Now, there's a name from the 80s: Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin Cocaine Cartel. If you wanted the archetypal Columbian Drug Lord, Pablo Escobar was your man. Since he was shot dead in 1993, his fame has receded into the history books as a footnote but while he was around in the 1980s, he defined the sort of drug-cartel-chic of white runners, tracksuit pants and briefcase look.
A whole series about the 1980s Columbian Drug Cartel from their point of view is as unlikely as anything you're likely to see, but here goes Netflix trying to give us a series that shows Pablo Escobar's story. It is radical and weird, edgy and strange, absurd and wondrous, all rolled into one. It is completely unlike this thing here.
Spoiler Alert here.
What's Good About It
For a while during the 1980s, the main plot of many a detective drama consisted of drug busts involving cocaine importation from Columbia. A lot of the time, the busts would consist of tens of kilograms of the substance being worth millions. That was the nominal range of busts. The reality of the scale of the importation is brought to the forefront and it is clear that busting some smuggling operations for mere tens of kilograms was chicken feed next to the metric tons of the stuff that was being moved into the USA, and consumed. The figures are simply staggering.
Central to all of this is a narrative of how the cocaine 'trade' came about and how Pablo Escobar essentially fell into the role of drug lord, merely by being the right kind of smuggler. The complexity of the character and his circumstance are explored in great depth and it is all utterly fascinating. Some of the detail leaves you astounded that the legendary drug lord was in many ways quite the family man, and had aspirations in politics.
Wagner Moura who plays Pablo Escobar is a stand out that holds the series together. With a weird piggy charm and a slouched posture and protruding belly, he is nobody's idea of a dashing crime figure. Maura's Escobar is more avuncular and restrained compared to the imagined figure across so many movies, while also dealing out tremendous violence with an unchanging creepy calmness. He was most certainly a very strange man, and that comes to life in this series. What's truly scary about the portrayal is that we recognise our everyday humdrum in his, juxtaposed with the power that money brings. It was a lot of money, and so it was a lot of power that distorted the nation of Columbia's politics to the core.
What's Bad About It
The narrative is a little spotty and the story jumps through time at irregular intervals. Pacing is a major issue. You get the feeling for Pablo's ascent to being a powerful player in Columbia, but sometimes the jumps forward in time are too radical.
The series also loses touch quickly with the mechanics of the drug manufacturing and smuggling operation in the second half season 1, but presumably this stuff was being made ever faster in greater volume. While the narrator talks the numbers, we don't get to see the mind-numbing volumes being shipped to America. By extension, the series shirks from illustrating the problem with the War on Drugs back home in America and how the US agencies utterly failed to address the size of the demand for cocaine.
We're also trying to understand the Medellin cartel from an American point of view, in having the show narrated by the US DEA agent. The cultural prejudices come thick and fast, but some times you think they're missing something about the whole rise of Pablo Escobar, and how much support he had from poor people.
What's Interesting About It
The thing about Columbia is that it is a smallish country of 20-odd million people in the 1980s. It's about the same population as Australia but the poverty is much worse. The 'Oligarchs' as Pablo calls them are entrenched interests of the ruling elite, who preside over a nation in dire poverty. Then along comes the cocaine trade, and suddenly money floods into this country in a way that not even the financial system can handle. US$60 billion is simply too much to be laundered so they end up having to bury the cash. It is as if out of nowhere, a company the size of BHP manifested itself out of this white powder; and the biggest banks about the size of the Bendigo Bank today.
Looked at another way, it is as if all of a sudden, the USA decided to snort the monetary equivalent of BHP's entire iron ore and coal haul every year. This is phenomenal amount of money that simply dropped itself into the laps of small time smugglers who suddenly grew into the largest industry in Central America. The United States Government meanwhile was spending a lot of money on law enforcement in their 'War on Drugs', but clearly it had very little grip on the size of this demand. If the demand for drugs is big enough, it becomes a social issue; if the supply is big enough to meet the demand, then it becomes an economic issue.
At the crux of the drama is that Pablo wants to participate in the political process, but he is shown the door by the ancien regime. So he sets about shaking the foundation of the country through the sheer weight of money at his disposal. With enough money, just about anybody can be bought. The cocaine trade's annual turn over was so huge, it dwarfed any other industry in the nation. Almost by default, the drug cartels became the greatest export industry of Columbia as well as its biggest rent-seeking lobby.
The War On Drugs
Whether it was heroin that crept into American life through the Vietnam War, or Cocaine that washed through America from Latin America, in each instance the US Government failed to anticipate just how big the problem was and what the nature of the problem happened to be. If it were simply about stopping drug use, there was too much emphasis on busts of users and low level dealers to actually get a view of even an outline on the problem. If they really wanted there to be less drugs in society, they had to address the explosive demand in another way than arresting them and throwing them in to jail.
Instead the DEA sent 2 agents to Columbia, ostensibly to help local police make some arrests, which makes about as much sense as sending 2 people to stop Sauron. Even if in their luckiest moment, should they have stopped Pablo Escobar and his entire Medellin Cartel, there was so much demand for cocaine that somebody was going to step into the breach and keep supplying that demand.
It's not a very popular thing to say it, but on some level, the government has no business intervening in how people choose to entertain themselves. Drugs are stigmatised because of the social problems a drug habit will engender, but it fails to address how much of that stigmatism creates the social problem. With whatever 'vice' there is, prohibition of the vice only pushes it underground, and in the underground is exactly where organised crime flourishes. In one sense, Pablo Escobar comes to prominence exactly because the USA insists on the War on Drugs policy. That dynamic is never clearer than when Escobar is able to dictate the terms of his surrender. Escobar is an American problem that happens to reside in Columbia. The Columbian state is essentially unable to deal with the American problem precisely because it wishes not to be co-opted into America itself.
If the US Government dislikes the Pablo Escobars of this world, it has an interest in trying to figure out a way of cutting demand.
Communism On The Wane
In the series, the US military and CIA are rabidly worried about the minuscule terror threat of communist guerrillas while the massive threat of the Medellin Cartel sits under their noses. The communist guerrillas they are pursuing in the jungles appear to be much smaller fry than than the cartel.
The 1980s of course saw the decline and demise of communism. You can see it in the relative irrelevance of communist slogans and ideological positions relative to the government backed by the military and the Catholic Church. In fact the M-19 - while dangerous - appear woefully inadequate to changing society let alone ushering in a revolution.
The cartel drug money on the other hand lends support to Pablo Escobar's election campaign. It suggests that change in society doesn't come from ideas, it comes from changes in flows of capital. Escobar certainly puts a bullet into Marx and Engels. Columbia was a microcosm of how Reaganomic over-spending essentially blew out Communism and its claims to the future. By 1989 the Berlin Wall came down but the dawning reality of the end of Soviet communism was presaged in the jungles of Columbia in the preceding decade. You could almost say it wasn't about labour; it was about the pursuit of physical pleasures.
In one sense, the people cannot join the communists because it compels them to go way outside of the law and end up camping in the jungle getting hunted down by the government. The M-19 and its ilk were puny and bad persuaders with a bad product. Sex, Drugs and Football, was a much more compelling horizon to pursue for the people around the world.
At one point the narrator touches upon the fact that Columbia is home to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and magic realism. There certainly is something very magic-realism about the landscape in which the characters move, whether it be the jungles or mountains or across the bridges and through the barrio. Somewhere in the country side is a vision of Macondo in this landscape, that peeps through ever so often. Even the bizarre rise and fall of Pablo Escobar could have been better narrated with the aesthetic irony infused in Marquez's writing and it might have been better. There are certainly, horrors aplenty that need transmogrification through art and language.
In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', there is a long drought that is then broken with a long rainfall. The appearance of cocaine in the landscape and these people has a similar quality of 'happening'. The absurd juxtaposition of international smuggling of drugs - and the money that comes with it - with the people who are like the simple farmers in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' makes for tremendous viewing. You can almost imagine Marquez's version of the narrative.
The other part that cannot go without mentioning is just how deep-seated corruption is in Columbia, because of the hold of power by the'Oligarchs'. Because Columbian society in the 1980s had immense disparity in wealth and practically zero social mobility, the society resembled a zero-sum game between the haves and have nots. The appearance of vast quantities of drug money of course shakes this up significantly, but more importantly it exposes why officials were corrupt in Columbia. It would have been too easy to bribe anybody given how little money there was in society. The real threat of Escobar wasn't just that the was a drug trafficker. It was that he was capable of buying out the entire economy of Columbia.
The World As We Find It
It's a strange feeling to watch a series that is at once history but an epoch you lived through. There was no cocaine in my orbit at any pointing time, so it strikes me as a kind of drug arcana that all this was taking place in the 80s and 90s. Still, if you parse through the dramatisation and the editorialising narration, you get the picture of a man who took the world as he found it.
Why do some people become famous? Why do some become infamous? Why do some people ever emerge at all, and others, never emerge? It's one of the interesting aspects to the story, that just at the moment history needed somebody to be the man to front the cocaine trade, there was a smuggler who was ready and able to be that man. Some of it might have been Darwinian section for the most brutal most determined man, but by this account, he was exactly the man to rise to the occasion. It's an amazing thing; he was as right as Bill Clinton was for the Presidency in 1992, or Derek Jeter was, to don a single digit for the Yankees and become a Hall of Fame ball player. The perfect fit, for the perfect role at the perfect time. It's a weird thing about superstardom, and make no mistake Pablo Escobar was his own kind of superstar.
You do wonder how many people in history simply found the opportunity open up before their eyes and were able to capitalise on it. There is no explaining it, which is why we watch in fascination.
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