The Medellin Cartel is the most famous trafficking group of all time. Pablo Escobar is probably the most famous criminal of all time. Names like Griselda Blanco, Boston George, the Ochoas… all under the umbrella of the Medellin Cartel. The smash hit Netflix show Narcos built their franchise on telling an absurdly untrue, sanitized, misleading, and stupid version of the Medellin Cartel story.
This is the real story of the Medellin Cartel. None of this information is anything I personally uncovered, but, for various reasons, no one has ever put the pieces of the puzzle together in a succinct and meaningful way.
First. What is a cartel?
In an economic context, it is an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition. There are also political cartels, such as the Democratic and Republican parties- who maintain certain narratives to control public behavior and restrict competition.
The Medellin Cartel was an economic cartel used by the American led political cartel to benefit yet larger economic cartels- the so-called “free market” of Big Business and Big Banking.
Cocaine started getting very popular by the late 1960’s. The first major suppliers of finished product were from Peru and Chile. During the 1970’s Marijuana and Heroin were the DEA’s primary focus. Colombian marijuana smugglers soon realized that not only was cocaine roughly 100 times more valuable per kilo, but it was actually less likely to be incur an investigation from the American government.
At this point Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas and Griselda Blanco and Carlos Lehder were already on the road to becoming billionaires from Cocaine. But the Medellin Cartel was still 4 years away from forming.
By 1981, Cocaine was huge business, but it had a Wild West atmosphere, hence the “Cocaine Cowboys”. Whether you bought some coca paste in Bolivia or Peru and converted it to powder, or you bought finished bricks in Cali or Bogota or Medellin- anyone could put a load together, figure a way to get it into America, and sell it to whoever they could. But that was about to change, and it was politics that caused it to change.
In March of 1981, Martha Ochoa was snatched while leaving class at her College in Medellin, Colombia. Her father was Fabio Ochoa Restrepo and her brothers Juan, David, and Fabio together constituted probably the largest cocaine trafficking group in the world at the time.
Her kidnappers were the Marxist political action group M-19. One man’s “political action group” are another man’s terrorists- and that is exactly what the U.S. government considered M-19 to be.
Let’s take a quick step back in time to understand what set the stage for Colombians to take over the cocaine business and why it got so violent, so fast.
conflict in Colombia, known simply as “La Violencia” was fought between the economic elites and the extremely poor rural peasantry. Colombia, like almost all of South America,
