Times Narcos Lied To You About What Really Happened

Publish date: 2024-05-17

It's a major turning point in Narcos, the moment when Escobar finally wins election to the Colombian Congress. Borrowing a tie, he goes to spend his first day as a representative, only to be denounced as a narco. Humiliated and enraged, Escobar symbolically removes his tie, storms out the building, and returns to his life of crime. It's a powerful moment, and it more or less really happened — the "more" part being that Escobar really did get elected to the Senate and really did get denounced, the "less" part being that his political career didn't last a single day. According to Biography, Escobar sat in the Senate for two whole years before being ejected.

The New Yorker has additional details. Elected in 1982, Escobar was allowed into the Liberal Party thanks to a corrupt senator named Alberto Santofimio. Once he took his seat, Escobar divided his time between splurging cash in Medellin and trying to get a treaty allowing the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States scrapped. Not that his fellow Congressmen were under any illusions: The justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, publicly denounced him as a gangster.

But while in Narcos, the accusation is enough to make Escobar leave, in real life, he tried to turn the tables by accusing Bonilla of being a client of (irony alert) Colombia's cartels. It was only when a newspaper resurfaced his conviction for cocaine possession that Escobar finally got the Congressional boot.

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