Killing Pablo - Mark Bowden

"Hang on a minute! If this is a military history blog, why have a book about an ordinary criminal in it?"

Because, gentle reader, this was no ordinary criminal. This was Pablo Escobar, El Doctor himself. And it took the military of 2 countries to finally take him down.
Pablo Escobar ruled the Colombian city of Medellin with the classical iron fist or as he called it plato o plomo: if you didn't accept his plato (money) then you were surely going to receive his plomo (lead). In any other context this would have been the classical 'poor kid makes good' story - becoming a multi billionaire, running for congress, entering politics etc etc but the means he employed to do it were beyond the pale for anyone; extortion, killing, torture, random violence and political corruption at the highest levels.

Mark Bowden is the author of the rather seminal Black Hawk Down, a book which is far better than the somewhat ropey film made of it. He approaches this subject in the same methodical way, a short history of the region and the violent circumstances which moulded Pablo into the man he became; it becomes clear that he was very much a man of both his country - Colombia has a history of violence that rivals anything from the Middle East and smuggling is almost an honoured profession - and his times.

However, in direct and rather stark comparison to most of the books that I've reviewed in this blog so far 'setting the scene' is wonderfully brief and concise, but it still manages to tell you exactly what you need to know and not one jot more. Then it's away from the slightly boring stuff and into the main event which gallops along almost as fast as Pablo's rise from car thief and protection racketeer to kingpin and kingmaker. There's a little pause in the middle when he goes to jail (having set the terms, conditions and exactly how said jail was to be built) but the action picks up when he goes on the run again and this time things are not so wonderful for him; what with Delta Force, the Search Bloc and Los Pepes scrambling for his head it was a wonder that he survived as long as he did. The end was somewhat tawdry for such a giant of a character though - a one-sided gunfight on a roof top in Bogota. There's more than a little double standard from those who were hunting him as much as he employed himself and, though he names no names, Bowden relates that some of the coincidences were certainly fortuitous...

Bowden does a wonderful job at turning a course of events that were weirder and more elaborate than many thrillers into the quintessential factual yet entertaining account. The long running duel between Escobar and Colonel Hugo Martinez is an epic in itself even without everything else that was going on.

5 and 3/4's out of 10.