A book a day: Mark Bowden: Killing Pablo

Original language: English
Original title: Killing Pablo.
Translation: Sandra Lafuente
Year of publication: 2001.
Valuation: highly recommended

Perhaps the reading of Kill Pablo, two decades after its publication, was mediated by the progressive rise of mythology around him, which I will not deny. Narcos, excellent and famous series, has finished giving the push.

Although you have to avoid that kind of thing. Pablo Escobar ordered the deaths of innocent people because they were family members or friendss of those who persecuted him. He did not care that they were public officials carrying out the work that his profession demanded of them, politicians who wanted to unseat him from his immense power, competitors in their business or normal people who did not accept what was so famous for one of the expressions through which it also passed down to posterity: silver or lead.

So I’m sorry to disappoint those who think they’ll find a story of pity and veiled veneration here, because Bowden is, above all, a journalist, and this is a brilliant chronicle of the ascension. and fall of the head of a criminal organization who at the peak of his success wanted to become a kind of Robin Hood by buying wills and adopting a very convenient aura of dissident against the power. That spiral also implied that his flight forward had no option of return.

Kill Pablo It only has against it that all these events are part of contemporary culture and that its figure has become trivialized, with which for those interested there remains, which is not a little, that crescendo, that dosage of history that acquires a tone epic as he acquires power, fortune, relevance, as he embarks on feverish adventures of political representation, in crazy battles with the powers not only of his nation but of the United States, with which he becomes a common enemy that The miracle of strange alliances between those who no longer want to capture or persecute him but destroy him works. Bowden builds this progression magnificently and I can only praise that, even knowing (who doesn’t?) how everything is going to end, the book maintains the suspense, the attention, as few can achieve, so that once again we find what which is basically another work of investigative journalism that transcends genres.