Narcos
As a look at the rise of Pablo Escobar, Narcos is hard to beat. Covering the rise of the Medellín Cartel from both Escobar’s perspective and that of law enforcement, the first series starts out with Escobar as a small-scale smuggler and ends with him all but running Colombia from a luxury resort disguised as a maximum security prison.
While Boyd Holbrook as DEA agent Steve Murphy is the nominal lead (alongside Pedro Pascal as his partner), it’s Wagner Moura as Escobar who dominates proceedings with his sombre yet compelling façade that can conceal deep love or cold-blooded murder – with no way to know which until he pulls the trigger.
Narcos screens Fridays at 9.30pm on SBS VICELAND and is now streaming at SBS On Demand
Escobar Exposed
You can’t get much closer to Pablo Escobar than this – his widow and son speak out in this two-part documentary. Alongside a colourful cast of insiders from the region’s criminal underworld, and featuring never-before-seen footage from the family’s own private archives, Escobar’s son (who fled Colombia in 1993) and widow (giving her first interview in twenty-five years) provide a uniquely personal peek behind the scenes of one of the century’s most notorious crime figures.
Loving Pablo
Academy Award winners Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz team up to tell the story of the romance between Pablo Escobar (Bardem) at the height of his power and the crusading journalist (Cruz) who was Colombia’s most famous media figure. His charisma and love of his country were what drew her to him; will she stand by him when the depths of his dark side are revealed and she has to choose a side once and for all?
Escobar: Paradise Lost
When a young American surfer (Josh Hutcherson) visits his brother in Colombia, he thinks he’s found paradise. Perfect beaches, lush jungles and a beautiful young woman named Maria: it’s everything he could ever have wanted. And then he meets her uncle, who just happens to be Pablo Escobar (Benicio Del Toro) – okay, maybe the title gave that part away. What happens next will shatter the young man’s dreams and plunge him into a living nightmare.
Cocaine and Crude: Mexican Drug Cartels
It’s a mistake to think of the cartels as merely being in the drug business. Their power touches Mexican life at every level, and if there’s an (illegal) dollar to be made, they’re interested. In this documentary, host Suroosh Alvi looks at the illegal oil trade in Mexico, which has become so lucrative that the cartels and government troops are fighting each other for control of the nation’s pipelines – and the ability to syphon off what flows through them.
Cyberwar, S2 E8 – Mexico’s War on Watchdogs
In Mexico, sometimes it’s difficult to tell where the government stops and the cartels begin. For journalists trying to expose government corruption, that adds a whole new layer of danger to their investigations. When hacking tools that were bought by the government for use against the cartels start turning up on journalists’ phones to track their movements and listen to their calls, host Ben Makuch investigates why.
The Escobar Effect
It’s been twenty years since Pablo Escobar was killed, yet across Colombia and Peru his legacy of drugs and death lives on. The hired killers he trained as underage hitmen are all grown up and still plying their trade, while the mountain slopes and jungles are dotted with the cocaine labs he set up. For farmers looking to get out, few crops can bring in anything close to the income the coca plant can provide; despite the desire for real change, the old ways die hard.
Vice, S3 E4 – Lines in the Sand and Outsourcing Embryos
Cocaine is back in style in Europe and its use there is skyrocketing. But how does it make its way halfway across the world from the jungles of Colombia? The popularity of the drug – and the money to be made from it – has opened up new smuggling routes, and host Ben Anderson traces the route of the new cocaine highway as it runs from the streets of Venezuela to drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean, to ports in West Africa and desert territories controlled by Islamic extremists.
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