Mark Bowden has a knack for telling an entertaining story. The heroes are the Columbians who persist in hunting Escobar despite great personal risk. Escobar seemingly knew anybody who was hunting him and everybody in their family. A carload of unexploded dynamite parked in front of your house would be a warning most people would heed. The corruption in government and law enforcement in Columbia is staggering, but considering the threats some officials and their families faced, who wouldn't make a phone call to apprise Escobar of a raid, or turn a blind eye to the drug trafficking? A moral dilemma few of us would experience.

Precízna práca autora s informáciami a zdrojmi doplnená o autentické prepisy komunikácie samotného El Doctoreho vytvorila veľmi pútavé čítanie a hltal som bez dychu stranu za stranou. Musím ale priznať, že aj keď je vyčínanie Escobara neospravedlnitlné a za hranou všetkého myslitelného v čo mnohí z nás veríme a žijeme, dokážem s ním v určitom zmysle sympatizovať. Viva la Colombia!

I originally was fascinated and awed by the life and story of Escobar and held a sort of reverence for the man, but during and after reading this book I was rooting for him to be caught and killed. For someone who is an adamant pacifist, it was striking for me to feel relieved by someone's death.

Not a bad read and tells a good tale about the hunt for Escobar but lots of repetition and parts that seem like they've been copied and pasted into the book. After watching Narcos on Netflix it seems like a lot of the material from this book was used so watch that if you want to get the gist of what happened and be slightly more entertained or read the book and then watch the series to see it all come alive. 3 stars from me.

Mark Bowden - Image from Grove Atlantic

This is great stuff! Bowden’s 1999 best-seller, Blackhawk Down, was a masterpiece of the genre. Killing Pablo, published in 2001, keeps that momentum going. It tells the tale of the rise and fall of, arguably, the greatest gangster (outside of government) of the 20th century. It is fast-paced, gripping, and gives one a feel for Colombia during the period when narco-terror ruled. (It’s all better now, right?) There is a large cast of characters portrayed here; Steve Jacoby, and American signals intelligence expert, Colonel Hugo Martinez, an incorruptible leader of Colombian police, and his son who was determined to contribute to the battle with Escobar, Mossir Busby, an American diplomat who was instrumental in gaining US involvement in tracking Escobar down. What makes Pablo Escobar significant for more than his mere criminality is that his level of influence and terror led to a change in American policy. It changed from seeing Escobar as a gangster to defining him as a threat to American security and ultimately waged war against him. This is a book you will not want to put down, even knowing that the bad guy gets it in the end.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Bowden on Twitter

July 2017 – National Geographic and ProPublica joined forces for this alarming report of a drug cartel outrage in the town of Allende, near the US border in Mexico - How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico - By Ginger Thompson

Pablo Escobar was the founder of the Medellin Cartel, and was a notorious drug lord. He began his criminal career as a young man doing petty crimes before graduating to serious criminal activity. He eventually employed other people to kidnap people who owed him money. His most notorious kidnapping scheme, where the victim was businessman Diego Echavarria, who was kidnapped and eventually killed in the summer of 1971, Escobar received a $50,000 ransom from the Echavarria family. He made a pretty good living off of his criminal enterprises, amassing some $30 million by the time of his death. Another thing that grossed me out was that he married a 15 year old girl when he was 26. I realize there are all sorts of age gaps in relationships, but it is nasty when one party is not even legal adult age. He had been incarcerated and escaped, which is where this book comes in. It goes over the manhunt and his subsequent capture/death. Overall, it was a decent book.

Really enjoyed this book, gets into the technical aspects of the hunt for Pablo from the side of the Columbia government & US government. If you enjoyed the show Narcos this book is for you.

I have never read anything else about the hunt for Pablo Escobar so I don't know if Mark Bowden's book is seen as authoritative but it is certainly thorough. Charting the events from Escobar's rise to prominence until his death in a shoot-out, Bowden outlines all of the main players and describes the various events in a clear and propulsive manner. Generally, the prose is simple and straightforward, which serves this kind of story well. Bowden lets the events speak for themselves. I would agree with some other reviewers that point to a little bit of over-admiration for the skills of some of the US military units but feel that it is tempered by his honest assessment of the hindrance caused by the various competing bureaucracies. With such a murky tale, I'm sure it was difficult cutting through rumour and speculation to get to the truth, and Bowden does a good job of pointing out ambiguity where it exists. I found the final chapter of the book, Aftermath, to be the most interesting. Naturally enough, the authorities followed a laser-like focus during the hunt for Escobar. After his death, some of the leaders of the search become more reflective and question whether it was all worth the hundreds (thousands?) of lives and millions of dollars. Like them, and Bowden himself, I'd say that remains an open question.

An education read about Pablo Escobar and Columbia. I had no idea what a manipulative, vile, violent and arrogant man Pablo was.

I learned so much from this book!
Living in Medellin, Colombia, I've wanted to gain a better understanding of this time period in Colombian history, and this was a great piece of that journey. It helped me understand so much more about the places, people, situations, and culture. There's no "one" unified story about Pablo Escobar and this time period, so I'm sure there are ways it's biased from an American's perspective, things it omits etc. But in general I thought it was a very readable book that struck a nice balance between being readable and thorough. I *do* think towards the end it was a bit overly detailed about the various people interactions with the Colombian and US govt, and I kind of lost track of which person did what thing. But. I think it also was probably a complicated mess towards the end, and hard to simplify!
If you're looking to learn more about the hunt for Pablo Escobar and the events during the years leading up to his death, this is a great choice!

A succinct but thorough overview of the collective political, military, law enforcement, and intelligence efforts to catch Pablo. Unfortunately, the scope of this book does not allow for any of the minute to minute intensity that Bowden captures in Black Hawk Down. Still, it seems to be a highly authoritative and well researched history.

I wanted to read this before I made a start on the Netflix series 'Narcos'. Basically, I wanted to know the truth (or as close as anybody can get without being there) of the story before watching a more dramatised version of it.

To be honest, it's a story that doesn't need to be exaggerated or sexed up. The story of Pablo Escobar, and the men (both Colombian and American) who lined up to stop him, is so utterly wild that if an author tried to present it as fiction nobody would believe it. Escobar earned billions (back in the days when this was still a relatively difficult thing to achieve), pretty much owned and modernised the city of Medellin, and organised a reign of terror across Colombia. He tried to run for public office in the early days of his empire. He was responsible for the deaths of police, armed forces, government officials, presidential candidates. He was even considered the mastermind behind an airplane bombing and bombs in public places. Like I said, life is often stranger and wilder than fiction.

Even the attempts to bring him down were the stuff of fiction. Endemic corruption in Colombian society meant that Pablo's snitches were embedded deeply within government, the military, and the police. He was able to evade capture for years (and later escape from 'prison') thanks to high levels of corruption. The few people who couldn't be corrupted were either targeted by Pablo's sicarios or slated by a press and public that didn't know what to believe. Even the American operation was mired with infighting by the small, tightly operated, and brilliant Centra Spike intelligence unit and the bloated and highly expensive CIA operation. Centra Spike won the battle to chase Escobar, but it cost them in the long run.

It's a story that benefits from Bowden's impartial and considered approach. He doesn't sensationalise or sex things up, probably because he knows that the facts speak for themselves, and his storytelling skills are strong. He keeps the prose in the background and never shows off, which throws the astonishing events into sharp relief. This is an excellent bit of non-fiction that reads as compellingly and quickly as some of the finest crime fiction. Highly recommended.