KILLING PABLO: A Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua

WHEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT went to war against Latin America's drug barons in the 1980s, it couldn't have asked for better poster boys than Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega. Flamboyant bad guys who reveled in their notoriety, they were greedy; violent, and physically repellent to boot. Both men helped the U.S. government publicly reduce complicated Latin American drug politics to a simple duel between good vs. evil in which the U.S. military was justified in meddling.

Now, as the United States again ramps up its military involvement in Latin American drug wars, two new books revisit: the stories of the Panamanian strongman and Colombian kingpin, as well as the U.S. government's sometimes hapless attempts to bring them down. These new books, of vastly differing quality, might serve remind for policymakers that there's no easy military fix to Latin American drug politics.

In Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden tells how Delta Force, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA, and an army spy unit known as "Centra Spike" pursued and helped to destroy Colombia's cocaine kingpin. Shooting the Moon, by David Harris, recounts the efforts by drug enforcement agents to build a case against Noriega--a campaign that culminated with 20,000 American troops being dispatched to Panama to haul "Pineapple Face" to prison.

Fresh on the heels of Steven Soderbergh's bleak film, Traffic, both books are reminders of an era when the Reagan and Bush administrations regarded covert operations and direct applications of military might as a legitimate means of stopping the flow of drugs across the border--even as they resorted to violence and violations of sovereignty to achieve their ends.

Bowden has written the far better book. A veteran reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bowden has produced a taut narrative along the lines of Black Hawk Down, his absorbing re-creation of the Olympic Hotel battle in Mogadishu in October 1993. Escobar's saga has been the grist for numerous magazine articles and books, and the early chapters of Killing Pablo sometimes feel like a clip job. But Bowden's portrait of Escobar--a pudgy hedonist who idolized the Mexican bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa and combined public relations genius with an utter lack of conscience--brings to life one of the most mesmerizing villains of recent times.

The basic facts of Escobar's ascent are familiar. Beginning his criminal career as a car thief in the slums of Medellin, Escobar clawed his way to the top...