A new TV series dramatises the life of Colombian drugs baron Pablo Escobar. Chris Harvey goes behind the scenes
When the life of Pablo Escobar came to an ugly end on December 2, 1993 - tracked down and killed by a US-trained Colombian hit squad on a barrio rooftop - it brought to a close the criminal career of the most powerful drug trafficker the world has known.
"I have very clear memories of a big, fat man dead on the roof of a house," says Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, who plays the cocaine king in the new 10-part Netflix series Narcos, which arrives on the internet streaming service this weekend.
The photograph of the US agents posing beside Escobar's corpse as if it were a hunting trophy was seen across the world. What it didn't show was that this one fat man had been able to bring an entire country to its knees.
As head of the infamous Medellin drug cartel, the former street thug - the son of a farmer - at one time controlled more than half of the US cocaine trade. It brought him such vast riches that Escobar was named by Forbes magazine as the seventh richest man in the world in 1989.
When the US came looking for him in President Reagan's "war on drugs" (they were equally desperate to stem the flow of dollars) Escobar waged war on the Colombian Government, lest it dare give him up to them.
He bombed the capital, Bogota, killed presidential candidates, ministers, judges, chiefs of police, newspaper editors, kidnapped relatives of the wealthy elite and horrified the world when he bombed an airliner, killing 110 people. The credo Escobar lived by - plata o plomo, silver or lead, which meant take a bribe or expect a bullet - was escalated to terrorism on a grand scale.
Yet, in his hometown of Medellin, where he initiated building projects and gave money to the poor, Escobar retained the status of a latter day Robin Hood.
"You go to Barrio Pablo Escobar that he built and you see a wall with Pablo's face, and right beside him Jesus Christ," says Moura. "If you say anything bad about Pablo in that place, you are going to be in big trouble."
Shot over eight months in Colombia, using many of the original locations, Narcos - the title is the local term for drug dealers - traces Escobar's rise amid the vast expansion of the cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s, when a handful of traffickers realised demand from the US for the stimulant was almost limitless. The only bar was how much could be smuggled from the growing fields of the coca plant in Peru into cities such as Miami without detection.
Luis Guzman as Jose Rodríguez Gacha.
Pedro Pascal as Javier Pena.
Escobar was an innovator, hiding the drug in everything from fish to coffee; ultimately scaling up his operation to employ remote-controlled submarines carrying 2000kg of cocaine into the waters off Miami and buying used Boeing 727s to smuggle in 10,000kg a time. At a street value of $35,000 to $40,000 a kilo as far back as 1975, the profits were staggering.
It has been estimated that at its height, the cartel was making around $60 million a day.
Escobar was also extravagant. He bought helicopters, planes, art, exotic animals - but he never adopted the look of Colombia's upper classes. Instead, he dressed in a new casual shirt and new sneakers every day. Meanwhile, he continued to audaciously maintain that he had amassed his fortune from setting up a bicycle rental business before moving into buying and selling cars.
It's a tale that mixes journalistic fact with magic realism, according to showrunner and lead writer Chris Brancato - by which he means that some of the real events in the Escobar story are just "too strange to believe".
In 1991, for instance, after his bombing and blackmail campaign, Escobar agreed a deal with the cowed Colombian Government that would save him from extradition to the US. He would surrender to the authorities and serve five years in prison. He had a jail built to his own specifications, overlooking the city of Medellin, with its own football pitches, bar and jacuzzi. He chose the guards. It was called La Catedral, but it was nicknamed Hotel Escobar. In the first two months, he had 300 visitors. His cocaine business continued unaffected. When the authorities responded with a plan to move him to a more conventional prison, Escobar simply walked away into the night.
Colombia today is a country still recovering from the era of instability in which Escobar thrived. His death led to a fragmentation of the Medellin cartel, allowing the rival Cali cartel to achieve dominance, before power shifted to Mexican cartels in the 1990s.
The communist guerrilla groups and their right-wing counterparts that for decades controlled large parts of the Colombian interior have come to the negotiating table.
What used to be a dangerous place to visit has a new air of optimism. When I visited during filming, it felt safe. Strolling through monumental Bolivar Square in the heart of Bogota, it was hard to believe the siege of the Palace of Justice by the left-wing M-19 guerrilla group (allegedly paid US$1 million by Escobar to destroy records that could be used against him in extradition hearings) in which 25 Supreme Court judges were killed, happened less than 30 years ago.
The series, the first two episodes of which are directed by Brazilian Jose Padilha (best known for the 2014 remake of Robocop) does not only focus on the story of Escobar's life. US drug agents Steve Murphy (who took the photograph on the rooftop) and Javier Pena, played by Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones' dashing Lord Oberyn), provide the other side of the story in the dual-language series - it's 60 per cent in English; 40 per cent Spanish with subtitles.
The US agents have a tenuous relationship with legality, not least in their dealings with Maurice Compte's remorseless Carillo, the character based on Colonel Hugo Martinez, whose Search Bloc hit squad targeted narcos, and for whom the phrase "killed in a shootout" was always accompanied by a wink.
Compte, who grew up in the 80s in Miami, the son of a nightclub owner, balks when I press him on Martinez's methods. "When you're in a war zone and you're being hunted yourself, what do you call it when you retaliate?
"When I was growing up, there were people who idolised the Pablo Escobars of the world; and all roads in Miami in the 80s always led back to Escobar. You could not have a conversation without mentioning him in some form.
"He was an incredible businessman and he was ruthless. I saw what it did to my family. I saw what it did to other people's families.
"Violent is a relative term when you're in a war."
In the foothills of the Andes above Bogota, with light fading, the film crew shoots a key scene in which Carillo leads the Colombian authorities' attempt to rescue Diana Turbay (one of the subjects of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping) from Escobar's clutches.
The journalist daughter of the former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay had been set up, believing she was going to interview a guerrilla leader, but was taken and held for five months in 1990 as part of Escobar's blackmail campaign against the Colombian authorities.
Moura gives an utterly convincing performance as the drug lord. Describing himself as "a skinny Brazilian actor who didn't speak Spanish" when he won the part of Escobar, he was "freaking out" about the role until he spent four months in Medellin learning Spanish and picking up the local dialect, reading every book there was about Escobar.
He also put on 22.6kg for the role, most of which he is still carrying when we meet in London four months after filming has finished (a second series is mooted but unconfirmed). "I had to do it," he says. "I don't think people think, 'Look at that actor, he gained 50lb, what a great actor'. It's not acting, it's just eating. But with Pablo, I had to do it. Because anyone would say that he was a fat guy.
"In the beginning, it was great because being almost 40 and eating icecreams and candies was cool. But then it sucks, your body starts to change, you start to feel heavy and it's not nice."
Moura has a reputation for intense preparation. He played a hard-edged cop in the Elite Squad films that made his name in Brazil, which were directed by Padilha. For that part, he ended up punching and breaking the nose of the trainer employed to develop his aggression. Is violence a part of who he is?
"Oh, not really, no, no. I'm not proud of it at all. But it got to a point where he was provoking me all the time, pushing me. He said something about my family, then I just punched him and he was so thrilled. The nose was broken, blood everywhere, [and he was saying] 'Yeah, dude! That's it!'."
"Oh, he was a bad man. He was a mean person, sure, I have no doubt. But if you ask his wife, who is still alive today, she would probably say something different. What I like about Pablo ... " he begins comparing the many first-hand accounts about him, from his son, his brother, his lovers - "in each one you are going to see a different Pablo, see how lovely he was, how charming. It is complex. My job is to portray the human being."
One person who saw the human being up close was his mistress, television news broadcaster Virginia Vallejo (renamed Valeria Velez in the series and played by soon-to-be-Bond girl Stephanie Sigman), who wrote a memoir called Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar.
"She was a TV host, a celebrity sex symbol, a journalist, a very smart woman, a very strong woman for that time," says Sigman. "She carried herself with such confidence, which is a challenge. She owned her sexuality, she was pretty powerful as a woman. She was also his only mistress who was the same age as him." (Escobar, who married his wife Maria Victoria when she was 15, and he was 26, usually favoured teenage girls.)
Vallejo helped Escobar to present himself when he appeared on television as a man of the people. Does Sigman think she was afraid of him?
"I think if she was a little bit afraid, she liked it. But I don't think she was intimidated by him. I think that's what makes her very interesting to Pablo."
"I think so, but I also think she's a woman who loves power more than love. Their egos fell in love."
Why does she think that Escobar is still interesting, when his story has been told before?
"Same reason that Hitler is interesting." She pauses.
"I'm not saying we're glorifying this character, I'm not saying he's cool, I'm just saying it's an interesting subject. Families, narcos, love, passion, drama."
