9 years ago

The Axis Around Which Everything Turns. 

On august 28th Netflix launched “Narcos” (TRAILER), a 1-Watch-Run 10 episode American crime drama television series. Narcos chronicles a more fictional deeper look at the criminal exploits of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Directed by Brazilian born Jose Padilha (Elite Squad), Mauricio Vidal in cinematography, and with a great staff of 11 writers, the series interestingly mixes a documentary style with even better investigative background research on the political side of the DEA and economic context of Columbia and Latin America. By achieving this, a personal narrative was used with classic South American serial drama (soap opera) elements. After watching the series carefully myself I can easily say that it’s definitely more then just a TV drama about the drug lord Escobar and it’s Medellín Cartel… 

  • After an interesting report (UNODC) from august 18th from the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Yury Fedotov, survey showed substantial coca crop decline in Peru. This when after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) left Peru in 2008, and according the report, only three years after that progress was finally made not by strong-arm police state tactics but to find alternative crops for farmers to grow that would actually make them more money. 

As in real life, “Narcos” painfully shows us the truths about American foreign policy told through the eyes of Steve Murphy (talented Boyd Holbrook), a young DEA agent assigned to Colombia in the late 1970s. A-ONE-TO-WATCH!

We all know that the $30 billion net worth bandido Escobar who ran the organized network of drug suppliers and smugglers called the Medellín Cartel through the 1980s was killed by Colombian troops in 1993. This after a fifteen-month search effort where they found him hiding in a middle-class barrio in Medellín. 

22 years later not a lot has changed. 

According to the UNODC World Drug Report 2014 (PDF) we are dealing with a $320 billion a year global drug trade, and where we have around 243 million individuals, 5% of the world’s population aged 15-64 having using an illicit drug in 2012. 

Gomorrah writer Roberto Saviano points this out in this new book ZeroZeroZero: 

BOOK TRAILER
ORDER BOOK – English translation Publication Date: July 14, 2015
Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)

Saviano’s warning: 

“the axis around which everything turns is cocaine.” The drug doesn’t just fuel our days; it fuels financial and political systems. It doesn’t exist in the shadows; it’s in full view, right there in front of us. Cocaine props us up and propels us forward — all the while driving us ever further into the abyss.” Roberto Saviano. 

Also check out ATTN: “The Real History Of Illegal Drugs”

Every drug has its story…

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Photo credit: Netflix