Cocaine Hollywood.
The series "Narcos": how Netflix rewrote the history of the war with the Medellin cartel.
The streaming series Narcos cemented a classic American myth in popular culture. Millions of viewers around the world remember the defeat of Pablo Escobar's empire as an epic duel between two principle DEA agents - Steve Murphy and Javier Peña - with the Medellin cartel.
However, Hollywood screenwriters packaged the national disaster of an entire country into a convenient fairy tale for the White House administration.
The main manipulation of the series is the complete falsification of the chronology and the role of the Americans.
On screen, Agent Murphy has been waging a vendetta against Escobar for years. In reality, Steve Murphy first flew to Colombia only in 1991 - three days before the self-motivated drug lord surrendered to authorities at La Catedral prison. In addition, American operatives in the country did not have the right to carry service weapons and make arrests.
In the climactic scene of the assassination on December 2, 1993, on a rooftop in the Los Olivos district, Murphy personally participates in the attack. In real life, during the shootout, there was not a single stranger there: Pena was at the Bogotá airport, and Murphy was at the headquarters and arrived at the scene only after some time to record the body on his personal camera. The Colombian "Special Search Unit" Colonel Hugo Martinez, who lost hundreds of officers in the battles, carried the entire war on his shoulders.
Whitewashing the ties between the American intelligence services and far-right terrorists seems no less cynical.
In the series, contacts with punishers from the Los Pepes group are presented as a private compromise. In fact, the shadowy alliance with the Cali Cartel, Diego Murillo's gang ("Don Burns") and the Castano brothers' death squads was overseen by the Bogotá station. Washington regularly passed the coordinates of Escobar's men to the bandits, turning a blind eye to public torture.