BRINGING DOWN THE DRUG LORDS

KILLING PABLO: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, by Mark Bowden.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 296 pp., $25.

SHOOTING THE MOON: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other,
Ever, by David Harris. Little, Brown, 394 pp., $26.95.

If you're beginning to feel as if it's 1990 all over again, you're not
alone. Recession is looming, politicians are visibly confused about whether
the Cold War is still on, there's too much religion in public life-and Bush
is in the White House. (Clearly, gangsta rap and bad performance art are
just moments away.) A few weeks after W. took office, an MSNBC documentary
about the Gulf War fawningly showcased Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and the
first President Bush as heroes who had the courage to take action against
evil Saddam Hussein despite the wimpy reluctance of Congress. In this odd
atmosphere of nostalgia for a past that has, quite literally, come back to
haunt us, perhaps the return of "War on Drugs" cowboy narratives makes some
sense.

The Latin American drug kingpin-with his greed, sexual insatiability,
violence and piles of cash that couldn't be laundered fast enough-was the
compelling villain of the Reagan/Bush era, a serious threat to the security
of the United States. In "Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest
Outlaw," Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden tells the story of
Colombian cocaine mogul Pablo Escobar's rise to power and staggering
wealth, his brutal reign of terror over an already-chaotic country, and the
U.S. government's 15-month quest to find and kill him. It's clearly
expected to be a big book, with a hefty $150,000 promotional budget and,
most amusingly, an excerpt scheduled to run in Men's Journal. David Harris'
"Shooting the Moon: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other,
Ever" chronicles the U.S. government's quest to bring down another
super-rich Latin dope dealer: former Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel
Antonio Noriega.

Despite the testosterone-infused subtitle, Harris' "manhunt" is the less
manly one. It's mostly a Grisham-like potboiler about the building of the
legal case against Noriega; the U.S. invasion that eventually captured him
is only a small part of the story. This tale has less violence in it, fewer
chase scenes and a lot more bureaucracy than "Killing Pablo." It's also
more sophisticated and better researched, providing a profound service to
readers who were confused -or guiltily bored-by the endless scandal and
conspiracy theory surrounding Noriega and Iran-contra at the time.

Both books are exciting, suspenseful and seem destined to become
blockbuster movies. ("Killing Pablo" has already been made into a CNN
documentary, but it seems unlikely that "Blow," starring Johnny Depp, has
exhausted Hollywood's appetite for the Medellin cartel). Harris and Bowden
tell somewhat similar stories, to strikingly similar emotional effect.
Whatever one's own views about the United States government's War on Drugs,
it is impossible not to sympathize with the individual agents who devoted
years of their lives to the pursuit of these very bad men.

In these books-as in any traditional spy or detective novel-an idealistic
hero, doggedly committed to nailing the villains, is constantly stymied by
weak-willed, corrupt or unimaginative bureaucrats. We root for these
heroes, people like Steve Grilli, the hardworking, smart, working-class
maverick underling in the Miami DEA office responsible for United States
vs. Manuel Noriega. We despise the time-servers in Washington who want to
make a deal with the drug-dealing dictator and won't commit enough
resources to hunting Escobar.

We ultimately rejoice at the downfall of the bad guys, savoring Noriega's
humiliating retirement to Miami's Federal Correctional Institution in 1990
and Escobar's violent death three years later.

But that's because these books are structured as thrillers. Like the Cold
War paperbacks that made hating Russians so much fun, War on Drugs
narratives feed our visceral enthusiasm for militaristic solutions. Indeed,
they construct a universe in which there are no other solutions and one in
which-most jarring to close observers of what might indulgently be termed
reality-the U.S. government is run by a bunch of cautious softies, who are
insufficiently willing to use force on our enemies.

I'm a fan of the thriller, its adrenalin and its escapism, which depends
not only on suspenseful narrative but moral simplicity. Unlike real life,
the thriller always makes clear exactly who's good, who's bad and what
should be done about it. "Politics" is always an obstacle in the thriller,
a synonym for corruption, opportunism and, most importantly, paralysis. It
seems like the worst sort of quibbling pedantry, therefore, to criticize
thrillers for lacking political analysis, or for occupying too simple a
moral universe. But the problem with "Killing Pablo" and "Shooting the
Moon" is that they aren't fiction; they tell true stories, stories that
don't make much sense without politics. For instance, "Shooting the Moon's"
394 pages shed almost no light on Noriega's own ideology; one of his
closest advisers was a leading Marxist intellectual, yet Noriega himself
was a darling of the Reagan administration.

He was no friend of the Sandinistas, yet his relationship to Castro seems
tentatively civil. Harris leaves such contradictions unanalyzed; that's
troubling, because they might shed some light on the U.S. relationship to
this complicated little man. And although both Harris and Bowden mention
tensions among Reagan-era policy-makers over whether the drug dealer should
in fact replace the communist as America's No. 1 enemy-disagreements that
had tremendous implications for the War on Drugs-neither analyzes such
ideological issues with the depth they deserve.

Since the War on Drugs is, in fact, far more about politics and ideology
than it is about good guys and bad guys, these limitations are serious.
These writers know a lot more about the War on Drugs than most reporters
do, and neither are right-wing fanatics. Yet their books highlight the
problems of presenting nonfiction stories in a genre that appeals to our
worst instincts as Americans: to see the rest of the world as full of
exotic bad foreign gangsters and messy Third World governments that can't
control them. It's a world that always needs saving, one in which no
problem is too complicated, too large or too small to be solved by the
American military-or its vigilantes.