Original subtitles

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(man speaking Spanish)

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(speaking Spanish)

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MAN: Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.

RICHARD NIXON: Public enemy number one is drug abuse.

NANCY REAGAN: Just say no.

RONALD REAGAN: Halting the drug problem in America

is like carrying water in a sieve.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH: Take my word for it, this scourge will stop!

KAMALA HARRIS: There's now an understanding

that the war on drugs was an abject failure.

MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?

DONALD TRUMP: We will build a wall.

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(gunfire)

(explosion)

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(explosions)

(gunfire)

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REPORTER: The Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia,

known as the FARC,

is the most powerful guerrilla group in the country.

They control the areas where large amounts

of the world's cocaine is produced.

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REPORTER: They are known as paramilitaries.

They celebrate a legend of heroic defiance

against the kidnappers.

The mission is to achieve what the army cannot:

defeat the guerrillas.

(gunfire)

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(siren)

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REPORTER: 12 died and more than 200 passersby were injured

in this recent explosion.

Another outrage was to follow,

this time there was no mistaking the culprit's identity.

They'd left their signature at the scene.

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REPORTER: Pablo Escobar couldn't stay out of the public eye,

and that's what killed him.

He died in a hail of bullets

as he tried to get away across a roof.

CHRIS FEISTL: In December 1993, after Pablo Escobar is killed,

there is a power vacuum.

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(helicopter)

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(shouts orders)

JEREMY McDERMOTT: The FARC embraced drugs

and used them to fund the revolutionary struggle

and the growth of the FARC,

and the growth of coca crops in Colombia is a parallel line.

Wherever the coca is, you tend to find the FARC.

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(gunfire)

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(speaking Spanish)

McDERMOTT: Carlos is the public face, extremely charismatic.

(siren)

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McDERMOTT: He wasn't from Medellín.

He was actually from Tuluá on the Pacific coast.

It is rumored that he was, for a short time,

a left‐wing guerrilla.

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He is what we call a "lavaperro,"

which is like the lowest rung in the criminal structure.

It literally means a dog washer.

And he proves his worth very quickly.

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The guerrillas try and muscle in on the cartel.

Berna says, "Let me take care of this,"

and there is a series of bloody shootouts

in which Berna takes anything up to 11 bullets and loses his leg.

But they win.

Berna's not the most handsome man.

He was a lot less handsome after he lost his leg

and took a bullet through the cheek and various other things.

This does not hamper his criminal career at all.

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FRANCISCO SANTOS CALDERÓN: Pablo Escobar not only

was a drug trafficker,

but he was also an entrepreneur of violence.

And he created different groups, gangs.

When he dies, there's a vacuum,

and many of those gangs are left with who controls it.

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McDERMOTT: Don Berna learnt a key lesson from Escobar,

which is never become visible; remain in the shadows.

STEVEN COHEN: He arguably becomes more powerful

than Pablo Escobar ever was.

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McDERMOTT: And the message is clear: We're coming.

(boom)

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(rooster crows)

REPORTER: People living in Mapiripán were suspected

of helping the FARC, providing them with food and shelter.

REPORTER: As the paramilitaries entered,

they marked the town as their territory.

REPORTER: Villagers were taken from their homes.

The killing began in the main street.

REPORTER: Three villagers were publicly executed,

beheaded with chainsaws.

Many more perished.

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None of the dead wore uniforms or carried guns.

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(gunfire)

SOLDIERS: ¡Uno, dos, tres!

McDERMOTT: The cocaine trade hid in Colombia's civil conflict.

And suddenly we have a right‐wing

anti‐subversive paramilitarism

which is welcomed in so many parts of Colombia

against the guerrillas who were kidnapping and extorting.

But this is just the new Medellín Cartel.

But it's cleverer.

It's got a political façade, it's militarized.

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(guns cocking)

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(gunfire)

(knocking)

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(siren)

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MAN: Stop? MAN: Yeah.

MAN: Okay.

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JEREMY SALAMEH: The Oficina de Envigado

was originally established to mediate,

to collect money that was owed.

And it was almost like an internal affairs

operation of sorts.

Don Berna made it clear, "I'm taking this over,

and if there's any pushback,

you're gonna have to deal with it."

McDERMOTT: And he turns this vehicle into his bid

to take control of Medellín.

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And he begins to scoop up a lot of the criminal infrastructure

and set up these debt‐collecting agencies, or oficinas,

all around Medellín, and they all answer to him.

COHEN: He understands that his rise to power

and his own control of power depends on his good standing

with the security state and with politicians.

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SALAMEH: Corruption at all levels

was going through the roof.

He would do things that would help the authorities,

and sometimes the authorities would do things to help him.

They did operations together sometimes.

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(popping and crackling)

(crowd oohs)

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SALAMEH: So nothing really occurred unless Don Berna

or his higher infrastructure approved it.

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People often refer to homeless people

or these homeless children and so forth,

they call them "desechables," like the throw‐aways.

And somebody's considered a desechable, a disposable person,

doesn't mean you can go out and kill them,

but that's what they did, they cleaned up the streets.

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And there was a scourge of those kind of folks,

people disappeared, people got killed, people got displaced.

They cleaned up the city,

and I think there was some sense that at certain levels...

In other words, it was accepted because of the outcome.

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McDERMOTT: Berna sees what the paramilitaries are doing,

and he goes, "This is an extraordinary business model,

I want in."

(gun cocks)

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McDERMOTT: So, there's lots of problems

within the paramilitary army.

If someone loses a load

or someone sleeps with someone else's wife,

normally in the drug trafficking world, there's violence.

Berna says, "No, we can sort this out."

He's not always successful,

but what he does is he begins to put discipline

on the paramilitary movement.

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(speaking Spanish)

McDERMOTT: Vicente's got a stutter,

not remotely charismatic, but super able at the business side.

And they turn the paramilitary army,

and this need to counteract the advance

of the Marxist guerrillas,

into a nationwide criminal network,

a VIP club for drug traffickers.

And people begin to realize

this is just the most powerful drug cartel there is;

dwarfs the power of the Medellín Cartel.

And at that stage the paramilitaries

are the most powerful criminal syndicate on the planet.

VICENTE CASTAÑO: Muchas gracias.

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(gunfire)

COHEN: And there really is a fear in Colombian society

and also at high levels of government

that the FARC are actually gonna manage to take over the country.

(gunfire)

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CALDERÓN: The main road to Medellín

sometimes was a week closed

because of attacks from the FARC to the road.

Bogotá is surrounded by FARC fronts.

They were getting ready to take over the capital.

(gunfire)

People were abandoning Colombia massively;

everybody was seeing Colombia as a sinking ship.

And frankly, when you saw the growth of the FARC,

the growth of the paramilitaries,

it was hard not to think

that Colombia could become a narco state or a failed state.

BILL CLINTON: We got to stand by these democracies,

including, and especially tonight, Colombia,

which is fighting narco traffickers

for its own people's lives and for our children's lives.

I have proposed a strong two‐year package

to help Colombia win this fight.

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COHEN: Plan Colombia was this major billion‐dollar effort

to bring the Colombian military up to snuff

to be able to take on the narco‐traffickers.

(gunfire)

And that meant training, that meant weapons, technology.

(gunfire)

It's also the point at which counter‐narcotics

and counter‐insurgency become explicitly the same thing.

REPORTER: Officially the United States

is fighting a war on drugs.

In practice, it is bankrolling conflict

against communist guerrillas.

COHEN: The escalating threat of communist takeover

becomes the justification for increasingly overt alliance

with the narco‐paramilitaries as the most effective

fighting force against the rising communist menace.

(gunfire)

(gunfire)

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(explosion)

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(speaking Spanish)

(plane approaching)

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(gunfire)

REPORTER: America's war on drugs ignores the paramilitaries.

Instead, government helicopters protect planes

dropping poison in the coca fields below.

Their aim is to destroy the plantations

controlled by the FARC.

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MAN: We have no relationship with the AUC.

COHEN: By 2001, the extent of paramilitary involvement

in the drug trade was too blatant to ignore.

MAN: They claim to wish to protect Colombian citizens

from other terrorist groups,

but they then massacre and displace the same citizens,

and they claim to stand against kidnapping and extortion,

and then engage in those very practices.

COHEN: So, in this very weird twist of history,

the AUC gets designated an official terrorist organization

the day before September 11th.

McDERMOTT: And then everything changes again on 9/11.

The war on terror and the war on drugs have now become one.

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ÁLVARO URIBE: Prudencia, muchachos.

Prudencia.

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FEISTL: President Uribe came up with the Justice and Peace Plan,

which would give benefits to paramilitary fighters

who decided to come in, demobilize, disband,

surrender their weapons, and stop drug trafficking

and any crimes that they were involved in.

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(gunshot)

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(siren)

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FEISTL: He wants to try to reap the benefits

of the Justice and Peace Law,

which basically says if you're a paramilitary and you surrender,

you would be eligible for certain benefits

under the Justice and Peace Plan,

which are very reduced sentences, under house arrest

or some kind of minimal confinement.

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McDERMOTT: The Americans and the Colombian public are seeing

that this peace process is bordering on farce

as these guys continue to move drugs, live the high life.

And so once the agreement is signed,

the constitutional court changes all the rules,

and they are suddenly sucked down into the prison system.

And then in 2008, what they all feared, they're all extradited.

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CALDERÓN: How do you measure the success of Plan Colombia?

It's Colombia itself.

From a failed state

to the darling of investment of what it is now.

Colombia is a beacon of stability.

COHEN: Today people will tell you that Plan Colombia's

a success despite the human rights abuses

let loose on the Colombian countryside.

WOMAN: Vamos, vamos.

COHEN: If the war on drugs is in fact an effort to stop drugs

from entering the United States,

it is clearly an abysmal failure.

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In that sense, we've poured billions of dollars into a hole

and lit it on fire.

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Captioned by Side Door Media Services