Interesting book to read while traveling in Colombia, to refresh my memory about the history of drug trafficking and terrorism in the country. While reading the detailed arc I was reminded of each Narcos' series episode I'd watched a while back, and got some additional details, including on how the political and security context Pablo Escobar was born into heavily impacted his development as a criminal, a refresh on how complicated was the connection between the government and Los Pepes or how key the development of tecnology was to finally catch him.
Engaging and easy to ready.

Świetne uzupełnienie po obejrzeniu Narcos. Jest to jednak (jak zresztą sugeruje sam tytuł) historia złapania Escobara - obejmująca okres od 1989 do 1993 - a nie opowieść o powstaniu imperium Pabla czy też kartelu Medellín.

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

Before reading this book I knew, through popular media, that Pablo Escobar was a drug kingpen who lived lavishly while publicly evading the law but who eventually fell and was jailed or something. A conversation with a Colombian student of mine who was surprised that I didn't know more about this cocaine mafioso led me to Mark Bowden's narration of the events that led to Escobar's assassination.

Upon reading the first 100 pages, my opnion of Escobar evolved from a general disliking of the type of business he ran to a deep loathing of everything he did and how he justified it. Pablo Escobar didn't just excel at smuggling contraband to North America and Europe and knocking off the competition. When the government mounted a campaign to bring Escobar to trial, the crime boss started kidnapping prosecutors, bribing judges and setting off bombs in the Colombian capital. The authorities and political class became scared of him and the poor saw--and continue to see--him as a hero because of his ongoing philanthropy and ability to employ many among the desperate and destitute. It's the perfect recipe for impunity.

Bowden is not a master of literary technique, but the book reads like a good suspense novel with enough description of those involved to get emotionally invested in this true story. When Pablo finally is executed, there is a mixed feeling of relief and frustration. The Colombian and US forces celebrated a victory, but it came at a cost paid in human lives, compromised ethics and state-supported terrorism.

“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

This is clearly well researched, however the writing style is dry and uninteresting. Honestly, if I hadn't already watched Narcos I wouldn't be able to keep up with all the people as the author provides no thread line and this reads more like a book outline and not the finished product.

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.

watched the Narcos series on Netflix and this is really worth it. surely it's more accurate than the series. here i realized the amount of things they changed to make the series more dramatic.

-¿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/...

Epic! I don't normally read non-fiction, but after watching Narcos, I wanted to read more about Pablo Escobar. About halfway through I didn't want to finish because then I'd know what was going to happen in Narcos season 2. I can't believe the life Pablo led and the insane search for him! This book was a little hard for me to follow all the characters and names, but I'm bad with names in general.

Very well researched and truly a page-turner kind of book. I didn't need to refer to other sources while reading and the investigation was not biased as I was expecting..

If you are interested in money laundering and illegal activities this book will be a very good real life case study, it gets exciting with every chapter towards the end of the story.

Highly recommended.

Mark Bowden is an American writer and author. He has been The Distinguished Writer in Residence at The University of Delaware since 2013. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and also a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. Another famous book by Bowden is "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War".

Mark Bowden is a masterful storyteller and Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw is no exception. I listened to it on audiobook and it is narrated by Mark Bowden. I love it when authors narrate their own work. I have read several Bowden books including Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, The Last Stone, The Case of the Vanishing Blonde: And Other True Crime Stories, and Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader. Many of his other books are on my TBR list.

I am currently watching the Netflix docuseries, Griselda, played by Sofia Vergara. The first episode begins with a quote from Pablo Escobar, "The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco." Both Griselda and Pablo were leaders in cocaine trafficking.

Pablo was the sole leader of the Medellin Cartel in Columbia. His nicknames were El Doctor, El Patron, and the King of Cocaine. Bowden described the ruthlessness of Pablo as "terror becomes art." Pablo often kidnapped people, held them for ransom, and then killed them after receiving the ransom. However, to many people in Columbia he was viewed as a type of Robin Hood because he built amenities for the poor and advocated for them. Pablo's funeral was attended by 25,000 mourners.