day or two. The ending is very cool as it is told through the different viewpoints of the members who participated in the final raid. As a military person, the reason that I chose this book is that the author, Mark Bowden, is the author of Black Hawk Down which is a very action packed book. This being said, I would think that mostly military people would like this book although there is not a whole lot of action like in Black Hawk Down. The most interesting aspect of this book is the how the different embassies and government agencies would have to compete in this manhunt. This is why in my opinon the book receives a 4/5 stars.

“Vivá Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!”

COLOMBIA
- Colombia is a land that breeds outlaws. It has always been ungovernable, a nation of wild unsullied beauty, steeped in mystery.

- The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.

- He had grown up in an essentially lawless state, one he called “morally timid,” and believed his philosophy of enforcing his own justice to be the only realistic alternative.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PABLO
- Pablo had the gift of putting people at ease.

- never seemed to lose his temper, especially when he was in danger. At those moments, in secretly recorded conversations with his associates, Martinez noted that Pablo seemed to radiate calm. He had a talent for managing several problems at the same time, and never made a move that had not been carefully thought through. Pablo was flexible and creative.

- He was comfortable. He clearly believed he could play this game indefinitely... Despite all the resources arrayed against him, Pablo didn’t even seem rattled.

PUBLIC RELATIONS
- [Pablo] had, in the words of former Colombian president César Gaviria, “a kind of native genius for public relations.”

- The killing had all the hallmarks of the young crime boss’s emerging style: cruel, deadly, smart, and with an eye toward public relations.

- He hired publicists and paid off journalists. He founded his own newspaper, called Medellín Cívica, which produced occasional fawning profiles of its benefactor.

- These acts of public vengeance and coercion turned all but Pablo’s hard-core local supporters against him and the other narcos. He had gone from hero to pariah in the space of eight years, and the suits in Bogotá and Washington were more than fed up.

US DOESN’T CARE ABOUT COCAINE UNTIL CRACK HITS THE STREETS
- Cocaine lost all its stylishness when it started showing up on city streets in its cheap, smokable form, crack.

“PLATO O PLOMO”
- Pablo was establishing a pattern of dealing with the authorities that would become his trademark. It soon became known simply as plata o plomo. One either accepted Pablo’s plata (silver) or his plomo (lead).

- He wasn’t an entrepreneur, and he wasn’t even an especially talented businessman. He was just ruthless.

PABLO FOR CONGRESS
- Under the Colombian system, voters elect a representative and a substitute, who is allowed full privileges of the office and sits in when the primary delegate is unable to attend congressional sessions.

- The post conferred automatic judicial immunity, so Pablo could no longer be prosecuted for crimes under Colombian law. He was also entitled to a diplomatic visa, which he began using that year to take trips with his family to the United States.

- The mistake Pablo made was to covet a public role in this process. He could have continued pulling strings in Colombian politics through a long, fat lifetime, but he insisted on stepping out from behind the curtain. Pablo wanted the limelight.

PABLO FEARED NOTHING (EXCEPT PERHAPS EXTRADITION)
- Colombia had signed a treaty with the United States in 1979 that recognized the shipment of illegal drugs to be a crime against the United States. As such, it called for suspected drug traffickers to be extradited for trial to the United States, and, if convicted, imprisoned. The prospect struck fear into the hearts of men like Pablo Escobar, who long ago had learned they had little to fear from Colombia’s justice system.

- “Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States.”

DRUG TRAFFICKING NOW SEEN AS NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT
- In April of 1986, the president had signed National Security Decision Directive 221, which for the first time declared drug trafficking a threat to national security. The directive opened the door to direct military involvement in the war on drugs,

DIPLOMACY AND WAR
- Diplomacy and war spring from different philosophical wells. The underlying premise of diplomacy is that people, no matter what their differences, are well-intentioned and can work together. Warriors believe in intractable evil. Certain forces cannot be compromised with; they must simply be defeated.

PABLO GOES TOO FAR
- These two atrocities would prove to be fatal mistakes...Downing a commercial airliner was an attack on global civilization. It meant Pablo now posed a direct threat to American citizens...Killing Galán had made Pablo public enemy number one in Colombia. The Avianca bombing made him public enemy number one in the world.

- Of course, killing Pablo had not primarily been about drugs. His violence was his death sentence. His violence and his ambition.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME
- With so much money, he might easily have sought shelter in a dozen places around the world, but his vision of himself and his future was focused exclusively on Colombia. He did not want to live anywhere but in his home city of Medellín.

GOLDEN CAGE
- He would have his own special “prison,” which would be built in his hometown of Envigado on a hill called La Catedral, on land that he owned. He would pay to have it built.

- Prison would give Pablo a comfortable, safe place to settle down and reestablish his dominance of the cocaine-trafficking business.

PABLO ESCAPES HIS PRISON AND GOES ON THE RUN
- What they needed for this mission were manhunters, Delta Force, the army’s elite and top-secret counterterrorism unit.

- When they found him, they were going to kill him. It was a practice so commonplace throughout South America that there was even an expression for it: la ley de fuga, the law of escape.

NEED TO ANGER PABLO TO DRAW HIM OUT
- claimed that in order to bring Escobar out of hiding, he needs to be provoked, or angered and made desperate so that he wants to strike back. The informant claimed that Escobar may then make mistakes. [He] recommended seizure and confiscation of Escobar’s assets, or their literal destruction, as a means of angering Escobar.

- Pablo found places where he could see the top of the apartment building, Altos del Campestre, where his family was living under heavy guard, and he spoke most often to his son, Juan Pablo. This was the weak link that the colonel wanted to exploit with the new, highly touted portable surveillance unit.

- Pablo’s son was his weakness.

ROLE OF THE AMERICANS DURING THE KILL?
- Pablo’s death was regarded as a successful mission for Delta, and legend has it that its operators were in on the kill. If so, and perhaps by design, there is no evidence of it. Some of the Search Bloc members I interviewed said there were Americans among the assault force that day; others said there were not.

OTHER DRUG LORD BENEFITTED FROM HUNT/DEATH OF PABLO
- In the years they had focused on Pablo, the southern cartel had consolidated its operations, cemented its relationship with the Colombian government, and become a cocaine monopoly.

- Killing Pablo had not ended the cocaine industry; it had merely handed it off to new leaders, who had presumably learned from Pablo’s mistakes.

*** *** *** *** ***

WTF
- To entertain his closest friends, Pablo would hire a gaggle of beauty queens for evenings of erotic games. The women would strip and race naked toward an expensive sports car, which the winner would keep, or submit to bizarre humiliations—shaving their heads, swallowing insects, or engaging in naked tree-climbing contests.

- Once, when a worker was discovered stealing something from his estate, Pablo had the man bound hand and foot, and in front of horrified guests at Nápoles personally kicked the man into his swimming pool and then watched him drown. “This is what happens to those who steal from Pablo Escobar!” he said.

- Moncada and Galeano were killed by being hung upside down and burned. The informant says this is Escobar’s favorite way of killing people.

FACTOIDS
- Simón Bolívar tried to join Colombia with Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador to form a great South American state, Gran Colombia. But even the great liberator could not hold the pieces together.

- He flew in hundreds of exotic animals—elephants, buffalo, lions, rhinoceroses, gazelles, zebras, hippos, camels, and ostriches.

- sicarios, or paid gunmen,

- Colombia was the source of nearly 80 percent of the cocaine making its way to the United States.

- He attended funerals almost every day. The national police had constructed special funeral chapels in Medellín and in Bogotá just to handle the demand.

- Knowing that the police and the Americans were still listening to his radio and phone calls, Pablo raised pigeons for private communications;

- DEA when it was established in 1973.

- There were so many American spy planes over Medellín, at one point seventeen in the air together, that the air force had to assign an AWACs, an airborne warning-and-control center, to keep track of them.

- It was during the summer of 1993, as Mendoza was undergoing this ordeal, that most of the Centra Spike unit departed Colombia for two months. The unit joined the hunt for Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

HAHA
- in the article Pablo traced the origin of his estimated $ 5 billion fortune to a “bicycle rental business” he said he had started in Medellín when he was sixteen years old.

- After the escape, the joke at the embassy went: “How many Colombian prison guards and soldiers does it take to let Pablo Escobar escape?” Answer: “Four hundred. One to open the gate and three hundred and ninety-nine to watch.”

- they carefully shaved off the corners of their victim’s whiskers to give him that peculiar Hitler-style mustache that would be featured in all the news reports of his death. It was one final indignity for the man who had embarrassed them for so long.

BONUS
- Impact of assassination of Colombian politician Jorge Gaitan: https://youtu.be/QFlCZ5lcG4Q

- Short history of Colombia: https://youtu.be/owDu_Yl_uas

- Death of basketball star Len Bias due to cocaine (1986): https://youtu.be/XUve5lAwU9Q

- A look inside Pablo’s self-made “prison”: https://youtu.be/-xkenGquUh8

- Pablo escapes from his luxury “prison”: https://youtu.be/ThSKAQbyCW4

- A Wired web article on the tech that helped find Pablo (very fascinating): https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2016/0...

- Interview with DEA agents who hunted, killed Pablo: https://youtu.be/EKpuBicyhqI

- Pablo’s hippos are alive and well: https://youtu.be/TU1laVxReaY

- Carlos Lehder released from US prison in 2020: https://youtu.be/4wfuA73adfc

I thought i would like this book .. but it seemed like reading a news paper !

It was filled with information rather than a story of the most famous drug dealer.. and I was very excited to read his story, but I wasn't able to continue reading it.

I would love to try another book to know the story of Pablo Escobar, but not this type of books. I would rather like a story being told by someone who was very close to him like his mother or his bodyguard or someone else ..

Nothing special about this book.
Pablo Escobar: My Father was by far the best perspective of Pablo and they life they lived during his empire and how they live now.

Historia upadku Pablo Escobara miała wszelkie zadatki na trzymającą w napięciu lekturę. Efekt z braku kunsztu literackiego nie został osiągnięty.

Opowieść o życiu króla narkobiznesu po prostu nuży. Autorowi nie udało wyjść się poza suche fakty. Co prawda widać ogrom pracy dziennikarskiej w pozyskaniu informacji od osób bezpośrednio zaangażowanych w pościg za Escobarem jak agenci DEA czy szef kolumbijskiego bloku poszukiwawczego, ale cóż z tego skoro relacji brakuje finezji i głębszego wgryzienia się w temat. Drobiazgowe zilustrowanie pościgu USA za Escobarem to za mało.

Osobom chcącym poznać historię Escobara polecam obejrzenie serialu Narcos. O ileż sprawniej ukazuje tragedię Kolumbii związaną z funkcjonowaniem narkobiznesu. Książka nie oddaje tylu niuansów.

What a fascinating story about an evil man and his downfall. Sometimes the writing felt dry, and the author loved describing people as fat or chubby for no apparent reason, but I am glad that I read this book. It helped me consolidate a lot of what I already knew about Colombia/Medellin’s history with Pablo Escobar and understand just how bad it was. And it was interesting in the end how people questioned the cost and aftermath to his death. Amo mi Medallo y mi Paisalandia

3.50 Stars - Mark Bowden is an extremely talented fellow & this classic tale is no let down that's for sure. As someone whom has a fair knowledge of these events already, I was surprised at just how many details there where in here that took me deeper down the rabbit hole & helped fill in more of the ’how’ in a concentrated telling of events that built.towards that fateful rooftop chase. Those few outside if Medellin whom hold Escobar in any sort of esteem will rightly become more clear as to just what a dangerous narcissistic sociopath the man really was.

Well researched & a well structured easy read, Killing Pablo is a tense, thrilling & highly informative read for anyone looking for more detail in the events that lead to the eventual shooting of the worlds largest drug kingpin.

I would say this book is very fun to read all the interesting events that occurred during the 70's and 80's I would recommend this to my friends.

Oceniając tę pozycję chciałabym zwrócić uwagę na dwie odrębne kwestie: po pierwsze na samą treść, a po drugie na jej polskie wydanie.
Ogólnie książka zawiera dużą ilość informacji dotyczących ostatnich lat życia Pabla Escobara i dla kogoś, kto nie miał wcześniej styczności z Kolumbią może być dobrym punktem wyjścia do zrozumienia o co chodziło w „polowaniu” na Escobara. Należy jednak pamiętać, że jest ona pisana z perspektywy Amerykanina i miejscami aż boli protekcjonalne podejście autora do kraju i ludzi, o których pisze. Chociaż stara się on zachować obiektywizm w opisie udziału sił Stanów w pościgu za Escobarem, to zdania typu „Kolumbia zawsze była trudna do rządzenia”, albo „jedynym przejawem cywilizacji była religia chrześcijańska” są uwłaczające i świadczą o ignorancji Bowdena jeżeli chodzi o historię oraz panujące tam od połowy XIX w. stosunki polityczne.
W Polsce książka Bowdena ukazała się nakładem Wydawnictwa Poznańskiego, które popisało się wyjątkową niestarannością w jej przygotowaniu. Zadziwiające są na przykład decyzje tłumaczki, która czasami odmienia, a czasami nie odmienia niektórych słów, w tym imion i nazwisk, albo brakuje jej konsekwencji w trzymaniu się zasad odmiany. Za przykład niech posłużą Barco (które można swobodnie odmienić jak Matejko), Gacha (przy którym pojawia się dziwaczna odmiana Gachym) i wiele innych. Nie odmienia też słów finca, lub sicario… Stosuje się tam wolne tłumaczenie nazw własnych i terminów, które w języku polskim mają już swoje ogólnie przyjęte tłumaczenie, np. teologia wyzwolenia (a nie wyzwoleńcza), albo Armia Wyzwolenia Narodowego (nie Narodowa Armia Wyzwoleńcza). Takie rzeczy wystarczy wpisać w Google. Ze słów hiszpańskich znikają akcenty, albo pojawiają się one w miejscach, w których być nie powinny. Nie rozumiem też, dlaczego nie zmienione zostały jednostki miar. Czytelnikowi w Polsce nic nie mówi to, że Juan Pablo ważył ponad 200 funtów. I moje ulubione – ciągłe użycie słowa „dżungla” w odniesieniu do lasów Kolumbii. Ja wiem, ze geografia pewnie była dawno temu w szkole, ale potoczne użycie tego słowa jako synonimu wszystkich wilgotnych lasów strefy równikowej jest po prostu słabe. Przez cały czas widoczne jest niechlujne podejście zarówno tłumaczki, jak i redaktorów tekstu, którzy przeoczyli też takie sprawy, jak literówki.

-¿El enemigo de mi enemigo es mi amigo aunque sea mi enemigo?.-

Género. Novela.

Lo que nos cuenta. Relato breve del ascenso del narcotraficante Pablo Escobar hasta ser el líder del Cartel de Medellín y largo relato de los hechos que desembocaron finalmente en su muerte.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

tons of fun, very light and breezy read. not as good as Kings of Cocaine, but an excellent supplement thereof.