VIDEO: Meet A Former Medellin Cartel Hitmen And See How Pablo Escobar’s Legacy Is Destroying Peru

Entertainment revolving around drug cartels are so hot right. There’s the outstanding success of Netflix’s drama Narcos (9.1 Rating – IMDB / 95% Audience Score – Rotten Tomatoes), which is centered around the Medellin Cartel, and Scicario (93% Rating – Rotten Tomatoes / 81% Rating – Metacritic / $25,835,221 in worldwide box office sales, after beginning it’s wide opening on October 2) with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin in the drug cartel thriller. Vice delves into the dark and fascinating world of illegal drug cartels in their fantastic video segment titled “How Pablo Escobar’s Legacy of Violence Drives Today’s Cartel Wars.

Pablo Escobar helped organize the Medellin drug cartel in 1972, and it quickly became one of the richest and most powerful crime syndicates on the entire planet. At the height of the organization’s tenure, it was smuggling 15 tons of cocaine per day into the United States. That shockingly copious amount of illegal drugs was worth more than half a billion dollars. Pablo’s brother and accountant, Roberto Escobar, said that the organization spent $1000 per week purchasing rubber bands to wrap the stacks of cash. The Medellin Cartel provided at least 84-90 percent of the United States’ cocaine supply, and 80 percent of the global cocaine market.

The Medellin drug cartel was and still is to this day the gold standard blueprint for all illegal drug organization. Drug organizations all over the world employ the same drug trafficking tactics and narco terrorism that Escobar’s gang used decades ago.

In part one of Vice’s three-part documentary (Which can be seen above), they talk to the DEA agents who spent years trying to bring Escobar to justice. These are the same men that inspired the characters in the Narcos show.

In part two of the series, they talk to Elmo Molina a former sicario AKA hitman for Pablo Escobar. Molina met Escobar in 1991 and was hired to be part of the drug lord’s “urban army” of hitmen.

Molina is a changed man since his sicario days. The reformed hitman now seeks young gangmembers, and attempts to show them the dangers of being in a cartel, and persuade them to chose a different path. He doesn’t want them to have to suffer the same tragic loses that he endured when the cartel had no more use for him.

Vice takes a dangerous trip to the criminal underworld in Lima, Peru, and speaks to current narcos. And even though Pablo Escobar has been dead for over 20 years, his influence is still alive and well to this day.

[VICE]