Pablo escobar narcos7/21/2023 Of course, there’s nothing new in any of this. Though we’re told that the line between good and bad is relative, there’s never any doubt as to where it actually lies. Anyone who doubts this - those who naively cling to the ideals of due process or rule of law - haven’t “spent enough time with the bad guys.” Evil, is on this account, a kind of school or training ground for experts in authority. To catch what the narrator calls a “bad guy,” the “good guys” are going to have to get their hands a little dirty. The show’s core truths are the kinds of things said by cops who have “seen shit” we can only imagine: close encounters with the specificity of crime scenes have shown them that the last thing standing between human nature and disaster is a law with fangs. It matters that Narcos tells its story in voiceover from the perspective of an American DEA agent, Steve Murphy. Narcos, though, expands the frame of the narrative to include the period’s broader geopolitical detail: Reagan, Noriega, the Sandinistas - they’re all here. This is exacerbated by the clear intention of the show to escape the limits of the “mostly true story,” which usually foregrounds persons and psychologies, not structures or events. Period listening devices, topographic maps, redacted documents: we are encouraged to anticipate what follows as grittily forensic. Its opening credits intercut stylish documentary footage with shots of the instruments used by police in the 1970s to detect, confirm, and store facts. Rather than developing characters through a sequence of slow, loosely connected, everyday vignettes, the show builds itself chronologically around a hard historical axis. Narcos is not a biography of Escobar, it’s a kind of map of his era. Not coincidentally, lately what links these travelers, almost to a person, is that they arrive at this new El Dorado having just watched Narcos. Some, mostly middle-aged gringos with little interest in the history of Colombia, make excruciatingly clear the fact that justice is never as simple as an end to war: “peace,” for them, means access to underage sex and dirt-cheap cocaine - the pleasures of a “South American Amsterdam,” a motif that often comes up in conversations with visitors to the city. Travelers arrive in Medellin informed by their guidebooks that the state’s “ urbanismo social” has transformed the city into a model of inclusive innovation and peace. A day which begins with a tour of Escobar’s Edificio Mónaco - a now-eerily silent structure he once used for torture and meals with the family - might very well end at Comuna 13, a barrio that was long impenetrable to outsiders and considered the city’s most violent, but which today attracts tourists with brightly painted street art and charming local guides. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reminders of this suffering are today exchangeable for cash. In 1991, two years before the death of Escobar, a city famous for its year-long spring had the death rate of a warzone. Nothing separated the methods used by the police in their hunt for notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar from those used by his sicarios to punish and intimidate the police. Its violence required superlatives: lots of “mosts” and “worsts.” Organized cocaine traffickers and the Colombian state had merged to create an immense system of indiscriminate cruelty. An awful thing to do to an animal, but evidence of the lengths Pablo would go to for his little girl.There was a time not long ago when Medellin could only be spoken about outside of Colombia as the world capital of murder. So much so that when she once asked for a unicorn, Pablo proceeded to buy her a horse, staple a cone to its head and some wings to its back. Growing up, Manuela was very much the apple of her father’s eye. ![]() Manuela is the only daughter of Pablo Escobar and his wife Tata Escobar. But if you’re just dying to know a bit more about who she is in real life, here’s what we managed to find out about the girl whose father supposedly burned a barrel of 2 million dollars just to keep her warm. It looks like she’s managed to live a pretty private life for the most part, and we can’t say we’re all too surprised. One figure that fascinated us is the daughter of notorious drug-lord Pablo Escobar – Manuela Escobar. ![]() A huge part of the crime drama's appeal is that it’s based on such an extraordinary true story, and of course, gets us googling as we try to connect the dots and find out if the Netflix show matches up to what went down in real life. Narcos has been one of Netflix biggest hits, a cult classic that is well worth catching up on if you've not watched it yet.
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