The Americans were technically adept but prone to interagency squabbling, tolerant of human-rights abuses and contemptuous of the host country.Ī 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. 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. If his story has heroes, however flawed, they are Colombians such as Col. 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. They kidnapped and killed enemies’ parents, wives and children.Įscobar’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. They killed judges, prosecutors and hundreds of police officers. His sicarios, or paid assassins, killed presidential candidates, in one case by blowing an Avianca jetliner out of the sky with 110 people aboard. He bankrolled politicians of every party. There was nothing to stop him.”Ī multibillionaire with a private army, Escobar gave Colombian authorities the option of plata o plomo- a bribe or a bullet. Eventually he was buying used Boeing 727s, stripping out the passenger seats and loading as much as 10,000 kilos per flight. He would send fleets of planes north, each carrying 1,000 kilos. just off Puerto Rico, where divers would remove the shipment and transport it to Miami in speedboats. soldiers to operate in its territory and let a death squad use the most brutal methods to bring down Escobar.Īt his peak, Bowden says, Escobar “built small, remote-controlled submarines that could carry up to 2,000 kilos of cocaine from. 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. It is a compelling, almost Shakespearean, tale: how a small-time hoodlum from Medellin parlayed the cravings of U.S.
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