Fall of the coke king

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Colombia is the most violent and dangerous place in the western hemisphere.

In a country with a population smaller than England's, recent guerrilla wars have accounted for more than 35,000 deaths. On top of that, around 30,000 people are murdered and thousands of the country's wealthier citizens are kidnapped every year.

It is important to note that Colombia is not heart-of-darkness Africa, or a Third World country so far off the western radar that it can be relegated to a category of fringe horror show, but a sophisticated First World economy.

Since the rise of a new kind of violence in the 1980s, inflamed by the astronomic growth of a multi-billion dollar narcotics industry, Europe and the United States now consume an estimated 500 tonnes of Colombian cocaine annually. With every little snort of Charlie, we are paying to fuel the violence.

Fifty years ago, a particularly frenzied period of random blood-letting was named by Colombians, simply, La Violencia. It was as if violence were not a consequence of political conflicts or culture, but rather a malevolent, independent actor. Pablo Escobar, the richest criminal in history, grew up during La Violencia and became its greatest son.

The best-known book about Escobar's tenure as chief of the Medellin cocaine cartel is Gabriel Garcia Márquez's News of a Kidnapping. It's an oddly disappointing and compromised account of how Pablo held the Colombian state to ransom during the 1980s by orchestrating the most successful reign of non-political terror of the last century. Apart from the odd magic-realist twist, like the inaccurate assertion that Escobar had a gold cross sewn into the skin of his chest, the central player in Márquez's story remains colourless and ill-defined.

Mark Bowden respectfully quotes Márquez (on Colombia's "biblical plague" of violence) but proceeds to tell the story prop-erly, from the bottom up, striking a clear and gripping narrative path from the background of La Violencia into the mind of its ultimate ghoul. Bowden's last book, Black Hawk Down, was an account of the 1993 battle in Mogadishu which left 18 American soldiers dead and forced the Clinton administration to pull out of Somalia. In Killing Pablo, Bowden puts to effective use his intimate knowledge of the high technology and messy bureaucracy of covert US operations.

Even after several American intelligence agencies have dovetailed with Colombian military, paramilitary and cartel plots in an unholy and bloody alliance, it takes nearly two years and $100 million to track down and assassinate "El Doctor" in December 1993.

Occasionally the sheer pace of Bowden's story leads to breathless gasps of American journalese. But the account of Escobar's rise to power is rich with the authentic complexity of both Colombian life and the political-economic matrix which inescapably binds Bogotá to Washington. Killing Pablo ends with a chilling message for the United States as, even now, it embarks on a $1.3 billion investment in the Colombian military and sends in its own troops.

Most pungent of all, though, in this brilliant reconstruction of a manhunt, is the portrait of Pablo himself. Here in the ghastly flesh is the man whose flab expanded with his power; whose ruthlessness contained depths of sentimentality; whose grisly obsession with 15-year-old girls combined with a love of working-class myth; who was adored by the people of Medell'n; who momentarily wielded power over an entire government and who, when finally on the run (his hundreds of billions of dollars spent on a national blood-feud), would make sure that each decreasingly lavish hideaway would still be fitted with a new bathroom, because Pablo loved a clean toilet to the last.