Theoretically speaking, there's no real reason for Narcos to ever end. Even now, decades after coke king Pablo Escobar was struck down during a rooftop shootout with Colombian national police, the story of cocaine—the true star of Netflix's hit drug saga—continues to add new chapters.
"We really love doing it (the show, not cocaine)," showrunner Eric Newman told Complex ahead of the premiere of Narcos' first post-Pablo season. "There are so many crazy stories in this arena, and new ones taking shape every day. Bad for the world I guess, but good for our show."
But before we see a presumably Sean Penn-free depiction of, say, recent headline snatcher Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, Narcos will introduce viewers to the drastically different vibes of the Cali Cartel. Ahead of the season 3 premiere on Sept. 1, we've compiled a cursory introduction to the legacy of the Cali Cartel, a legacy far more complicated—with more players and twists, but less traditional coke lore—than that of its predecessors.
Of course, what you're about to read kinda qualifies as spoilers. Warning you about a Narcos spoiler, however, is like telling you that the Titanic sinks at the end of Titanic. You probably know how this story goes, but that doesn't make it any less compelling.
Even before Pablo's death, the Cali Cartel had been described in the press as Colombia's "No. 1 drug organization."
From the beginning, the Cali Cartel—founded by brothers Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela and Miguel Angel Rodríguez Orejuela, and José Santacruz-Londoño in the '70s—made a point to shy away from the more bombastic tactics of Pablo and the Medellín Cartel.
A 1991 New York Timesreport claimed that Cali's tactics, by this point, had helped them overtake Medellín as the nation's leading drug organization. Between 1989 and 1991, Medellín's share of annual cocaine trade fell from an estimated 70 percent to 40 percent. Cali, meanwhile, saw their share of the coke business rise to 60 percent during the same period.
"It's always slightly daunting to hit reset, particularly in our case where there was so much goodwill towards the show, much of it aimed at Wagner Moura's amazing portrayal of Escobar," Newman told Complex. "Fortunately, Cali provided a natural evolutionary change in style that was fun to dramatize. They are a different species than Escobar, beneficiaries of his demise who took what happened to him as a cautionary tale. And while there were practical challenges bouncing between four amazing actors rather than sticking with one, in any group dynamic there is going to be conflict, and that certainly helped. The tonal shift that came in shifting focus was fun too."
At their peak, Cali was banking $22,500 every 30 seconds.
Cali benefited from an unspoken immunity from major federal intervention in the early years.
Pablo openly referred to the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers as cops' "pets," suggesting they worked in tandem with Colombia authorities in an effort to strip him of power. Police denied these allegations.
However, Cali was initially able to capitalize on the slightly relaxed stance on cocaine in the U.S. during the '70s. For example, a Newsweekpiece from 1977 spoke of "hostesses in the smart sets of Los Angeles and New York" for whom a dash of cocaine, "like Dom Perignon and Beluga caviar," was merely a fashionable dinner accessory. At one point, even the White House (under President Gerald Ford) told the public that coke "does not usually result in serious social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions, or death."
Cali was also not known for being the subject of violent headlines, again marking a much different approach than Medellín. "The Medellin cartel solves its problems by killing,'' an anonymous army colonel told the Times in 1989. ''Cali solves its problems by buying people, politicians, military men, just about everyone.''
Unlike Pablo and the Medellín Cartel, Cali wasn't known by a single (extremely famous) leader.
This is, perhaps, the most noticeable change in season 3 of Narcos from the very first episode. The mythos surrounding Pablo casts a large shadow in pop culture, ranging from the comical (Entourage) to the highest possible art (the WHICH/ONE question proposed on the cover art for Kanye West's 2016 album The Life of Pablo).
For some viewers, Narcos' move into the Cali Cartel arc may mark the first time they've taken a closer look at the powerful cartel whose intelligence division was nicknamed "the Cali KGB" by American DEA agents.
A 1994 Department of Justice report pinpointed the difficulty of dismantling Cali, citing its status as a "loose association" of five independent trafficking organizations. In the U.S. specifically, cells were established to handle specific facets of the drug trade. For example, one cell might exclusively handle transportation, while another cell—with no knowledge of, and limited communication with, other cells—handled money laundering. Those in charge of each cell reported to various regional directors, who in turn reported back to Colombia.
Cali's head of security played a major role in the cartel's eventual takedown.
In what federal prosecutors called a very personal betrayal to the Cali Cartel, a top Cali security official formerly known as Jorge Salcedo plotted his escape in the late '90s. "When I agreed to assist U.S. drug enforcement agents 16 years ago, the Cali cartel was making $7 billion a year," he said in a CNN op-ed in 2012. "Cartel documents turned over to Colombian authorities exposed a vast network of corruption. There was public outrage. Widespread arrests and firings followed, and the grip of corruption was broken."
The breaking point, Salcedo told the Seattle Times years earlier, was witnessing the strangling of four Panamanian operatives suspected of leaking information to the authorities. Eventually, during a period of weeks in the summer of 1995, Salcedo served as both a CIA informant and the head of security for Miguel Angel Rodríguez Orejuela.
"Cocaine is the great white whale, the pursuit of which leads to ruin," Newman told Complex when asked why the coke trade is such a draw for storytellers. "Its destructive properties are unrivaled. The people using it, selling it, and fighting it all share a similar delusion: we can stop this thing at anytime; we can control it. It's like a terrible magic potion. It can help you to touch the sky and send you crashing hard back to earth a moment later. It will convince you that you can do anything, undermining and dooming all your efforts at the same time. The stakes with cocaine are always life or death."
Those stakes ultimately forced Salcedo to abandon his name and enter a life in hiding. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers later landed in federal prison. José Santacruz-Londoño, meanwhile, was killed by authorities in 1996 after escaping from prison.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury, however, didn't formally declare victory over Cali until 2014.
In a 2014 press release announcing the single largest delisting of financial sanctions in the department's history, the U.S. Department of the Treasury touted the "collapse" of the Cali Cartel. "The sustained economic pressure on the Cali Cartel, at its height the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world, stemmed from close coordination between multiple U.S. law enforcement agencies and our Colombian counterparts," Adam J. Szubin, Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the time, said.
Treasury officials also confirmed to reporters at the time that Cali, following the removal of 308 individuals and entities from the sanctions list, was now considered "defunct." As part of their plea agreement in connection with drug trafficking charges back in 2006, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers agreed to hand over more than $2 billion in global assets.
For a much deeper dive into the Cali Cartel story, catch the new season of Narcos on Netflix Sept. 1. Newman promises fans they're in for a treat. "If we modeled our Escobar years on Scarface, we looked to Lives of Others or The Conversation to help us find this season's tone," he told Complex.
