ABSTRACT
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, most talented and richest of Colombian drug bosses, lived his contradictions. While inviting us to read about "the richest, most powerful criminal in history", Bowden keeps harping on the mediocrity of Pablo Escobar, dismissing him as "just a thug". It seems that Bowden's informants had not even asked themselves how Pablo Escobar had risen to command the Medellin Cartel. Having killed Pablo Escobar with the notable assistance of the volunteer-vigilante terrorists, Los Pepes, it destroyed the Medellin Cartel only to find that it had merely shifted its business to the Cali Cartel, which not coincidentally was behind Los Pepes. So the futile war started once again, this time against the Cali Cartel, which was duly dismantled after years of vast effort, only to give way to much less visible networks of many small operators, who ship as much cocaine as before.
