"The men of always aren't interested in the children of never" - Pablo Escobar.
"If I say a man dies, he dies the same day" - Pablo Escobar.
A father pulls his daughter's blood soaked plimsoll from the wreckage of a bombsite outside the Presidential Palace in Bogota, he clutches it to his face and he weeps. Just one of the many examples of personal tragedy and trauma that Pablo Escobar (as played here by Wagner Moura) and his associates enacted on the people of Colombia during his reign of terror. The poor professed a love for Escobar but it was the poor suffered the most because of him.
Teeth are forcibly extracted, weddings are bombed, throats are slit in acts of 'Colombian folk art', people are shot in the forehead, an entire group of sex workers are slaughtered, the footballer Andres Escobar (no relation) is brutally murdered for scoring an own goal against the USA in Pasadena during a group stage match in the 1994 World Cup.
If you're looking for violence then, with the second series of Narcos on Netflix, you've come to the right place. The series picks up where series one ended with Pablo Escobar in La Catedral jungle prison, a prison that is more like a palace than a punishment. But that's certainly not where he ends up by the final episode of the season.
With four hundred soldiers surrounding him, rumours start to circulate that he's actually immortal and when these soldiers move on him they simply let him walk right through them. To freedom. Which Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) is, in a strange way, almost pleased about. Murphy's become obsessed by, addicted to even, the hunt for Escobar - and this monomania is putting a strain on his marriage to Connie (Joanna Christie).
It's not the only marriage that has been put asunder by Colombia's deadly drug trade. Judy Moncada (Cristina Umana) lost her husband Kiko to Escobar and is now putting together a breakaway cartel in Medellin that will ally with the Cali cartel and pretty much anybody else who wants to put a stop to Escobar's killing.
Even if that means doing a lot of killing themselves. Which it does. The Cali cartel are led by Gilberto Rodriquez Orejuela (Damian Alcazar), a man who steps off helicopters quoting the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and his handsome and nattily attired sidekick Helmer 'Pacho' Herrera (Alberto Ammann). Both Escobar's Medellin operation and the Cali cartel have so much power, and money, that they actually run major football teams as laundering operations.
Orejuela runs America de Cali and Escobar runs Atletico Nacional in Medellin. They were, and remained for some time, two of the three most successful teams in the whole country. But what happened on the pitch was just a distraction from the real business of being a front for the two biggest cocaine trafficking businesses on the entire planet.
Escobar's running his coke into Miami, Orejuela into the much larger New York - which is starting to give him an edge. At the same time in Colombia, there are the Autodefensas, right wing paramilitary guerrilla groups and deadly rivals of FARC. These Autodefensas are determined to kill Communists. Which brought them to the interest of senior, and shadowy figures, in the American government who had a deeply held fear of Communism taking over Latin America in some kind of domino effect.
While Murphy's hitting the booze because of his marital strife, his partner Pedro Pascal (Javier Pena) is banging prostitutes and, at times, going full maverick and taking the law into his own hands. We're never far from a gunfight in a darkened back alley, often soundtracked by the crackling of police walkie talkies.
There's lots of running up and down, and throwing things off, staircases and there's lots of people running over corrugated iron rooftops but there is a rich narrative thrust to Narcos season two that begins to develop three of four episodes in as well as a tender and touching story about a young mother, Maritza (Martina Garcia), who has been roped into unwittingly helping Escobar and then finds her life, and that of her child, threatened from every side.
She's an old friend of Escobar's new driver Limon (Leynar Gomez sporting a mullet that could see him find gainful employment as a third Chuckle Brother), a former pimp who becomes part of Escobar's inner unit as the series develops, along with La Quica (Diega Catano, oozing casual menace in the role) and Blackie (Julian Diaz) who has earned his nickname simply because of the colour of his skin.
Don't feel too sorry for him though. He's not one of the good guys. Sometimes, it's hard to know who is as those opposed to Escobar change tactics and up their own levels of violence in attempts to either bring him to justice or to simply get rid of him. Even the then president of the US, George Bush, threatens the death penalty for Colombian drug kingpins and tells his agents to use 'appropriate force' to find them.
In what was an ultimately doomed attempt to look strong in a 1992 presidential election, one he lost by some margin to Bill Clinton. Colonel Horacio Carrillo (Maurice Compte) is brought in to head up the Colombian army's war against Escobar because both the DEA and the Cali cartel know he is the only cop that Escobar is afraid of, the only cop he genuinely thought was dangerous enough to kill him.
Carrillo makes a token gesture of urinating over a mural of Escobar in an area in which the man is almost worshipped but that's the least of his 'unorthodox' methodology. As the loose agglomeration of Escobar's rivals congeals into something more solid they take the name Los Pepes and they're shown to be nothing short of a vigilante death squad.
Escobar retaliates, of course, with more violence and, in Cali, legitimate, on the surface, businesses owned by the cartel there, drugstores for examples, are bombed and yet more innocent bystanders are slain. Escobar, a man who has already downed entire jet planes, is starting to go too far and the walls appear to be closing in on him.
But a cornered man is a dangerous man and Escobar has escaped punishment many times before. This notwithstanding his wife Tata (Paulina Gaitan) thinks it's time to escape Colombia and essentially retire abroad. They've certainly got enough money. Interspersed with contemporary news footage, we see Escobar decked out in a range of nautically themed knitwear, routinely referring to his rivals and foes as 'gonorrhea', and constantly adjusting his trousers as his waist expands and his beard grows longer and greyer.
Until he starts to look grizzly and unruly like Saddam Hussein hiding in his bunker (or me in lockdown). We see the duality of this killer. We see the hypocrisy of the man when we see him with his children in the role of loving family man. Idiots often like to boast they'd kill to improve their children's lives but Pablo Escobar, it seems, took this literally. At least if you think putting your children's lives in mortal danger is an improvement on not doing so.
Escobar's reunion with his father is played out powerfully and painfully and honourable mentions, all performances are good in Narcos - it's hard to single one out, should go to Bruno Bichir as Escobar's lawyer Fernando Duque, Raul Mendez as President Cesar Gaviria, Manolo Cardono as Eduardo Sandoval, Gaviria's Vice Minister of Justice, Juan Pablo Shuk as Colonel Martinez, an army boss whose methods are a bit saner than those of Carrillo, and Paulina Garcia as Escobar's loving mother Hermilda.
The soundtrack, too, is great. Escobar, it seemed, liked tango so there are Argentinian bandoneon players Anibal Trolio, and Ruben Juarez but also Puerto Rican salsa c/o Cheo Feliciano. Brazil is represented by Los Indios Tabajaras, and Colombia itself by The Latin Brothers, Lisandro Meza, and the vallenato sounds of Guillermo Butrago.
Oh, and Respect by Erasure gets an outing too. Not that Escobar showed much respect to anybody outside his own family. Nobody showed him much either but fear is often mistaken for respect. Season two of Narcos made important points about that and about how violent society needs to be to contain its most violent members. These are questions still unanswered, questions that may never be answered, but Narcos certainly did a good job of asking them. It did an even better job of showing us the workings and power struggles of some of the world's most powerful criminals. I'll be going in for season three soon enough.
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