By the early 80s, the powder is a river. Miami is a Roman decadence of cocaine and corpses, and the DEA is a laughingstock. Then comes Steve Murphy. He is a gringo from a Virginia tobacco town, a man who thought he had seen evil until he arrived in a city where the traffic cops work for the killers and the air smells like charcoal, cheap rum, and burnt plastic.
The chase breaks everyone. Murphy’s marriage frays like old rope. Peña falls in love with a woman he cannot protect—a guerrilla informant who will be found in a ditch. The DEA is a tourist in someone else’s civil war. They learn the lesson: You cannot arrest an idea. You can only starve it. narcos complete season 1
Pablo is not a devil. That is the horror of him. He is a father. He is a son. He plays Tejo with his lieutenants, the smell of gunpowder and beer mixing in the twilight. He pays for a thousand soccer fields for the poor of Medellín. The campesinos call him El Padrino . They do not see the bomb he plants on a commercial airliner. They do not see the stewardess's shoes in the wreckage. By the early 80s, the powder is a river
Steve Murphy leaves. He sits on a plane, watching the lights of Medellín disappear into the Andean dark. Below him, a million people sleep in a city that has become a mausoleum of good intentions. Javier Peña stays. He drinks a glass of cheap aguardiente in a bar where the bartender is a former sicario. He stares at a photograph of Pablo Escobar—the fat man, the father, the ghost. He is a gringo from a Virginia tobacco
But he is wrong about that too.