Colombian writer winner of Ibero-American Literary Prize

Ángela Becerra was awarded with the third Planeta-Casamerica Prize for Ibero-American Narrative on Tuesday for her novel “Ella que lo tuvo todo” (She who had it all). The award was a $200.000 U.S dollars cash prize. Becerra’s awarded novel describes the story of a writer who suffers and accident and is unable to go back to writing. The winner selection was made out of 10 finalists works from seven countries. 493 writers initially entered the contest.

Escobar by Roberto Escobar; the Accountant's Story

In the museum of organised crime, Pablo Escobar deserves a room of his own. He was the first gangster billionaire, listed by Forbes magazine in 1989 as the world’s seventh richest man; in the late 1980s he offered to pay Colombia’s national debt as a way of fending off the ever-present threat of extradition to America. The rise of his cocaine-trafficking organisation, the Medellin cartel, triggered a period of mayhem unprecedented even by the standards of Colombia’s modern history.

There are passages in this biography written by Pablo’s brother and chief accountant, Roberto, that are jaw-dropping, especially when detailing the sheer ingenuity required in smuggling hundreds of tons annually into America and Europe. At first, simply packing the drug in aircraft tyres was effective. But as the cocaine craze began to grip the nightclubs of New York, Miami and LA, the inventiveness of the Medellin cartel reached new heights.

One of the most successful tricks early on involved stuffing cocaine into the vaginas of mares being transported to America for racing. But before long, the chemists of Medellin had perfected the technique of dissolving cocaine that allowed them to mix it with any liquid — wine, cooking oil, paint. If it sloshes around and originates in South America, it may well contain coke. Roberto explains how the chemists then blended it “into plastic, forming it into many different items, including PVC pipe, religious statues, and when we started shipping it to Europe, the fibreglass shells of small boats”. Consumers may wish to remember that during a night on the razzle they could well be snorting paint or fibreglass.

There are two schools of thought on Pablo, who was killed by a joint American/Colombian operation in 1993. The conventional assessment is of a murderous, power-crazed narco-boss who opened the sluicegates to a river of Colombian blood. Unsurprisingly, Roberto Escobar subscribes to the second, minority view. This sees Pablo as driven by the plight of Colombia’s poor. Once his coke business started attracting billions of dollars to Medellin, the munificent Escobar used these funds to provide for Colombia’s dispossessed, the campesinos and the urban poor in the barrios. Roberto occasionally drops in phrases like “of course, Pablo was no saint”, or “like all people, he had his bad side”, but this hardly does justice to the Armageddon unleashed by Escobar’s wars with the Colombian state and rival cartels. Not content with taking out opponents in stomach-churning fashion, Escobar was responsible for, inter alia, blowing up a passenger airliner mid-flight, assassinating a presidential candidate, and razing the HQ of Colombia’s version of MI5.

Despite this profound distortion, Roberto’s portrait of his brother is an important corrective. The traditional view of Escobar, most widely disseminated by Mark Bowden in Killing Pablo, ignores Colombia’s political, social and cultural peculiarities that encouraged the emergence of somebody like Pablo. And Roberto is right to insist that in the poor districts of Medellin Pablo’s significance is hotly contested; many still venerate him as an anti-establishment figure who distributed wealth from hard-living gringo yuppies to the destitute.

The great disappointment of this intriguing book is that Roberto glosses over the fascinating story of Pablo’s war with his great rivals from the south, the Cali cartel. In the early 1980s, the cartels struck a deal: Cali would control the New York market while Miami belonged to Medellin. Roberto skates over how in the late 1980s Pablo committed his biggest tactical error: he ordered his people to muscle in on New York. The response of the Cali cartel was not just to wage war on Escobar, but to deliver information to the Colombian government and Americans.

Roberto claimed that law enforcement was always two steps behind him and Pablo, but thanks to the Cali cartel’s collaboration, the cops were able to close in. The police caught up with the Cali cartel two years later, but despite the occasional success against leading bosses, the supply of coke to America and Europe has never dried up. America’s disastrous war on drugs is the guarantee that Pablo was only the first in a long, powerful line of narco-kingpins.

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