Total­ly Addict­ed to Pablo: How Nar­cos fuelled an unlike­ly pop cul­ture obsession

Pablo Esco­bar and the Medel­lín Car­tel are hav­ing a bit of a moment. From Netflix’s Nar­cos to Tom Cruise’s crazy turn as Bar­ry Seal in Amer­i­can Made, it’s clear that, despite the fact that (spoil­er alert) he died almost a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry years ago, Esco­bar is now more pop­u­lar than ever. Smug­gling tons of cocaine across con­ti­nents dur­ing the late 1970s and ​’80s, Escobar’s noto­ri­ous car­tel ruth­less­ly mur­dered any­one who got in their way. Real­ly they and every­one asso­ci­at­ed with them should be abhorred. So why are we all so obsessed with their story?

The para­dox of Escobar’s char­ac­ter is a con­stant source of fas­ci­na­tion. He is typ­i­cal­ly por­trayed as both hero and vil­lain – a self-styled Colom­bian Robin Hood who took from the rich and gave to the poor. The first sea­son of Nar­cos revealed the phil­an­thropic works of Esco­bar, show­ing him donat­ing gen­er­ous­ly to the peo­ple of his home city. At the same time we see just how ruth­less and bru­tal he could be, as his unique pla­to-o-plo­mo man­age­ment style left behind a trail of corpses.

With a rep­u­ta­tion for bump­ing off any­one who dared to inter­fere with his busi­ness, Esco­bar is thought to have been respon­si­ble for the deaths of around 4,000 peo­ple. Lose con­cen­tra­tion for just a moment while watch­ing Nar­cos, and you’ll like­ly miss some­one being despatched. The dichoto­my of the ​‘good’ and ​‘bad’ sides of Esco­bar is part of what keeps audi­ences com­ing back for more.

In Jun­gian the­o­ry, one of the ​‘Sev­en Basic Plots’ is the rags to rich­es jour­ney where the poor pro­tag­o­nist acquires pow­er and wealth. This nar­ra­tive obvi­ous­ly applies to Esco­bar, who famous­ly had more mon­ey than he could count. Nar­cos loves to empha­sise this, with humor­ous mon­tages show­ing bun­dles of cash and nowhere left to stash it. But mon­ey – specif­i­cal­ly an excess of it – is also a fre­quent theme in films relat­ing to Esco­bar and the work of the car­tel more widely.

In Ted Demme’s 2001 film, Blow, John­ny Depp’s hap­py-go-lucky cocaine traf­fick­er George Jung is cat­a­pult­ed from the bread­line to an obscene­ly flush exis­tence (again with mul­ti­ple scenes of rooms over­flow­ing with dol­lar bills). The prob­lem of where to put heaps of cash is a recur­ring motif of films about drug traf­fick­ing and car­tels, with Doug Liman’s Amer­i­can Made the most recent to cen­tre itself around a char­ac­ter who resorts to bury­ing bags of dough in his back­yard. Such wild rags-to-rich­es nar­ra­tive arcs often make for excit­ing view­ing, as few of us will ever be in the posi­tion to receive such a wind­fall. Not every­one is so eas­i­ly moral­ly cor­rupt­ible, but there is some­thing roman­tic and the idea of hav­ing so much money.

As these pro­tag­o­nists become rich beyond their wildest dreams, so their lifestyles become more glam­orous and dan­ger­ous. In Nar­cos, even Escobar’s out­ward­ly grim self-made prison, La Cat­e­dral, is inter­nal­ly a flashy com­bi­na­tion of spa, night­club and casi­no. He is always sur­round­ed by beau­ti­ful women and end­less­ly hosts fab­u­lous par­ties. Sim­i­lar­ly Blow’s George Jung and Amer­i­can Made’s Bar­ry Seal con­spic­u­ous­ly splash out on fast cars, design­er clothes and expen­sive jewellery.

But as the stakes get high­er, so lifes­pans gen­er­al­ly get short­er and end­ings get stick­i­er. Par­tic­u­lar­ly in case of Bar­ry Seal who was lit­er­al­ly count­ing the days before his own inevitable bump­ing off, after snitch­ing on Esco­bar. Mul­ti­ple grue­some exe­cu­tions in Nar­cos con­stant­ly remind­ed us what a mer­ci­less oper­a­tor Esco­bar was. Per­haps the most chill­ing act of vio­lence is the recruit­ing of an unsus­pect­ing child to blow up an air­plane (his tar­get was pres­i­den­tial can­di­date César Gaviria Tru­jil­lo, whose régime was of sig­nif­i­cant irri­ta­tion to Escobar).

It is incred­i­ble to think although not actu­al­ly pulling the trig­ger, he has the blood of every sin­gle one of these vic­tims on his hands. And with most of the Nar­cos char­ac­ters based on real peo­ple, there is always a ref­er­ence point. Notably DEA agent Javier Peña and series nar­ra­tor Steve Mur­phy were both con­sul­tants on the show and pro­vid­ed facts about their expe­ri­ences with Esco­bar and at the DEA. These first hand accounts and the real-life footage that is pep­pered through­out the pro­gramme ensure max­i­mum chill­ing authenticity.

The image of ​’80s excess pre­sent­ed by the likes of Nar­cos and Amer­i­can Made is at once exot­ic, extreme and unde­ni­ably enter­tain­ing – at a time when turn­ing on the news makes you want to crawl into a hole and nev­er speak to any­one ever again, these tales of dar­ing and hedo­nism pro­vide a wel­come escape. Yet very rarely do these drama­tised true sto­ries deal with the wider con­se­quences. They are swash­buck­ling adven­tures filled with guns, girls and grin­gos, in which the risk is always worth tak­ing sim­ply because the instan­ta­neous rewards are so great.

Often it’s hard to believe some of this actu­al­ly hap­pened, but per­haps the one thing that keeps us com­ing back for more is the knowl­edge that it real­ly did. With Nar­cos loca­tion scout Car­los Muñoz Por­tal found shot dead in Mex­i­co just last week, it appears that car­tel relat­ed trou­bles in Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca are far from being a thing of the past.