Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo is a work of narrative nonfiction that recounts the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord who became one of the richest and most violent criminals in history, and the massive joint Colombian-American manhunt that ended with his death in December 1993.

The book opens on December 2, 1993, in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín, Colombia, where Escobar's mother, Hermilda, walked through police barricades to identify a body lowered from a rooftop. She recognized her son: a fat, barefoot, bearded man in blue jeans. She told a reporter only that now he was "at rest."

Bowden traces the roots of Pablo's story to Colombia's turbulent mid-20th-century history. In 1948, the assassination of populist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán triggered El Bogotazo, a wave of rioting that devolved into La Violencia, a period of civil bloodletting that killed an estimated 200,000 people. Colombia's weak central government, ungovernable terrain, and cycles of partisan war bred a culture of famous outlaws. Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on December 1, 1949, into this environment. Contrary to the mythology he later cultivated, Pablo grew up solidly middle class in Envigado, outside Medellín. He dropped out of school as a teenager, telling Hermilda he wanted to be "big," and quickly graduated from street scams and car theft to kidnapping and murder. The most famous early crime attributed to him was the 1971 killing of a wealthy industrialist, which earned him the nickname El Doctor ("The Doctor").

In the mid-1970s, the American market's shift from marijuana to cocaine transformed Pablo's fortunes. He muscled into the trade by murdering Medellín cocaine pioneer Fabio Restrepo, then created a unified syndicate that taxed every shipment heading north. He built the extravagant Hacienda Los Nápoles estate, cultivated a Robin Hood image by building housing for the poor and donating to churches, and in 1982 won election as a substitute congressman, gaining parliamentary immunity.

Pablo's political ambitions collided with Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, who launched a campaign against drug money in politics and publicly exposed Pablo's criminal history in Congress. The newspaper El Espectador unearthed Pablo's 1976 drug arrest and published his mug shots. Luis Galán, head of the New Liberal movement, expelled Pablo from the party. Pablo withdrew from politics in January 1984, convinced that Lara was a tool of the Cali cartel, a rival drug-trafficking organization based in the city of Cali, or the United States. Three months later, Lara was assassinated by a gunman on a motorcycle.

Lara's murder prompted President Belisario Betancur to declare a state of siege and enforce the extradition treaty with the United States, the one fate Pablo feared more than death. Pablo fled abroad but returned to Colombia, vowing never to leave again, and waged a campaign of plata o plomo (silver or lead) against the judiciary, murdering or bribing judges who weighed extradition cases. In November 1985, the guerrilla group M-19, reportedly paid by Pablo, stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, a siege that killed 90 people, including 11 Supreme Court justices, and destroyed thousands of criminal case files. In the summer of 1989, Pablo ordered the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Galán. Three months later, his men bombed an Avianca airliner attempting to kill Galán's successor candidate César Gaviria, killing all 110 passengers, including two Americans. These atrocities made Pablo public enemy number one worldwide.

Colonel Hugo Martinez was assigned to lead the Bloque de Búsqueda (Search Bloc), an elite police unit dedicated to hunting Pablo. Within 15 days, 30 of Martinez's 200 men were killed by Pablo's sicarios, or paid gunmen. Pablo offered Martinez a $6 million bribe, which the colonel refused. Meanwhile, the United States secretly deployed Centra Spike, an army electronic surveillance unit that could pinpoint radio and cell-phone signals from modified spy planes. Centra Spike first tracked José Rodríguez Gacha, believed to be the most dangerous leader in Pablo's Medellín-based drug syndicate, to a hiding place where Colombian police killed him in December 1989. Intercepted calls then revealed that Pablo, not Gacha, had been the syndicate's true leader all along.

Through 1990, the Search Bloc raided safe house after safe house but always arrived too late. Pablo kidnapped prominent Bogotá figures to pressure the government into banning extradition. President Gaviria, who took office in August 1990, offered increasingly generous surrender terms. On June 19, 1991, the day Colombia's Constitutional Assembly voted to outlaw extradition, Pablo surrendered and was flown to La Catedral, a custom-built "prison" on a hilltop he controlled overlooking Medellín. He continued running his cocaine empire from inside. When he suspected associates Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada of withholding money, he had them killed. These murders forced Gaviria to order Pablo transferred to a real prison, but the operation descended into chaos, and Pablo escaped through the army perimeter.

Gaviria, furious, opened the door to American assistance. Ambassador Morris D. Busby seized the opportunity, and operators from Delta Force, an elite U.S. Army special operations unit, arrived within days. Colonel Martinez was recalled to resume command of the Search Bloc. The hunt stretched through the fall and winter of 1992 in frustrating stalemate. Pablo set off car bombs, offered bounties for killing policemen, and granted a defiant radio interview portraying himself as a victim.

In January 1993, a car bomb killed 21 people in a Bogotá bookstore. Days later, a group calling itself Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) announced its existence and began attacking Pablo's properties and associates. Los Pepes was an alliance of Pablo's enemies: the families of men Pablo had murdered, paramilitary leader Fidel Castaño, elements of the Cali cartel, and, the evidence strongly suggests, members of the Search Bloc. From February through the summer, Los Pepes killed scores of Pablo's associates, lawyers, and family members, methodically dismantling his organization. Evidence accumulated that the Search Bloc was sharing American-supplied intelligence with the death squad, raising serious concerns within the U.S. government. Pentagon officials moved to pull special forces out of Colombia but were temporarily outflanked by Busby's appeal to the White House.

By late 1993, Pablo's empire was in ruins. When his wife, Maria Victoria, and their children, son Juan Pablo and daughter Manuela, attempted to fly to Frankfurt, Busby coordinated with European governments to deny them entry. The family was sent back to Bogotá and installed at the Hotel Tequendama. Colonel Martinez placed a trusted officer on the hotel switchboard to alert his son Hugo's surveillance team whenever Pablo called. Lieutenant Hugo Martinez Jr. commanded a mobile direction-finding unit and had recently honed his skills by tracking a lesser target.

On December 2, 1993, Pablo awoke before noon in a Los Olivos row house and began calling the hotel. Hugo traced the signal and spotted a fat, bearded man with long curly black hair in a second-floor window. He radioed his father, and the colonel converged all assault units. The Search Bloc smashed through the front door. Pablo fled to the rooftop and fell under a cascade of gunfire, hit three times: in the leg, the back, and fatally through the right ear. Autopsy evidence and later testimony suggest the fatal shot was a coup de grâce.

Thousands mourned Pablo in Medellín, prying open his casket to touch his face. Colonel Martinez was promoted to general. DEA chief Joe Toft, despite celebrating, felt the hunt's alliance with the Cali cartel and Los Pepes had strengthened the drug industry the operation was meant to fight. Six months later, Toft retired and publicly accused president-elect Ernesto Samper of being in the pocket of the Cali cartel, releasing recordings that led to a crackdown on Cali's leaders. Throughout the 1990s, cocaine availability in the United States increased while prices declined, suggesting that killing Pablo did little to curb the drug trade. The hunt's significance, Bowden concludes, lay in the assertion of democratic civilization against a would-be narco-tyrant, achieved through methods that remain morally and legally contested.