pablo escobar the drug lord season 1 episode 2

“There were tugurios, what we call houses of cardboard and wood,” remembers Iván Hernández, a community leader in the Barrio Pablo Escobar.

He built an apartment complex in a neighborhood of Medellín that still bears his name, where even today people praise him for what he did for their families and community. “He was considered a Robin Hood in Colombia.”Įscobar rallied support among Colombia’s poorest citizens by stepping in where the government couldn’t or wouldn’t. He tracked Escobar from 1988 until the trafficker’s death in 1993. Drug Enforcement Agency officer Javier Peña. “Escobar was the CEO, very charismatic, very powerful, very demanding,” says former U.S. Escobar was a master at wielding loyalty to get what he wanted. The loyalty, often laced with violence, replaced the courts that a legal corporation would use to enforce contracts. That first element was fierce, almost irrational, loyalty to the syndicate’s leaders, especially Escobar. “You start with an ordinary manufacturing and sales business, and then you overlay it with three other things to make up for the fact that you are working outside the legal system.” “What the Medellín cartel did is exactly what any global pharmaceutical firm has to do,” says Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who fought the drug cartels as a deputy U.S. It was not only a lethal purveyor of stimulants and mayhem, it was also a brilliant business, no different in many ways from a Fortune 500 corporation, but built to operate wholly outside the law.

Pablo Escobar and his partners called their business a cartel, but instead of controlling price and supply, it behaved far more like a criminal syndicate that pumped an endless supply of cocaine into the market and let the market set the price. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year-most of it cash-for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake. The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence.

Pablo escobar the drug lord season 1 episode 2