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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
As the putative villain, Noriega is right out of central casting: wily, greedy, crooked, lecherous and spectacularly ugly, as well as seemingly invincible, at least until he had the misfortune to lose two of his best Washington protectors. He lost Oliver North to the same scandal that nearly toppled Abrams, and he lost CIA director William Casey to a brain tumor.
But in Harris' kind of movie, of course, the real bad guys are the higher-ups, the brass, with their inept ignorance of how things work on the street, their highhanded interventions and their propensity to sandbag politically awkward investigations and otherwise offer "sweetheart deals and that kinda bullshit." All of this intrigue is highly entertaining -- particularly Harris' meticulous recounting of the exacting hierarchical protocols of the DEA, which makes the court of the Ottoman emperor seem folksy by comparison -- but in the process, an important shift in the orientation of U.S. drug policy and foreign policy gets lost. Harris doesn't really care about this (or, for that matter, the question of the legitimacy of the invasion of Panama itself): It all just amounts to the self-interested machinations of powerbrokers.
North, Casey and certain officials in the State Department had kept the heat off Noriega because Noriega helped the U.S. in its covert campaigns to bring down the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to squelch Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, espionage junkies and Cold Warriors lost their bad guy -- even Cuba was forced to focus its attention on the struggle to get by without its Soviet patron. For someone like Gregorie, who already talked about the drug trade the same way Joseph McCarthy talked about the threat of international communism, no switch was necessary, but in Washington and overseas, one very big battleship had some turning to do.
By the time Escobar escaped from his palatial "prison" in Envigado, Colombia, in 1992, that turn had been completed. Unlike Harris, who treats the Noriega affair with a certain amount of cynical amusement, Bowden presents Escobar's career in narcoterrorism as the tragedy it was. But even he sees a touch of the ridiculous in the eagerness of various U.S. commands to volunteer once the Colombian president asked for help. "With the threat of worldwide communism evaporating, America's military and espionage community had become a high-priced, highly skilled work force in search of a role." When then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ordered all top military leaders to define the drug war as "a high-priority national mission," in September 1989, he didn't have to say it twice.
Escobar's surrender and imprisonment had been the result of a 1991 deal he'd cut with a Colombian government that was desperate to end a blood-soaked two-year-long battle against the drug lord. Whatever his skill at public relations -- he tried to cast himself as a champion of "the people," part Robin Hood, part Pancho Villa, with some success -- Escobar, Bowden leaves no doubt, was a very, very bad man. Utterly ruthless in securing his own power and exacting revenge, he was responsible for hundreds of murders and kidnappings, most characterized by gratuitous cruelty and carnage, from the routine torture of the friends and family of his enemies to random executions of members of his own security force when he suspected one among them of informing on him. It was the August 1989 bombing of an Avianca airliner, in which 110 passengers were killed in an attempt to eliminate a single man, that proved to be one of Escobar's biggest mistakes. Two Americans were on that plane and, according to Bowden, "in the eyes of the Bush administration, [the bombing] marked Pablo Escobar ... and other cartel leaders as a direct threat to American citizens ... As such, they were now men who could be legally killed." And in the case of Escobar, American intervention would prove decisive.
Escobar's vast wealth and fearsome reputation meant that he could corrupt any Colombian authority by means of a policy dubbed "plata o plomo" -- silver or lead -- but he feared nothing more than extradition to the U.S. In exchange for the Colombian government's outlawing of extradition, and for a ludicrous reduction of the charges against him and various other concessions, Escobar turned himself in, moving into a prison built especially for him. When some Colombian officials tried to relocate him to a facility that was a little less embarrassingly plush, he panicked, convinced they planned either to kill him or to hand him over to the gringos, and went into hiding. Colombian President César Gaviria was furious -- for Escobar to waltz out of a supposed maximum-security prison made Colombia look like a "narcocracy," he felt -- so furious that he opened the door to the Americans: "Despite constitutional barriers to foreign troops on Colombian soil, Gaviria said he would welcome any and all help the Americans could give."
After that, the deluge. Every spy-boy and special operatives unit, "every direction-finding surveillance and imagery team in the arsenal," descended on Colombia, intent on making a name for itself. "It didn't take a genius to foresee that big budget cuts loomed at the Pentagon, CIA and NSA," Bowden writes. "One way to ensure survival in the era of deficit reduction was to prove how vital you were to this new struggle." People were sleeping on the floor of the embassy conference room and "there were so many American spy planes over Medellmn, at one point 17 at once, that the Air Force had to assign an airborne command and control center to keep track of them."
