Book Review : Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

Killing Pablo presents the readers with a detailed and informative account of the 15 months manhunt of Pablo Escobar, the once powerful Colombian drug kingpin whose reign had terrorized a nation. The book discloses how Escobar succeeded to rise in the Medellin Cartel and build up his criminal empire. His empire included an army of soldiers and criminals, a private zoo, mansions and apartments all over Colombia, private airstrips and planes for drug transport and personal wealth reported to be in the neighborhood of $24 billion.

At the peak of Escobar dominance, Escobar’ legendary savagery and ruthlessness had turned  Colombia into  one of the scariest places on earth, a society in which aeroplanes exploded in mid-air, policemen and judges were murdered in cold blood and innocent civilians found themselves caught up in a conflict which, at times, seemed to be holding the country's entire population hostage.

As his criminal empire continuously grew and begun to create spill over effect over the US borders,  the US government eventually sanctioned military and intelligence initiatives to bring down the kingpin. Working together with determined Colombia’s federal police headed by Colonel Hugo Martinez, the US and Colombia’s government decisively moved to track down Escobar through a team of expert personnel and armed with an arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance technology the likes of which the world had never seen.

In order to bring down the empire to its knees, the US had assigned Centra Spike, the ultrasecret U.S. special forces team that would utilised cutting-edge surveillance technology to find Escobar. In addition, the shadowy Delta Force operators were also deployed who would eventually be the key to the drug lord's demise.

Escobar was finally hunted by the Search Bloc, a special Colombian police task force trained by the US  and at the same time the vigilante group known as Los Pepes. On December 2 1993, the search parties finally managed to pin point the hiding place of Escobar; a home in the middle-class section of Medellin. Escobar fought back an attempt to bring him into custody that led to a shootout.

He was finally gunned down on a roof top.  

The book is well researched and drawn from unprecedented access to the soldiers, field agents, and officials involved in the chase. Furthermore, Bowden had access to hundreds of pages of top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations. As a result, the author successfully creates a narrative that reads as if it were torn from the pages of a techno thriller; action-packed, page-turning and penetrative of the undeclared war between the kingpin and the enforcers determined to end his criminal reign.