♪ ♪
MAN: Hooah!
ALL: Hooah!
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville!
NIXON: Public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY: Just say no.
REAGAN: Halting the drug problem in America is like
carrying water in a sieve.
BUSH: Take my word for it, this scourge will stop!
REPORTER 2 (over TV): There's now an understanding that the
war on drugs was an abject failure!
TRUMP: We will build a wall.
MARROQUIN: My name is Sebastián Marroquin.
I am the son of Pablo Escobar.
He raised me with a lot of human values,
with respect for life.
I grew up in a family surrounded by love.
Love made the difference in my life.
My father was perhaps one of the richest men in Colombia,
but we shouldn't forget how much blood was behind that money.
REPORTER (over TV): This all‐American group includes a teacher,
a nurse, a recording engineer and a photographer.
Ten years ago, they might have stuck to smoking marijuana,
but now they pass around the lines on the mirror.
MAN (over TV): Save some for the rest of us!
MCDERMOTT: His structure is based on two foundations.
One is extreme violence and the other is business
and logistical organization.
His capacity for violence, his ambition and
his smarts single him out.
And no one actually ever challenges Escobar's leadership.
MCDERMOTT: Planes would leave the jungle drug laboratories
laden with cocaine and begin to fly northwards.
And hopscotch across the Caribbean before it hit US shores.
TURNER: And that was all coming in through Miami.
So Miami was a distribution point.
And Miami became the hotbed of corruption,
of the cartels.
REPORTER (over TV): So this is why police in
south Florida are worried.
They are seeing more and more Colombian traffickers bring
their incredible brand of violence here.
We have had kidnappings and machine‐gun murders in broad daylight,
and police worry the violence will spread,
if steps are not taken to stop it.
WETLI (over TV): We have to start taking the war on drugs
very seriously.
If we don't, we're going to have something like a domestic Vietnam.
We're either gonna fight the war and win it or we're just
gonna give up.
TURNER: United States is a patient.
It's got a severe cut, it's bleeding to death.
POLICEMAN (over TV): Get down! Police!
TURNER: So you gotta stop the bleeding in Miami.
(screaming)
♪ ♪
TURNER: Reagan came into the White House,
he looked at the drug issue as a detriment.
He sort of took the view of
"I'm the sheriff, it's my responsibility.
I'm gonna do what I need to do."
REAGAN (over TV): You wanted law and order in this town,
you've got it!
I'll shoot the first man that starts for those steps!
MAN (over TV): Come on!
TURNER: My name is Carlton E. Turner.
I was President Reagan's policy adviser from
1981 to January 1987.
Ronald Reagan was against drugs, period.
REAGAN (over TV): Thank you!
We intend to do what is necessary,
to end the drug menace and cripple organized crime.
We live at a turning point.
We can and will make a difference.
REPORTER (over TV): Miami is the source that supplies
two‐thirds of America's drug habit, and the target in
Mr. Reagan's crusade to get America to kick the habit.
TURNER: Only way you going to ever stop it is attack.
And it became a war on drugs.
REPORTER (over TV): It really is a war, too.
There's a big Air Force radar balloon checking on anybody
trying to run the drug blockade.
The army's contributed a couple of helicopters to
help enforce it.
The Navy's sent some radar plains,
and the coastguard has a fleet on patrol
in the Florida Straits, whilst 300 drug agents going
over South Florida with a fine tooth comb.
BUSH (over TV): 5,100 pounds of cocaine,
165 vessels seized, $5 billion in street value of drugs.
I mean there has been a major impact.
MARROQUIN: My father was called by the
Vice President of Colombia, The Da Vinci Of Crime.
Of course he was a very intelligent man.
The way he show his own intelligence was finding the
simplest solutions for the most complicated problems.
He was always imagine how the enemy was going to behave.
Always pushing things to the limits.
REPORTER (over TV): He's known as Pineapple Face because of th
smallpox scars he's carried since childhood.
He's a Buddhist, a multi‐millionaire,
in spite of his small army salary,
and a collector of Old Masters.
BROWNFIELD: The government of Panama,
which was controlled by General Manuel Noriega,
had an unfortunate tendency to accept basically any sort of
business relationship with any entity that could,
in fact, put revenue into his pockets.
Panama was very useful for moving up by sea,
for moving by air, or if you're pushing it up overland,
you can't get from Colombia to North America
without going through Panama.
Escobar reached out, and they establish a deal.
BROWNFIELD: That was how Noriega became, if you will,
a key in the, in the western hemisphere drug trafficking
routes and industry.
♪ ♪
MARROQUIN: My father, he had so much money.
We had our own Jurassic Park, even before Spielberg.
He imported, like, four hippos.
And now there are more than 40 in, in our country.
MARROQUIN: My father, he used to tell me he was willing to
use the drug trafficking business in favor of the
poorest people in Colombia.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Medellín is a boom town.
Here the drug lords make most of their investments.
New construction, office buildings,
apartment complexes, shopping malls.
MARROQUIN: My father used to say,
"I prefer to die in Colombia than to live in a cell in the United States."
TURNER: Our government was pushing the
Colombian government to do more about interdicting and
about the control of narcotics.
We were looking for people that had basically a commitment.
TURNER: Lara Bonilla was a Minister of Justice in Colombia,
who basically took it to them straight on,
he didn't back down at all.
He knew what had happened to the other people that
opposed Pablo Escobar, but he did it anyway.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): It took satellite surveillance to
tell the Colombian government that the dense Amazon Rainfores
was playing host to the world's biggest cocaine factory
The jungle is scarred with the new airstrip and buildings of
what the drug barons call Tranquilandia.
REPORTER (over TV): When the troops arrived,
they found a self‐contained town,
built by Colombia's cocaine mafia,
and capable of producing severa tons of the drug each week.
The drug processors left in such haste that a light plane
was left abandoned, camouflaged between the trees,
a sign of the growing sophistication of the drugs industry.
♪ ♪
TURNER: Lara Bonilla was a crusader,
and he didn't back down.
And they knew that the only way to stop him was to kill him.
♪ ♪
(gunshots)
TURNER: I lost a friend.
We began to realize, in the US, and in Colombia,
that the cartels had amassed tremendous power.
Think about someone assassinating the
Attorney‐General of the United States,
it just doesn't happen.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Police and army units found a new vigor
for a series of country‐wide raids,
and hundreds were arrested.
Most of them were relatively small‐timers.
The barons of the cocaine traffic had gone to ground.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): M‐19 carried out its most
spectacular operation in 1980, when it seized the
Dominican Embassy in Bogota, and held hostage an
army of foreign diplomats.
REPORTER (over TV): Ana Cecilia Cartagena was
a Medellín judge, who worked hard to imprison drug dealers.
For that, she was murdered, shot in the head as she drove
up to this intersection after leaving a workshop,
sponsored by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration
(gunshots)
QUIÑONES (over TV): Three, two, one.
This morning, the Judicial Palace is still smoldering,
but there is still no word on how many guerrillas or
hostages are dead or alive.
The standoff continues.
John Quiñones, ABC News, Bogotá.
(gunshots and explosions)
MAN: My uncle told him,
"You piece of garbage. One of us has to die."
MAN 2: Every person he wanted to kill, he killed.
REPORTER (over TV): In the city of Medellín yesterday,
four powerful bombs were sent.
REPORTER 2 (over TV): This is the terror.
A ruthless campaign of car bombs, grenades,
hit squad assassinations.
MAN 3: What he did to the Colombian people,
he was behind thousands of deaths.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.