The Act of Terrorism That Thrust Pablo Escobar Into Infamy

The aftermath of the Avianca Flight 203 bombing

On November 27th, 1989, Avianca Flight 203 took off on a routine flight from Bogota International Airport.

At 7:13AM, the wheels of the Boeing 727 left the runway. Five minutes later, it had climbed to 13,000 feet – halfway towards cruising altitude.

The captain radioed down to air traffic control: take-off went smoothly. 

But the passengers would never reach their destination, because at 7:18AM an explosion detonated within the plane. The force of the blast tore the nose section of the plane from the tail. Both halves crashed towards the earth in flames. On the ground, three bystanders looked up to the sky to see debris speeding towards them. They were killed instantly.

This callous act of terrorism was the work of Pablo Escobar. His target was just a single person on board – a man called Cesar Gaviria. Gaviria was a candidate for the Colombian presidency. Turns out he’d cancelled his flight at the last minute. Escobar didn’t even get his man. But he was willing to send all 107 people on board the plane to their deaths, in pursuit of that one target.

Agent Ken Magee remembers the terrible news breaking at DEA headquarters in Bogota. “I just thought of the terror that was involved. Imagine blowing up an international airliner. Imagine blowing it up, killing everybody on board because you want to kill one person you think is going to be on board. That was worldwide news, number one. Number two is that elevated the focus tremendously on who did this? Why did they do this? And what are we going to do about it?... There was always a big effort to capture Pablo Escobar, but this placed it on a worldwide scale.”

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