Pubdate: Tue, 03 Jul 2001
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2001 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Michael Harris, Special To The Times

SIMPLE TALE OF HOW U.S. HELPED BRING DOWN A DRUG KING

Killing Pablo: The Hunt For The World's Greatest Outlaw

By Mark Bowden ,Atlantic Monthly Press, $25, 296 pages

The story of how U.S. Army intelligence experts and Delta Force 
commandos helped Colombian police track down and kill Pablo Escobar, 
head of the Medellin cocaine cartel, in December 1993 is rife with 
implications for the United States as it embarks upon a $1.3-billion 
effort, complete with Black Hawk helicopters and trainers, to 
eradicate cocaine production in this South American country over the 
next two years.

Mark Bowden, a veteran Philadelphia Inquirer reporter whose 
bestselling book "Black Hawk Down" described the Delta Force's 
ill-fated attack on a Somalian warlord in Mogadishu earlier in 1993, 
is clearly aware of those implications. But he leaves them for us to 
articulate.

Bowden simply tells his story, aided by interviews with top U.S. and 
Colombian sources and access to classified documents, including 
transcripts of telephone calls by Escobar that were monitored by an 
American unit called Centra Spike in aircraft crammed with high-tech 
surveillance gear.

It is a compelling, almost Shakespearean, tale: how a small-time 
hoodlum from Medellin parlayed the cravings of U.S. drug users and 
his own organizational genius into a criminal empire that almost 
toppled Colombia's fragile democracy; how his incarceration in 1991 
ended a year later when he walked away from a luxury prison he had 
built for himself; how Colombia, desperate, allowed U.S. soldiers to 
operate in its territory and let a death squad use the most brutal 
methods to bring down Escobar.

At his peak, Bowden says, Escobar "built small, remote-controlled 
submarines that could carry up to 2,000 kilos of cocaine from ... 
Colombia to ... just off Puerto Rico, where divers would remove the 
shipment and transport it to Miami in speedboats. He would send 
fleets of planes north, each carrying 1,000 kilos .... Eventually he 
was buying used Boeing 727s, stripping out the passenger seats and 
loading as much as 10,000 kilos per flight. There was nothing to stop 
him."

A multibillionaire with a private army, Escobar gave Colombian 
authorities the option of plata o plomo-- a bribe or a bullet. He 
bankrolled politicians of every party. His sicarios, or paid 
assassins, killed presidential candidates, in one case by blowing an 
Avianca jetliner out of the sky with 110 people aboard. They killed 
judges, prosecutors and hundreds of police officers. They kidnapped 
and killed enemies' parents, wives and children.

Escobar's weakness, Bowden says, was that he believed his own 
propaganda about being a populist hero who provided Medellin's poor 
with housing and soccer fields. He could easily have left the country 
after his surrender in 1991 but instead stayed and fought, like 
Macbeth, adding another chapter to Colombia's century-long history of 
La Violencia. Bowden lucidly summarizes that history. If his story 
has heroes, however flawed, they are Colombians such as Col. Hugo 
Martinez, head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, who 
could be neither bought nor scared and who kept going when the 
situation seemed hopeless. The Americans were technically adept but 
prone to interagency squabbling, tolerant of human-rights abuses and 
contemptuous of the host country.

A 1989 memo by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney defined anti-drug 
activities as a "high-priority security mission," clearing the way 
for the U.S. military to operate in Colombia. The jetliner bombing 
that same year allowed the first Bush administration to redefine 
Escobar as an international terrorist and covertly abet his 
assassination. The death squad, Los Pepes, which wrecked Escobar's 
organization by killing as many as six of his supporters a day, had 
troubling links both to Martinez's police and to the rival Cali 
cartel, whose clout in Colombia rose as Escobar's fell.

Escobar's death from the bullets of a police squad led by Martinez's 
son did not halt cocaine's flow to the U.S., Bowden notes. He lets 
Joe Toft, former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration 
office in Bogota, have the last word: "I don't know what the lesson 
of the story is. I hope it's not [just] that the end justifies the 
means."
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