Narcos hit our Netflix accounts a few years ago and many of us are currently engrossed in the second series.
What’s compelling about this show, as with many dramas, is that it’s a narrative where fact and fiction intersect.
The shows unlikely anti-hero, drug-trafficking Pablo Escobar, is a billionaire who looks like an animated version of pictures of all of our dads from the early 1990s whilst simultaneously and somewhat implausibly being one of the most notorious figures in criminal history.
The show is the story of his rise, reign of terror and (SPOILER ALERT) eventual and symbolic death in 1993 on a Medellin roof. There are many articles dissecting the accuracy of the shows plotlines and it’s fair to say there’s quite a bit of artistic licence involved, but how many friends do you have who are suddenly overnight experts when it comes to Colombian politics?
That said, political events which are currently unfolding IRL in Colombia are, in many ways, the legacy of the conflicts dramatized by Narcos.
Yesterday the people of Colombia have rejected a peace deal, years in the making, which would have officially put an end to 52 years of war between the country’s government and Farc rebels, who began life as the armed wing of the country’s communist party in the 1960s and were also involved in the Columbian cocaine industry.
The Farc don't actually appear in Season One of Narcos, which features another militant leftist group - the M 19.
Last week the country’s President, Juan Manuel Santos, and Farc leader Timoleon Jimenez, both signed the deal. The peace treaty was then put to a public referendum and Colombians voted against it by 50.2% to 49.8%.
A BBC map of how the country voted shows that in regions which have been the hardest hit by the conflict – such as Choco and the country’s capital Bogota - people overwhelmingly voted ‘yes’.
However, those who voted no are said to have done so because they felt that the rebels were being given too much: trials in special courts, lenient sentencing and seats in the Colombian Congress at the next election. Further confirmation, if we needed it, that referendums on emotive issues don’t always go the way politicians would like them to.
President Santos has vowed to continue the peace process despite the referendum result. Ahead of the referendum Farc leader, known as Timoshenko, told *The Observer *that regardless of the vote’s outcome it was ‘time to heal wounds’ not perpetuate conflict.
Colombia is a much safer place than Escobar’s heyday as depicted through Narcos but as this latest development on the road to stability demonstrates its political situation remains sensitive.
Narcos should be enough to make anyone in the West who’s ever used cocaine recoil in guilty horror, unfortunately it seems there will be plenty of material for future spin offs. The war on drugs is far from over. It has moved, out of Colombia, through Latin America and into Mexico and Central Americawhere trafficking still gangs operate.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.