Starting from the unsettling cover till the last disturbing word this book is a masterpiece. I don't know what is it about Mark's Bowden writing that makes the violence sound so exciting. There are bombings, kidnappings, torturing and brutal murders and I was repelled and strangely attracted to the story at the same time. When extremely brutal vigilante group fighting Pablo Escobar arose I was straight up spooked. Seriously, how do you fight people like narco kingpins? Is the only answer to violence is more violence? Good reminder that the world we are living in can be very frightening.

In the 1980s, the biggest industry in Colombia, a nation of then 30 million people, was cocaine manufacture and smuggling, accounting for 6% of the country's GDP. It was controlled by two cartels, one based in Medellín, the other in Cali. The head of the Medellín cartel was one Pablo Escobar, a professional criminal who assassinated his way to the top of an existing production and distribution network, and grew the business. Listed by Forbes Magazine as the seventh richest man in the world, Escobar lived in opulence: his country estate had a private zoo with hippos; he organized races of naked beauty queens for his friends to watch. However, this was not enough for him: he wanted to enter politics. Offering "silver or lead" to Colombians who stood in his way, Escobar assassinated presidential candidates, judges, journalists, policemen and soldiers, kidnapped children of politicians. Escobar also went out of his way to cultivate his image of a man of the people among Colombia's poor, although he was nothing of the sort: he was a drug baron who once had a dishonest servant drowned in front of his guests to drive home the point that this is what happens to people who cross him. After he blew up an airliner that a presidential candidate was supposed to fly in, the United States has had enough, and brought pressure on Colombia to extradite Escobar so he could be tried on drug and terrorism charges in a court he did not own. After a campaign of terror to fight the extradition, Escobar and the government agreed to a deal: he would not be extradited, but instead would serve five years in a prison he himself built. The prison was more like a luxury hotel with a telephone switchboard from which he ran his cocaine empire. After Escobar ordered two subordinates murdered, the government felt that he had broken his part of the deal, and sent a vice minister of justice to tell him that he would be transferred to a regular prison. The vice minister was taken hostage; the prison was stormed, and Escobar walked out: what soldier would risk his life by pointing his gun at the most powerful man in his country? After Escobar's escape, the government no longer felt bound by any deal; it brought in elite American soldiers and eavesdroppers; also, somebody whose identity is not revealed organized a regular Latin American death squad, which murdered, tortured and dispossessed not Marxist guerrillas and Liberation Theology priests, but Escobar's relatives and associates; the death squad seems to have made use of the American surveillance data. A year and a half after the escape, a young lieutenant, a son of the colonel who headed the task force for tracking down Escobar, honed in on the emissions of Escobar's cell phone, and saw him in a window of a house in Medellín. The lieutenant called in his father's forces, and Escobar was killed in a firefight, which ended a mission that cost hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Qualche mese fa riuscì a recuperare la serie Netflix Narcos e ne rimasi totalmente ammaliata e quando seppi che era tratta da questo libro di Bowden andai subito nella mia libreria di fiducia a ordinarlo!
È noto a tutti il nome di Pablo Escobar, noto in Colombia con il soprannome de El Patron o El Doctor (ancora così tanto amato e venerato dalla sua gente di Medellin), ma conoscere veramente la sua storia, beh quello è un altro paio di maniche!
Ed è proprio questo l'obbiettivo del libro: analizzare in profondità Pablo, le persone a lui intorno e le vicende storiche che portarono alla sua uccisione!
Il libro, come dice lo stesso autore, si basa su documenti, nastri, articoli e interviste realmente esistenti e ho apprezzato molto le note dell'autore e il nominare le fonti a cui attinge.
Come avviene ed è avvenuto nella storia contemporanea gli USA hanno giocato un ruolo estremamente rilevante nella ricerca e nella cattura/morte di Pablo, impensabile per loro che così tanti dollari finissero in mano a narcos sudamericani! Ma Pablo è stato solo la punta dell'iceberg del mercato della cocaina, che dopo la sua morte ha continuato e continua a entrare negli USA! È una guerra che non avrà mai fine e che è costata un monte di vite umane!
L'inizio della fine di Pablo è stata la sua vanità: il suo orgoglio di ritenersi un eroe nazionale, un nuovo Sancho Villa, e di entrare in politica per diventare presidente della Colombia!
Leggendo il libro da una parte sei quasi mossa a "compassione" verso la sua figura, perché mossa dagli stessi nostri istinti umani, dall'altra è agghiacciante la sua serenità nel commettere omicidi e questo non lo rende diverso dai nostri (ahimè) mafiosi!
Sconcertante l'impiego massiccio di mezzi, soldi e uomini da parte degli Stati Uniti e dell'enorme corruzione vigente in Colombia!
Sconvolgente anche il modo in cui una persona che aveva beffato 2 Stati per così tanto tempo sia morta così miseramente e il pubblico ludibrio a cui fu sottoposto il corpo di Pablo (con gente che tiene ancora la foto ricordo appesa nel proprio ufficio!!)
Insomma un libro che va letto per conoscere a pieno la nostra storia contemporanea e che si legge bene (a parte quando partono con le tremila sigle degli enti che parteciparono alla cattura

The first section about Escobar's rise to power was the best part of the book. Once the DEA and various other American agencies got involved, Bowden shows a bad habit of fawning all over them, and comparing their rugged cynical professionalism to the whacky zany Colombians in some pretty patronizing ways. Still, it's a lively and very readable account and Bowden isn't entirely supportive of the ruthless extremes the hunters used in tracking down Escobar, giving the last word to the Colombian DEA chief who even today thinks that the ends, in this case, didn't justify the means.

A good, succinct (6 hours on audio) account of the life of Pablo Escobar - from his rise from small-time car crook to most notorious cartel leader of all time, to his subsequent downfall at the hands of a joint Colombian-US manhunt. What I found most interesting was the book's contextualisation of how Pablo took advantage of Colombia's troubled democracy, in which power still lay with whoever was willing to seize it or undermine it most violently. Thus when Escobar - a man later estimated to be responsible for 4,000 deaths - surrendered for the first time, he was able to set most of the terms of his incarceration, including a maximum term of five years, building and staffing his own luxury prison from which he could continue his cartel business, and even having extradition outlawed in the constitution. A fascinating read which examines why Escobar's character and story remain so compelling (“Anybody can be a criminal, but an outlaw needs a following”), without romanticising them or minimising the atrocities he committed.

"Mark.Bowden's well researched account of the hunt for Pablo is best read with a CL smoothie regging cold as the Rockies, because his writing is as smooth as Coors' barley pops" - Paul Bunyan

‘Killing Pablo’ provides the reader with a high level of details of the years-long manhunt that eventually led to the killing of the drug kingpin shortly after his 44th birthday in December 1993. Written by an American author, with a knack for, and what seems like an interest in how US foreign- and security policy directly intervenes abroad, the book allows for insight into how American interests impacted the process as well as the outcome. Nevertheless, it also limits the perspectives of this narrative to a small group of men, be it politicians stretching from President Gaviria to Defense Minister Pardo, to police, military generals and coronels, DEA agents, CIA agents, Delta Force operators etc. I doubt that a book written today, more than 20 years after this publication, would survive such a narrow [albeit deep] approach.

However, in Bowden’s description the protagonist himself remains an almost one-dimensional character. The book, while dutifully mapping out timelines and actors, does not reveal or imagine what drives or enables Escobar to eventually become one of the “the world’s greatest outlaw”. The strongest literary moment in this documentary style text is when the relationships between Escobar and his son (Juan Pablo) is juxtaposed with the relationship between coronel Martinez, who heads the police unit tasked with hunting Escobar, and his son [Hugo], a police intelligence officer ultimately assigned to his father’s unit. In the end it was a call to Juan Pablo that enabled the police to reveal Escobar’s whereabouts and ultimately kill him.

This was a random read for me. Throughout the years I have consciously stayed away from anything ‘narcos’ related, not wanting to perpetuate an outdated stereotype. When my dad, who rarely reads, and who I don’t think ever shared a reading recommendation presented me with this book I took it on to show appreciation for the initiative, and out of curiosity in what he had learned about Pablo Escobar and Colombia.

This book explains first how Pablo Escobar scrambled his way up to the top of the cocaine distribution network known as the Medellin cartel, and then goes into much detail about the last years of his life, especially the period that he was on the run from the Colombian police, the CIA, the DEA and US military advisers.

It's a story of violence that is unbelievably casual. Pablo Escobar and his henchmen had a simple way of keeping control of their empire, and of their public relations : kill everyone who disagrees. It helped that Pablo Escobar played the bountiful benefactor in his home town of Medellin, so that many of the locals revered, respected and helped him during his months-long life underground.

The author does a good job of describing the various efforts that were made to curb Escobar's activities, both in Colombia and in the USA. It was hard to keep up with the description of the political situation in Colombia, partially because so many presidential candidates or prominent politicians, judges and law enforcement experts were killed. Finally, a Major Martinez was assigned the job of finding the fugitive Escobar, not once, but twice. Indeed, Escobar had negotiated a type of voluntary surrender that allowed him to run his drug empire from a comfortable country-club type prison where he controlled every guard! After a much-publicized escape from that prison, he went on the run for about 16 months, moving from safe house to safe house within the city of Medellin, while various technical experts tried to figure out where he was based on the radio signals coming from his cell phones. Ultimately, what put the most pressure on Escobar was not the legitimate police hunt, but the appearance of Los Pepes, a vigilante group that undertook a systematic elimination of Escobar's business associates and extended family. The Americans involved in the search for Escobar noticed with dismay that these executions dovetailed very nicely with the information they had provided to the Colombian police. The suspicion that the Colombian police forces, embittered by years of seeing their brother officers being assassinated in the drug wars, had somehow become involved in this vigilante justice, was never proven or disproven - but weighs heavily on the mind of many of the Americans who were in Medellin at the time Escobar was found. Even the death of Escobar in a reported shoot-out raised more suspicions. Was his head wound a lucky shot, or a cold-blooded execution of a man who'd been brought down by a leg wound? Or even worse, was an American sniper involved?

These questions will likely never be answered. The book also doesn't answer the question of how the death of Pablo Escobar affected drug trafficking overall - because it is clear that at some point, the hunt for Pablo Escobar was not so much about fighting drugs, as about punishing and neutralizing someone who had kept an entire country terrorized for a decade.

Belonging to a minority who hasn’t watched Narcos yet on Netflix, there was next to nothing I knew about the exploits of Pablo Escobar. The contents of the book offer a comprehensive view on the Escobar phenomenon in Colombia and across the world and also is an account of the manhunt that eventually brought him down. As it chronicles the rise and fall of a crime lord, the book moves at the speed of a thriller and is quite well researched and comprehensively written. If it was not for the too obvious way in which the author leaned towards the Americans, this would have made for a splendid work of non-fiction.

The rise of Escobar as the undisputed drug boss of Colombia speaks much about the state of affairs in Colombia of old. The degree to which corruption had rusted the machinery of the government needs to be read to be believed. Escobar was also shrewd enough to understand how best to employ fear to achieve the status of a living legend. He lived flamboyantly and rivalled any legitimate business mogul in displays of wealth. When the Forbes magazine itself featured him as one of the richest men alive, the notion grew within Escobar’s criminal enterprise that they were reaching some levels of legitimacy equal to a large business house. The entire government machinery was more or less in his pockets and his influence reached everywhere in society across all stratas. Playing the role of a rich Robin Hood, Escobar even pandered to the whims and fancies of the general populace with the clever manipulation of media. With increasing revenues from the drug business Escobar grew so omnipotent and in the process made two enemies. The United States was one of the biggest markets that Escobar catered to and this brought him eventually to the sights of the US law enforcement. The second was when Escobar overstepped all the lenience that the Colombian government was showing him and unleashed a string of murders through the nation – judges, police men and even their families fell like flies in this carnage. Like the proverbial straw the broke the camel’s back, the Colombian governments finally decided to shake hands with the Americans and the tables turned on Escobar. This is part I of the book and is a roller coaster ride. The research that Bowden has done for these chapters is brilliant and is stocked full of facts and figures of Escobar’s early life.

Part II of the story deals with the manhunt which was only rivalled later in history by the money and effort spent to bring down Bin Laden. The Americans brought in technological support and also manpower in the form of Delta force and the SEAL’s who assisted the Colombians in tracking Escobar down. The job however was not easy for the hunters as Escobar and his men eluded them for years and continued to carry out judgements and executions even when in exile. Pushed beyond their usual limits, there came to the fore Los Pepes who began rivalling Esocbar in brutality and began taking out Escobar’s associates and friends. The theories surrounding this group and their connections to American military/intelligence establishments is yet to be proved but this tactic of an eye for an eye did bring Escobar out of hiding and finally led to him being gunned down.

There is a strong sense of anti-climax here if you consider this : At the start of the chase, Escobar was being touted as the thousand headed demon who controlled everything related to drugs but by the time he lay dead under a hail of bullets the drug empire were controlled by a host of other players. In the words of one of the officers who led the chase, the death of Escobar hardly put a dent in the overall scheme of things. It is also here that the author comes across as staunchly pro-American. While the Colombians mostly are portrayed as incompetent and corrupt (with the exception of Colonel Ramirez maybe), the Americans are knights in shining armour. Bowden is smart enough to avoid such a treatment all through the book and yet it surfaces from time to time in the narrative. This was my only gripe with the writing as such.

Recommended. I should now watch Narcos !

True crime is an incredibly popular genre these days and "Killing Pablo" is a high-end true crime read. The difference here is that the book does not revolve around a particular crime or crimes, or an infamous serial killer, its much wider scope focuses on a man who brought the world of the narco "industry" to the fore of world news. Simultaneously, we get the biography of a notorious and ruthless drug baron while also gaining insight into the workings of the massive cocaine trafficking business. Author Mark Bowden also renders dramatic flair, applying a fine writing style to a smorgasbord of mouthwatering content. There's no need to fictionalize anything here. The life and world of Pablo Escobar were, as the cliche goes, stranger than fiction. For anyone with an interest in the shadowy world of the international drug trade, or the rise to power of one of its pioneers, this book is a must.

Everything about Pablo Escobar is fascinating and borderline unbelievable. This book follows the rise of Escobar’s drug empire and the massive hunt to find and kill him.

Good info, crazy history + so recent/current