Killing
Pablo
By Mark Bowden
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
Patrick O'Brian's "Jack Aubrey had the rare virtue of listening to an account without interrupting," and at least part of Mark Bowden's success as a non-fiction narrator may be attributed to his sharing that rare virtue with Captain Aubrey. Bowden, a journalist by training, is a gifted interviewer. The narrow focus of Bowden's earlier account of a firefight in Somalia involving U.S. Special Forces, Black Hawk Down, was made to order for his strength in drawing together a compelling narrative from eyewitness accounts.
In his current book, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, the scope of the story demanded a much heavier reliance on written source materials than did Black Hawk Down. The textual source material cited by Bowden, however, is inadequate by any professional standard. Killing Pablo lists a total of 19 books, 9 articles, 6 documents. One of the 19 book sources is a Lonely Planet Survival Kit, which, Bowden relates, is "an extremely useful travel guide." The reader wonders however, how the book might have been different if the author had selected The Footprint Columbia Handbook instead.
Bowden writes that "To help me through the mountain of material on this subject generated by Columbia's very courageous journalists, I employed a series of translators and researchers." One cannot help but puzzle over the question of how a "mountain of material" analyzed by "a series of translators and researchers" resulted in citations from only 4 translated journal article and no documents.
Bowden's reliance on translators is exacerbated by the remarkable use of one of the book's principal subjects, Eduardo Mendoza, as a translator. Mendoza served Bowden not merely as a translator but also as a "patient advisor, chief consultant on Columbian history and politics...intermediary, and friend." Is the reader presumed to understand the positive portrayal of Mendoza in Bowden's narrative as that made by both an objective journalist and a collaborator, advisee and personal friend?
The fact that one of the book citations, Bandeleros, Gamanoles, y Campesinos, by Sanchez and Meertens, is annotated to note that "passages were translated for me by Eduardo Mendoza," casts a negative light on Bowden's command of his material in that the same book, Bandits, Peasants, and Politics, was fully translated by Alan Hynds, and published by the University of Texas Press two months before Killing Pablo, but also announced for publication many months before that.
The story of how Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar's determination for legitimacy, both popular and legal, combined with his ruthlessness and savvy, drew his hunter's within his own twisted, brutal matrix, is both fascinating and compelling. Looking back DEA agent Joe Toft is reported by Bowden to reflect that, "In retrospect, now, he wished they had just relied on all that legitimate effort to get the job done. It might have taken them longer... but it would have been better... Instead, they had taken this terrible shortcut."
A haunting thought, and more than a little ironic given Bowden's own research shortcuts, particularly given his great talents as a narrative journalist.
