Series / Narcos

Soy el fuego que arde tu piel, soy el agua que mata tu sed...^*"I am the fire that burns your skin, I am the water that kills your thirst."

There's no business like blow business.

— Tagline

Narcos is a Netflix original Criminal Procedural series produced by Gaumont International Television. It premiered in August 2015 and ran for three seasons. It was announced in July 2018 that season 4 would instead reset as the first season of a new Soft Reboot series titled Narcos: Mexico. That series also ran for three seasons before coming to an end.

The series chronicles the United States Drug Enforcement Administration's attempts to stem the drug flow from South and Central America into the U.S., related from the perspective of hardbitten deep cover DEA Agents in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way much chaos, corruption, and bloodshed occur in the pursuit of fortune and justice. The series is filmed in both Spanish and English, and mixes drama scenes with a semi-documentary style narration and real-life news footage.

The first and second seasons of the original series respectively follow the rise and fall of notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, while the third depicts the conflict between the DEA and the Cali Cartel. Following the switch to Narcos: Mexico, the first season of that series follows the early origins of the Mexican drug war alongside the creation and rise of the Guadalajara Cartel, the second chronicles the downfall of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo as leader of the cartel, and the third follows the inter-cartel Mob Wars that ensued.

The show features Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar, and Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal as the DEA agents on his trail. Mexico features Diego Luna as Félix, and Michael Peña and Scoot McNairy as his most-prominent DEA adversaries. Jose Padilha, director of the first two episodes of the series, is also an executive producer.

Narcos has branched out into other forms of media. CMON published Narcos: The Board Game in 2018, which has one player take the role of El Patrón while the other players take role of the factions tring to hunt him down; a Turn-Based Tactics game developed by Kuju and published by Curve Games called Narcos: Rise of the Cartels was released in November 2019; and IDW published a Narcos comic book series from December 2019 to July 2020.

Interestingly, Narcos marks one of the few Netflix original shows to air on other platforms: Gaumont allowed Univision to televise it, and Pluto TV to provide an ad-supported means of streaming it for free.

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Narcos contains examples of:

#-F

• The '80s: The setting for most of the first season. However, fashion in Colombia seems more rooted in the The '70s. The only character to dress in a stereotypically '80s fashion is Pacho Herrera, who doesn't enter the picture until the final few episodes which are set in the early 1990s, showing that Colombia is not in the vanguard of the world, in fashions or otherwise.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Peña unintentionally getting Murphy abducted due to his dealings with the Cali Cartel gets dropped in season two, with the two making up as bigger threats emerge.
  • Early episodes focused on the long history of Colombian Government corruption and why so many of Colombia's poor turned to crime since they saw it as the only way out in what was essentially a caste system. This is dropped midway through season one and never really explored again.
  • M-19 member Elisa Álvarez, put into hiding as a potential witness against Escobar, is never revisited. Her fate in the show is never explained and she isn't based on a real person.
• Actor Allusion: What's the first thing Michael Peña does on the show? Tell a funny, long-winded story.
• Adaptational Name Change: While Feistl and Van Ness were real people, Van Ness is not the DEA agent's real name as the real one was still serving while season 3 was produced.
• Adaptational Curves: In real life, Don Neto was rather lean, unlike the actor that portrays him, Joaquín Cosío.
• Adapted Out:
  • Pablo's real-life older brother Roberto is entirely absent from the show in spite of his role in founding the Medellín Cartel, making Gustavo Gaviria something of a Composite Character as Pablo's closest relative with a role in the Medellín Cartel.
  • The Arellano-Félix clan is reduced to Enedina and her brothers Benjamin, Ramón, and Francisco. She had several other brothers who were all heavily involved in the Tijuana Cartel.
• Affably Evil:
  • Pablo Escobar himself cares for the poor and is in general a very polite man, at least at first. As the series progresses he loses his "affable" part and increases his "evil" part.
  • The Gentlemen of Cali do live up to their names. They treat crime as a regular enterprise and genuinely want to avoid unnecessary violence.
  • Season 4 continues the trend with how they portray Mexican drug lord, Félix Ángel Gallardo. He is shown as pretty nice guy most of the time. A loving husband who is devoted to his family. A trustworthy business man who doesn't screw over his partners and employees. The only time he shows his ruthless side is when someone stands in the way of his dream of creating a Mexican drug empire, no matter who they are. Subverted when he Took a Level in Jerkass.
  • Amado is personable and charming in almost every scene that he's in. He's even quite calm and restrained when he's being tested or threatened. He keeps his cool when getting threatened by Rafa, or Hank later on. He's also shown to feel hesitation and regret when he betrays people he used to work with and became fond of, like Pacho and even Aguilar whom he personally executes. The closest he ever gets to not living up to the trope is when he decides It's Personal with the hitmen sent after him. And even then, he lets his Ax-Crazy brother handle it.
• Age Lift: In real life, Don Berna was around 30 in 1993, not middle-aged.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Zig-Zagged with Escobar's death which is deliberately presented in a grey, conflictive light. The show pointedly juxtaposes the laments of his tearful mother with images of his various atrocities. Satisfying and tragic at the same time. Showrunner Eric Newman has stated that it was a conscious decision to humanize him in his final moments, and anticipates that there are going to be just as many people rooting for his death as there are for him rooting to get away.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • The Prisco brothers, by Getting High on Their Own Supply and dooming themselves by calling on cellphones they were warned beforehand were being tracked. It also doubles as an example of Too Dumb to Live as noted blow.
  • Rafa, Cochiloco and Cuco enjoy themselves on both beer and cocaine while pigging out in Cochiloco's seafood restaurant. Bad timing for the two American tourists who come in hoping they can be the last customers for the night. Rafa rushes to the conclusion that they're DEA agents staking him out, and promptly murders both of them. Relations were already strained between Rafa and Félix as it was during Félix's transition from weed to coke. Félix absolutely sees Rafa as The Load after the murders in the restaurant.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys:
  • Valeria and Tata during seasons 1 and 2 with respect to Pablo.
  • Sofia during season 4. She's utterly bored by the high-society guy who takes an interest in her, but can't help herself with unstable narcos like Rafa and Amado.
• All There in the Manual: The ultimate fate of some characters isn't resolved on-screen, but as the series is based on genuine events it's pretty easy to find out what the show didn't explain. For example:
  • Steve Murphy doesn't appear after series 2. In reality, he returned to the U.S. the year after Escobar's death, staying with the DEA until as recently as 2013.
  • Pablo Escobar's wife Tata and his son are still alive, having went into exile in Argentina. They were caught in 1999, held for 15 months, and have lived fairly quietly since. The son is now a motivational speaker and lecturer. Little is known about his daughter, although she is also still alive.
  • Pablo Escobar's mother Hermilda died in 2006.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Félix Gallardo has a knack for gaining the favor of powerful people and then moving up the power hierarchy when his current patron tires of him. The problem with this approach is that he is never able to build a power base that he controls directly and has to make bigger and bigger power plays to make himself useful to his next patron. His downfall comes when the power brokers running Mexico decide that he is too much of a liability and the United States government sees no need to make a deal with him.
• America Saves the Day:
  • Mostly averted. While extradition to the United States is a way to bury the problem for good away from a corrupt Colombia and a Fate Worse than Death to the narcotraficantes, the show makes it clear that the Colombian Government, and many of its' citizens, led the charge to bring down Pablo and that American involvement was strictly for support. Perhaps best summed up by Lara's conversation with Murphy:
  "We accept your help, but never your condescension. When all this is over, Colombians will be the heroes, and the victims."
  • Subverted in Season 4. While the small DEA team is fighting to make a difference in the face of a broken and corrupt Mexican system, all other Americans are at best apathetic and at worst actively working to maintain the status quo. Even at the end when they begin to take action, it's only because It's Personal rather than any sort of moral superiority.
• Amoral Attorney: Fernando Duque. Subverted in later episodes when he starts to regret working for Escobar and fears his boss.
• Analogy Backfire: When Gustavo asks Escobar what they should do about all the money they're bringing in, Pablo suggests laundering it like Al Capone did. Gustavo points out that this is a terrible analogy - not because Capone was eventually caught and convicted for it, but because Capone never had as much money as they do now.
• Animal Motif:
  • Rats are used as a major symbol in the first episode.
  • One of Escobar's original major backers is nicknamed The Cockroach because he had a knack for survival. Eventually, his luck ran out when he crossed Escobar.
  • In season 4, Félix meets with Escobar in person. The latter implicitly compares himself with the hippopotami he keeps as pets around his mansion—they look harmless, almost like a baby, but if you get in their way they'll bite you in half.
• Anti-Hero:
  • Javi Peña and Murphy are both ruthless, not above doing a Vigilante Execution on criminals and torturing bad people.
  • Carillo is even more ruthless than either of them. He sees no problem with having Gustavo beaten to death for refusing to give the Search Bloc any information, nor threatening and shooting a teenager in cold blood due to his association with Escobar.
• Arc Words:
  • For Escobar, plata o plomo ("silver or lead").
  • For the early Medellín Cartel, especially Pablo and Gustavo, Nosotros somos bandidos ("We are bandits.")
  • For Galán and Gaviria, "There will be a future."
• Arch-Enemy: Carillo becomes this for Escobar. He is one of the few people to openly challenge him and eventually even becomes the only man he ever feared. He is also directly responsible for the death of Gustavo, who was both Pablo‘s most essential lieutenant (to the part where he often was considered the real brains of the Medellín cartel), but also his best friend.
• Artistic License – History: The story condenses and sometimes rearranges the timeline and changes the specific details of some events.
  • On the show, Murphy arrives in Colombia in 1981 and Peña has already been there or a while. In real life, Peña didn't get there until 1988, with Murphy not arriving in the country until 1991, a full decade after his fictionalised counterpart. This creates a continuity error in the first episode, which shows Murphy leaving for Colombia in 1981 and then going forward one year to the aftermath of the opening scene's shootout, which had already been stated to have taken place in 1989. Also, shortly after his arrival, Peña informs Murphy that because of the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena, the Cartels wouldn't dream of harming a DEA agent. The real Camarena was killed in February 1985.
  • The real life Palace of Justice Siege took place in 1985. In the series, it happens in 1989.
  • In the series, the United States still views communism as its biggest threat in 1989. In real life, by 1989 the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviets had instituted glasnost and withdrawn from Afghanistan, and communism was in decline all over the globe. For all intents and purposes, the Cold War was over.
  • The show portrays M-19 as much less competent and dangerous than they were in order to prop up the Medellín cartel. The group did clash with cartels occasionally, but the show portrays it as a slaughter, forcing Ivan the Terrible to turn himself in to Escobar to save the movement. When M-19 attacks the courthouse, it's purely on Escobar's bidding. This is an existing conspiracy theory, but not much credit is given to it. Near the end of the season, Escobar betrays and casually executes Ivan and his closest supporters. In reality, Ivan was killed in battle against the Colombian army.
  • Crosby's real-life counterpart Busby became ambassador to Colombia in 1991, not 1992 as in the show. His fictional predecessor, Ambassador Noonan, takes the place of four different ambassadors (Thomas D. Boyatt, Lewis Arthur Tambs, Charles A Gillespie Jr., and Thomas Edmund McNamara).
  • Valeria is murdered by Los Pepes, while the real person she's based on, Virginia Vallejo, survived the war, going on to get political asylum in America after naming names of some of Escobar's allies.
  • After season 3 aired the real Jorge Salcedo was interviewed and stated that while most of the story is factually true, some scenes were added for dramatic effect and never happened. Miguel never tried to suffocate Jorge with a plastic bag since Jorge was not exposed as The Mole until after Miguel's arrest. Jorge could not have killed Navegante in self defense since at the time of the shooting he was already in protective custody and far from the action.
  • The arrests of the Cali Cartel leaders are shown out of sequence. Chepe was arrested a month before Miguel.
  • Peña was not involved in bringing down the Cali Cartel. The DEA station chief was Joe Toft. See Composite Character.
  • The Arellano-Félix siblings are shown to be distrustful of Félix Gallardo and seem always on the verge of leaving the cartel. They were actually his nephews and designated heirs. It would be like having Prince Philip trying to depose Queen Elizabeth II; pointless.
  • Félix Gallardo is shown to have lost the respect of his plaza bosses which breaks up the Federation and leads to his arrest. Law enforcement alleges that he was still in charge for years after his imprisonment. The breakup of the cartel was caused by his imprisonment rather than his imprisonment being caused by the breakup.
• Ascended Extra: Trujillo has a small role in season one, but gets much more prominent in season two. Most notably, he kills Pablo.
• Assassination Attempt: The cartel attempts to kill several politicians, some successfully:
  • Lara, who is gunned down on the way to the airport to go to a safer location.
  • Galán, who is shot and killed at a campaign event.
  • Pablo blows up Avianca flight 203 in an attempt to kill Gaviria; over 100 civilians are killed, but Gaviria decided not to board at the last second.
  • A sicario tries to assassinate Carillo as he eats dinner with his wife; Carillo manages to kill the assailant.
• Asshole Victim:
  • In his one episode on screen, Gacha's son Freddie is overly lecherous to a maid, offers to kill her husband so he can have her to himself and tries to rape her before being interrupted, eventually killing her when he and Gacha flee, while blaming her for making him do it by not accepting his advances. When he's killed, only Gacha is really upset.
  • Escobar himself zig-zags this. While his real-life mother mourning him is depicted in a tragic light it’s juxtaposed with footage of the countless innocent people Pablo had killed due to spite, ego and greed, while she claims that Pablo was a generous benefactor of the people, who was unjustly persecuted.
  • David Rodríguez, Miguel's son, is killed in a North Valley Cartel drive by in the season 3 finale.
  • Brutal as it is, Nava‘s death at the hands of Félix is downright cathartic, given what a sadistic, arrogant and greedy scumbag he was.
  • It‘s pretty hard to feel sorry for Clavel when Hector Palma bashes his head in after he shot his wife and threw his children off a bridge.
• The Atoner:
  • Javier becomes this once he realizes that giving confidential information to the Cali cartel has only made the situation worse. He tries to help out Fernando Duque, but fails, and resigns himself to being transferred back to the States for disciplinary action once his involvement comes to light.
  • After Escobar orders a bomb to explode in a very public place resulting in many children dying, Blackie looks extremely remorseful before doing it and when he sees the news where the crowd has totally turned on Escobar, he silently says "Forgive me".
• Attempted Rape: Gacha's son attempts it on a maid, only to be interrupted by his father, who's more annoyed than angry.
• Ax-Crazy: Gacha, and as time goes on, arguably Escobar. The Castaño Brothers are definitely this.
• Back for the Dead: Season 2 has a nasty habit of this, with both Colonel Carillo, The Lion, and Valeria being dispatched shortly after their returns to the show.
• Badass Army: The Search Bloc. And in the first season finale, Colombian Special Forces. Season two introduces Los Pepes, a far-right paramilitary death squad who switched from fighting FARC guerillas to fighting narcos.
• Badass Israeli: Gacha imports Israeli mercenaries to Colombia to train his sicarios.
• Badass Pacifist: Jorge Salcedo of the Cali Cartel. He's a security expert who doesn't carry a gun but his badassness lies in his ability to spot out trouble with ease.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Narcos: Mexico (season 4) ends with Agent Kiki being kidnapped, then tortured and murdered by the Cartel, while Félix Gallardo has made a deal with the Mexican government and reasserts his control over the organization from his underlings who planned on betraying him.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: Pablo chides his sicarios for loading up assault rifles as they're going to meet with politicians, not gangsters — and since politicians are more easily intimidated, they'll only need pistols.
• Bait the Dog: Jhon (Limón's) whole story in Season 2. He seems like a good person who is in over his head at first. You'd expect the Heel–Face Turn to come in at some point, right? Nope. Instead, he uses his friend by pretending to want out, in order to setup the Policia, which gets Carillo and many of his men killed by Escobar. He ultimately kills his friend, when she threatened to turn him in for ruining her life, and because she spent most of the money Pablo gave to her, which he wanted back. And he is the only man to fight and die with Escobar at the end of the Season 2 Finale.
• Bald of Evil: Navegante has male pattern baldness mixed with long hair. Velasco has an outright shaved head.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Escobar pulls one off. It's based on having Limón generate a Hope Spot for Maritza, that she can secure passage to America, and setting the bait for Carillo. Escobar correctly guesses that Carillo can't resist the chance to bring him down once and for all, and Carillo takes the bait hook line and sinker.
  • Félix makes his start by killing Hernin Naranjo to get the attention of the DFS, which is an extremely risky move. He also tricks his DFS driver by saying he was once apprehended by El Azul. The whole point is to get himself just close enough to El Azul to make his sales pitch of seedless marijuana t, and it works.
  • Breslin pulls one off on Zune Arco. Breslin correctly guesses that Zune Arco doesn't trust the military guards sent to protect him by his uncle, and that he's a Dirty Coward with nothing close to nerves of steel. All it takes is to show up on the estate's security cameras to cause Zune Arco to panic, and head straight for a plane manned by a DEA pilot that takes him straight across the border.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Jorge never uses guns, despite being a security expert for a massive criminal organization. Once he feels his family is in danger, however, he reassembles an UZI stored in his house. He doesn't end up actually firing one until the season 3 finale when he is forced to kill Navegante in self-defense.
• Beard of Evil: Pablo's end-of-season-two beard, plus one of the Orejulas, and Pacho Herrera after previously being a mustache.
• Beard of Sorrow: Pablo grows a beard while languishing at his father's farm, after he's lost everything. Luckily, it does help him with remaining undercover to some extent. When Murphy comments on how unimpressive Escobar looks in the end, he notes Escobar's overgrown beard.
• Berserk Button: Peña is very protective of his informants, and is outraged when Murphy goes behind his back to put one's information to use, getting him killed.
• Betty and Veronica: Played with. While Valeria is the Veronica played straight, Tata only displays a few Betty characteristics. The most notable subversion being that she's fully aware of Escobar's activities and atrocities, and doesn't discourage him in any way.
• Big Bad:
  • Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel, for the first two seasons.
  • The "Gentlemen of Cali" (Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, Pacho Herrera, and Chepe Santacruz-Londoño) take up the mantle in Season 3.
  • Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the founder of the Guadalajara Cartel, replaces them in Season 4 and season 5.
  • Carlos Hank Gonzalez becomes the final main villain in season 6, as the man backing both the cartels and the PRI.
• Big Bad Wannabe:
  • Judy holds delusions that she can manipulate the Cali Cartel and Los Pepes just long enough to take out Escobar for her, and somehow emerge in Medellín as the undisputed top Narco of Colombia. And despite having no real cards of her own, with Berna her bodyguard holding them as the Dragon-in-Chief. She doesn't take his Bodyguard Betrayal very well to begin with, but then very reluctantly counts her blessings and realizes she's frankly lucky that Berna's arrangement is the only one that allows her to make it out alive.
  • Miguel after Gilberto gets arrested thinks himself the new kingpin but his leadership just causes more problems for the Cali cartel, including turning Salcedo against the Cartel out of fear the latter will end up killed because You Have Failed Me.
  • David Rodríguez (Miguel's son) is even worse. Paranoid, doesn't look for threats around him, a Bad Boss, obsessed with ruining Jorge's life for no discernible reason, refuses to listen to reason, and tries to "rule" with an iron fist. Fittingly, he's unceremoniously gunned down, having taken no precautions whatsoever to protect his location.
  • After the arrest of Don Neto and Rafa and the apparent disappearance of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Benjamin organizes a meeting with the heads of the different plazas to establish himself as the new leader. It's abruptly cut short when Félix Gallardo shows up with the Mexican army, showing that he has secured his political protection and is still very much in charge.
• Big Brother Instinct: Tata's older brother, Carlos, tries to convince Pablo to get her and the children out of Colombia when things start getting too dangerous.
• Big Good: César Gaviria becomes the closest thing to one that the series has, and he looked up to Galan.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Valeria has a carefully cultivated image as a serious but glamorous newscaster. The reality is anything but. Case in point, she has Diana Turbay, a rival newscaster kidnapped by Escobar. Why? Because Turbay had better ratings than her.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The main difference between our good guys and the cartel is that the good guys don't purposefully endanger civilian lives as they try to bring Escobar to justice. And as the opening of episode one shows, even they aren't immune to killing innocents, albeit accidentally. They do know that what they do is brutal and are not happy about it, but they don't have many alternatives and honestly believe they are fighting for the greater good.
  Murphy: The good guys, they got guns pointing at their fucking head and the bad guys get away with it?
  Peña: Who are the good guys, Steve? That's us?
• Blatant Lies
  • Peña denies ever visiting a brothel they track a Cartel man to, even as he identifies the location, names one of the girls, and gets very familiar greetings from the ladies.
  • After killing Gustavo by badly beating him, Carillo says to report his death as caused by a shootout with police. When an underling points out how no one would believe that, Carillo simply draws his pistols and unloads half a clip into the bloody and bruised corpse.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: A mild example because it doesn't impede understanding, but there's been complaints by Spanish speakers that the English subtitles for the Spanish-language dialogue in Narcos: Mexico are consistently inaccurate- they get the gist of what's being said, but they leave out a lot of the nuance and metaphors that add character, as well as the Mexican slang. And considering that something like 80% of the series run's spoken dialogue is in Spanish, it becomes glaring.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Especially notable in season 4:
  • When Rafa starts really getting into the gangster lifestyle, he begins carrying gold-plated guns around. He defends himself with a gold-plated assault rifle when his marijuana field is raided, and carries a similarly fancy pistol.
  • Basically every named henchman carries a gilded, bejeweled pistol.
  • Don Neto tells a story of his childhood hero, a Robin Hood-type figure. As he speaks, we are treated to a close up of his gun, which features a portrait of the outlaw on the grip in gold and jewels.
• Bodyguard Betrayal:
  • Navegante sells out Gacha to the DEA, and later works for the rival Cali Cartel.
  • Don Berna does a variant. Rather than let Judy Moncada become a DEA informant, he sells her out to the CIA. She's forced to leave Colombia, but he also ensures her safety.
  • Jorge Salcedo is the head of security for the cartel, but he ends up working for the DEA as his position becomes increasingly precarious.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: As the war heats up, Carillo gains a number of guards protecting his house, and one who even sits at the table next to him at a restaurant when Carillo and his wife go out for a date. The bodyguard dies quickly when a gunman attacks, only for Carillo to take him out quickly.
• Book Ends:
  • The first season starts with text defining Magical Realism. At the end of season two, Murphy's narration gives a different definition.
  • Similarly, the first episode establishes Pablo's character with him declaring himself the future President of Colombia. The final episode of season two opens up with a long dream sequence of him achieving just that.
  • In the first episode, Murphy recalls that drug dealers he caught early on in Miami wore flip-flops. In Murphy's final appearance, Escobar attempts to flee him in flip-flops, although they fall off in the chase.
• Boom, Headshot!: How Trujillo finishes off the gravely wounded Pablo.
• Brains and Bondage: Escobar and Valeria engage in this at one point, while discussing politics.
• Break the Haughty: The Arellano brothers get way too cocky after Félix's downfall. Because they control the most important corridor on the US-Mexico border, they heavily tax the Sinaloa Cartel for moving their product through Tijuana. The final straw for the Sinaloans is Ramón murdering another one of their partners over a drunken insult and Benjamin rejecting their offer to buy their own piece of the border, which would have settled the conflict for good and let them go their own separate ways. This leads to a Mob War between the two that claims the life of Enedina's husband and the collateral damage of a dead cardinal wrecks their credibility with the Mexican elites forever. Being hunted down by the Mexican Army and seeing their empire implode before them, they strike back against the rival Cartels and even associates such as El Mayo who were merely in debt to them in a desperate bid to maintain control, which only serves to unite everybody against them and speed up their decline.
• Break the Cutie: Across the board with many, many characters.
• Brick Joke: The marital problems of the boss of the Obstructive Bureaucrat customs agent who stalls Murphy at the airport to get his information for the Narcos:

At the Airport:

Customs Agent: My boss is not having a good day. I think his wife left him.

The following episode, when the agent and his boss are both being interrogated by the DEA for their role in reporting Murphy to the cartel:

Boss: If I open my mouth, they kill me... and they kill my wife.

Customs Agent: [sympathetically] He's having problems with his wife.

• The Brute: What Navegante becomes after Herrera is Demoted to Dragon for the Cali Cartel.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Minister Lara and Galán. They are killed for it. And in season two, Carrillo pushes his luck too far.
  • The M-19 decides it is a great idea to pick narcos' relatives as targets for kidnapping.
  • A very angry Maritza confronts Limón, threatens to turn him in for the reward and keeps antagonizing him when he points a gun on her, confident that he is not really a killer. He pulls the trigger.
  • Nava, head of the DFS, at first is a senior partner in the Guadalajara cartel, since Félix relies on their contacts for protection, but after Félix makes a deal with the Colombians and starts side-lining the DFS, Nava still thinks he can boss Félix around right up until Félix smashes in his head in a fit of rage.
  • Mexican politicians and drug dealers. Seriously, two centuries of history with US law enforcement raids into Mexico and outright invasions haven't taught them what happens when one Awakens the Sleeping Giant in the North? How arrogant are these people?
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Navegante. A looming, threatening and dangerous hitman, who also has odd jokes, is quiet, and has a warped perception of friendship.
• The Bus Came Back: The Lion disappears after the first two episodes of season one. He reappears in episode five of season 2, running much of the Miami smuggling operations for Pablo.
• By-the-Book Cop: Martinez, in contrast to Carillo. It doesn't mean he's not a badass though.
• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards:
  • Not a cadre, but Falcon and later Félix Gallardo employ Tony as a bodyguard, a massive blond American veteran of the war in Vietnam.
  • Gacha recruits a group of Israeli mercenaries, reasoning that he can avoid arrest by killing anyone who comes to arrest him.
  • The Arellano-Félix family recruit the Logan Heights street gang from San Diego to serve as their muscle/protection. One member in particular, David Barron, becomes Benjamin's Dragon after proving how valuable a soldier he is by saving his life from numerous Sinaloan gunmen.
• Call-Back: The Lion is introduced trying on a jacket with pockets sewn in to smuggle cocaine to Miami. When The Bus Came Back for him in season 2, he's introduced sewing cash into beds in Miami to ship back to Colombia.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Pablo calls his father an ignorant nobody who lives alone in a shithole farm, while Pablo made the name Escobar resonate throughout the whole world. Pablo's father retorts he is ashamed and broken because his son is a murderer.
• The Cameo:
  • The real Steve Murphy and Javier Peña appear in the Season 2 finale, cheering while watching a basketball game on TV next to the exiled Peña.
  • Pablo Escobar and the Gentlemen of Cali (minus Gilberto) briefly reappear in Season 4 when Gallardo goes to Colombia.
• Camera Abuse:
  • As an ACCU sniper kills a sicario with a headshot, the camera is hit by a spray of blood.
  • Escobar helps his father slaughter a pig; as his father slits the pig's throat, the angle switch to beneath the pig and as a result the camera is drowned in blood.
• The Cartel: Drug cartels are the subject of the series, and several make appearances:
  • The Medellín Cartel is the focus of the first two seasons.
  • The Cali Cartel appears in the first two seasons and is the focus of the third. Both Medellín and Cali cartels appear mid-Season 4 after Félix Gallardo decides to expand into the cocaine trade.
  • La Oficina de Envigado splits off from the Medellín Cartel in Season 2.
  • The Norte del Valle Cartel likewise splits off from the Cali Cartel in Season 3.
  • The Juárez Cartel in Mexico also appears in Season 3.
  • The Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico is the focus of Season 4.
  • By the finale of Mexico Season 2, all plazas that previously made Félix Gallardo's now-defunct Federation became cartels in their own right: Tijuana, Sinaloa, Gulf, and Juarez Cartels.
• Can't Stop the Signal: When the DEA higher ups want to ignore the information about the massive marijuana fields in Zacatecas, Jaime leverages them into action by (indirectly) threatening to leak the information to the press if they don't act.
  Jaime: If the press caught wind that we had this and we buried it, given the first lady's [strong anti-drug] stance? I imagine that would be a pretty bad look. For all of us.
  Ed Heath: And how would that happen?
  Jaime: It's Mexico, Ed. Who the fuck knows?
• The Casanova: Peña, who's also a Chivalrous Pervert. A prostitute he sees refuses to charge him, and later he sleeps with his informant Elena.
• Catchphrase:
  • Escobar's
    • "Plata o plomo." Silver or lead. Meaning you either take bribes and work for the drug lords or get bullets.
    • Better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the US.
  • Javi Peña's "all in."
• Cassandra Truth: Jorge is Season 3 is mostly ignored when he tries to warn Cali Cartel associates whenever the DEA or a rival Cartel are trying to come after them, because he isn't liked among most members for being straight laced and refusing to get his hands dirty. He is ignored and even insulted despite being an expert in security and trusted to do his job. And when things go wrong, the members who don't like him use this as an excuse to blame him for it. Especially Miguel's son who is jealous of him for gaining favor with his father. It's this among other things that causes him to betray the Cali Cartel.
• The Chains of Commanding
  • The President of Colombia is presented with terrible cards; deal with a narcoterrorist or fight a civil war, and sometimes both.
  • Carrillo has to live with the deaths of his Search Bloc troopers killed under his watch, which is why he explains to Peña that their planned raid on Gacha's hideout better be worth it, or those dead are on him as well.
• Children Are Innocent: Pablo's young daughter Manuela. After the Escobars barely escape from one safehouse to another in December, she quietly asks Pablo how Santa Claus will bring her presents if he doesn't know where they live.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: All narcos, and some of the law enforcement officers, have it. Félix takes the crown during seasons 4 and 5. It would actually be harder to find somebody whose back he didn't plant a dagger into, than to remember the numerous characters he betrays. His ex-wife says as much when she gives him "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Remarkably, the absence of Steve Murphy in series 3 doesn't seem to be addressed on-screen, even though he was the narrator during the first two series. In reality, he returned to the U.S. the following year and stayed with the DEA for two more decades, finally leaving for private consultancy work in 2013.
• Co-Dragons: After Gustavo's death, Moncada and Galeano take over his operation duties for Escobar.
• Coitus Interruptus: On one of their first nights in Bogota, Murphy and his wife's intimacy is broken by the sound of machine gun fire nearby.
• Colonel Badass: Colonel Carillo and Colonel Martinez.
• Conspicuous Consumption: The Narcos generally have giant houses and fancy clothes, cars, and guns; the narration points out that you know a drug operation has moved to town when the money starts flowing in luxury goods:
  • Pablo Escobar has an entire zoo's worth of exotic creatures imported, including his (in)famous hippos.
  • Rafa buys a mansion big enough for him and his friends to ride their dirt bikes inside. When he flees the country, his first stop in Costa Rica is a Porsche dealership.
  • Félix throws lavish parties for his godson's wedding and his own birthday, where he is gifted a tiger.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist
  • Which is what Javier lampshades in the season 3 opening. While Pablo and his men wanted to be loved by the citizens and made sure everyone knew of their crimes, the Cali Cartel wanted friendships with politicians and other political figures and did everything in their power to keep their crimes hidden from the public eye.
  • Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the main villain of seasons 4 and 5 and the leader of the most powerful Mexican cartel, combines aspects of both Escobar and the Cali godfathers. Like the former he came from humble beginnings and more than anything wants to make a name for himself (ultimately leading to his own downfall), but like Cali he does so by creating a vast network with ties to government and intelligence officials and is overal much more calculating.
• Contrast Montage
  • A montage of Pablo's hitmen assassinating dozens of cops is cut with clips of him dancing lovingly with his wife.
  • In Mexico, Rafa and Don Neto's coked-out Christmas party and geeking out about CDs is intercut with Félix getting tied up and tortured in Nicaragua.
• Comic-Book Time: You could be forgiven for missing the fact that the first two seasons take place over a 14 year period (1979-1993).
• Composite Character: Since the real Peña left Colombia after Escobar's death, his actions in season 3 against the Cali Cartel are taken from DEA station chief Joe Toft. Most notably the part where he leaks to the press and calls Colombia a "narco-democracy."
• Cool Shades: Most of the main characters have amazing vintage sunglasses, but Félix's gold-framed Solexes, and Peña's aviators deserve special mentions.
• Cop Killer: Murphy relates that US agents are not targeted by the drug dealers, because the last time one was tortured and killed, the retribution from the US was extremely harsh. Played with in the season 1 finale when Murphy is kidnapped and his fate uncertain for a while. This is also a factor behind the increasing ruthlessness of law enforcement, as Peña relates to Murphy regarding Carrillo: "You had a partner killed. He's had a dozen," because the Medellín Cartel actively encourages the killing of Colombian soldiers and police officers.
• Corrupt Cop
  • Escobar offers "silver or lead." In other words, cops take bribes and become corrupt or they get shot.
  • The first season finale heavily implies that Peña is this, by selling proof of Murphy's culpability in the nightclub shooting of several innocents to Pacho Herrera, head of the Cali cartel. He gets a DEA agent in his pocket in exchange for his support in helping the Americans and Colombian military take down Escobar. Averted in season two though.
  • In Season 3, the Cali Cartel controls all of the local police and politicians including the President of Colombia by helping him win his election. This makes things a lot harder for the DEA to bring them down, and the revelation that the US Government knew and still backed the President, causes Peña to quit the DEA and live with his father at the end of the season.
  • Season 4 possibly shines the brightest light so far. All of Mexican law enforcement and government are controlled by different drug cartels, and eventually controlled by Félix, when he brings all of them together. On top of this, many US officials in Mexico also turn a blind eye to the corruption, either because they are also getting a piece of the action, or because they simply don't care. The DEA in Mexico originally didn't care until Kiki came along. And they become committed to bringing down Félix and the cartels after Kiki is kidnapped, tortured, and killed.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela run a corporate empire, mostly banking, which they built with (and use to launder) cocaine money.
• Corrupt Politician:
  • Corruption in the Colombian government is widely discussed in the first couple of seasons, but the narrative focuses mostly on the honest politicians who are trying to rid the government of narco money and influence.
  • In Mexico, essentially every member of the ruling PRI party is motivated solely by continuing the status quo so they can enrich themselves personally and maintain power.
• Cowboy Cop: Being a maverick is a necessity for the crusading law enforcers (Murphy, Peña and Carrillo) given the red tape, obstructionism or outright corruption they regularly face. The attitude is apparent when Calderoni shows up to help the DEA task force who are facing government obstruction while trying to investigate Kiki's kidnapping:
  Jaime: We've got a few addresses we'd like to hit. Of course, we're still waiting on the warrants.
  Calderoni: What's a warrant?
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • The Cali Cartel is shown to be this, in what amounts to be an Establishing Character Moment when they're introduced as the Big Bad for season 3. No one can come into or out of Cali without the Cartel knowing about it, and furthermore knowing a new arrival's entire background and history within minutes. Their systems for laundering money, exporting cocaine and insulating themselves from law enforcement by cultivating corrupt connections within the Colombian government and police show them as having their trade down to an art form. Further accentuated when the Gentlemen of Cali set up surveillance on almost everyone else in the Cartel, to flush out who was going to dissent against their surrender and retire plan. Those who indicated a willingness to turn against the Gentlemen are promptly executed.
  • Javier Peña and Feistl head off any and every contigency as they plan and execute the arrest of Gilberto Rodriguez. They guess correctly that Calderoni is a Corrupt Cop, so they pretend to be misinformed and accompany Calderoni on a search of an empty residence. That proves to be a diversion, as Hugo Martinez arrives by a chicken delivery truck to the residence where Feistl had spotted Gilberto and begins the real search. They bring Calderoni over afterwards, and his nervous reaction reveals to Hugo that Gilberto is indeed hiding in the residence where the real search was taking place. They leave no stone unturned, and find Gilberto hiding under a Jacuzzi tub. They lead him away in the chicken delivery truck. It seems like Calderoni is about to become the Spanner in the Works when he hotwires a police car, and tries to get the rest of the local police to halt the arrest in its tracks before Gilberto can be flown to Bogota. But Peña and Feistl thought of that too. The truck carrying Gilberto hooks up with a second identical chicken delivery truck. Feistl leads the pursuing corrupt cops on a wild goose chase, buying time for the truck carrying Gilberto to make it to the airfield.
• Criminal Craves Legitimacy:
  • The Cali Cartel spends years using their drug money to buy up legitimate businesses; Gilberto's goal is to work out a deal with the government where they can turn themselves in, get a slap on the wrist for their crimes, then retire while being supported by their now legitimate business empire and no fear of future prosecution.
  • In season 3, Jorge Salcedo's goal is to leave employment with the Cali Cartel and start his own security firm.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Pablo isn't exactly a moron, but he's a fat stoner who spends his time wearing silly sweaters. Every time he's forced to take action, he's one of the most badass fighters in the show.
• Crusading Widow: Judy Moncada in season two, who vows revenge against Pablo for killing her husband in season one and her brother in season two.
• Curb-Stomp Battle
  • In the season 1 finale, Colombian Special Forces storm La Catedral and obliterate Escobar's men.
  • Escobar's Cartel massacres the Communist Rebels, M-19.
  • Los Pepes absolutely slaughter Escobar's sicarios at almost every encounter.
• Da Chief: Ambassador Noonan, who has to deal with the CIA, DEA, and military, with increased exasperation as the series goes on. An actual DEA Da Chief appears in season two, with Messina. Noonan is replaced as ambassador with Crosby, a more covert operations-minded person.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: The series devotes a huge portion of its running time to chronicling the extravagant lifestyles of the Colombian and Mexican drug traffickers while also showing how violent and deadly such a career choice is.
• Dartboard of Hate: Halfway through season four, as Kiki is ready to go back to the U.S. after spending years with the DEA in Mexico, he and his colleagues are seen throwing darts at a board outlining the Guadalajara Cartel network. None of the darts hit Félix Gallardo's picture, just as none of their many attempts to take him down have succeeded up to that point.
• Dead Guy on Display:
  • The Medellín cartel sends a message to M-19 by killing several of their number and displaying their bodies with warning messages on them.
  • How Los Pepes leave behind the sicarios they kill. At one point they're even shown positioning the corpses, and putting a freshly lit cigarette on the mouth of one.
  • In Narcos: Mexico, Mayo and Chapo leave a rather gruesome display for the Tijuana Cartel: beheaded corpses sitting on a monument, with one's head between the corpse's legs and the others's stuffed in their open bellies.
• Deadly Doctor: One of Pablo's underbosses, Ricardo Prisco.
• Dead Person Conversation: Pablo has one with Gustavo in the season two finale.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Colonel Horacio Carrillo's real-life counterpart, Colonel Hugo Martinez, successfully fended off all attempts on his life and was still the leader of Search Bloc at the time of Escobar's death. He retired with the rank of General in 1998. In the show, Carrillo dies in an ambush set up by Escobar.
  • Valeria Vélez's real-life counterpart, Virginia Vallejo, was in 2006 evacuated from Colombia by the DEA as she was a key-witness in several cases against leading politicians involved with cartel activities, and she went on to testify about several of the Medellín Cartel activities in the 1980s, even releasing a book in 2007 about her romantic relationship with Escobar. She gained political asylum in the US in 2010. In the show, Vélez is murdered by Los Pepes.
  • Roberto "Poison" Ramos' real-life counterpart, Jhon "Popeye" Jairo Velásquez was apprehend by Colombian authorities in 1992, and sequentially sentenced to 23 years and 3 months of jail. He was eventually released on parole in 2014. In the show Poison is killed by Carrillo during a raid of the nightclub he was hanging out at.
• Deadpan Snarker: Feistl and Van Ness. The former leans more on the snark and the latter on the deadpan.
• Dead Partner: Murphy's Miami partner gets accidentally gunned down by one of Escobar's assassins. Carillo is stated to have lost dozens.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Gaviria describes dealing with Escobar as this. A former Colombian president retorts that it could not be otherwise, since Colombia became a living hell a long time ago.
  • Javier definitely considers his deal with the Cali cartel to be this.
• Death by Materialism: The Cockroach, Escobar's original cocaine manufacturer, eventually tries to backstab Escobar in various ways (snitching on him to hurt his operation and getting into bed with a different trafficker) to increase his own percentage of the profits. Murphy's narration does say that Escobar was screwing over his partner as well, but when he finds out he personally executes him and his conspirators.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: What gradually happens to Escobar's Medellín Cartel. Even the Cali Cartel was reluctant to cross the Medellín Cartel in the latter's heyday, as seen in a scene during the Mexico arc where the Cali Godfathers appear very reluctant to partner up with Félix if it meant crossing Escobar. But Escobar soon acquires a lot of enemies. The Search Bloc, splinter groups from his Cartel led by Judy Moncada and Berna, the Castaño brothers, and then the Cali Cartel. The splinter groups and the Castaño brothers together comprise Los Pepes, while the Bloc and Cali assist them from the background. And slowly but surely they start to whittle down Escobar's Sicarios. Each Sicario death, very often amounting to Cruel and Unusual Death, doesn't look like a big loss in isolation. But it adds up over time, and what's left of Escobar's once mighty Cartel is floudering and struggling to hold on. The knockout blows, severing the connection to Miami, and routing what's left when Escobar tries to make a desperate move on Cali, only come after the Medellín Cartel has been sufficiently weakened over time in a process of attrition.
• Decomposite Character: Colonel Carillo is a fictional character. Carillo and Colonel Martinez are based on the real Colonel Hugo Martinez who led the Search Bloc in its hunt for Escobar. Carillo gets most of Martinez's backstory and Cowboy Cop tendencies while Martinez himself is portrayed as a By-the-Book Cop and finishes what Carillo started.
• Defiant to the End:
  • Carillo goes down swinging, calling Pablo Escobar a "coward" to his face.
  • Escobar himself ends up going out a similar way.
  • Gustavo, when faced with the option of giving up Pablo or being beaten to death.
  "Nosotros somos bandidos, no sapos, hijo de puta!
  • Played With with Kiki Camarena. He initially begs Félix to let him go back to his family, but after realizing that Félix never has any intention of letting him go alive, he accepts his fate calmly and ominously tells Félix that retribution will come swiftly and that whatever dreams Félix have are over.
  (in English) "You fucked up, man."
• Delayed Narrator Introduction: In season 4, the narrator isn't introduced as a character until the final minutes of the last episode.
• Demoted to Dragon: Pacho Herrera in season two, when the true leaders of the Cali Cartel are revealed.
• Demoted to Extra: Martínez and Don Berna involvement in Season 3 is little more than a single event.
• Dirty Communists: Much of the first season takes place during the Cold War. M-19 in Season 1 and FARC in Season 3 are Communist guerilla groups who kidnap people for ransom. Discussed; the DEA only gets the resources they need to combat the cartels when they can link the cartels to communist groups.
• Dirty Cop: Both the Colombian and Mexican cartels have massive numbers of corrupt policemen on their payroll. Escobar enunciates this in his plata o plomo offer to any law enforcement officer or bureaucrat. The Guadalajara Cartel gets off the ground to begin with thanks to its alliance with the DFS, the corrupt former State Sec of Mexico.
• Dirty Coward: La Quica is notable for the sadistic pleasure he takes from his work as the Medellín Cartel's main assassin after the death of Poison, having absolutely no qualms in liquidating defenseless civilians and killing police officers in ambushes, but when Escobar asks for his participation in Storming the Castle of the Cali Cartel, something that is very probably a Suicide Mission, he gets notably deadly afraid, and ultimately deciding that he doesn't like the odds, he ends up betraying the Medellín Cartel by trying to run away with a chunk of the cartel's money, but gets arrested by the Search Bloc during this attempt. He also cracks very easily during Murphy and Peña's interrogation of him, quickly dropping his half-hearted attempts at acting tough and agreeing to give them all the information they want in exchange for a more lenient punishment, where pretty much all of Escobar's other men put up much more of a fight.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • The father of Maritza's daughter isn't mentioned or seen.
  • Pablo's own father also doesn't get a single mention before he hides out in his farm in the second season. It's quickly made clear they aren't that close, and possibly have been estranged for some time (his parents apparently divorced or separated). His father finally tells Pablo that he's completely ashamed to have him as a son, seeing him as nothing but a murderer, prompting him to leave.
• Disappointed in You: Pablo calls his father out on his modest life as a farmer, stating that he himself has made something of the name Escobar through his drug empire. His father throws it back in his face, telling him in no uncertain terms that he is ashamed of his son who in his eyes only has made himself a simple criminal and murderer.
• Disposing of a Body: Generally averted by the Medellín Cartel, who let the bodies serve as examples not to cross them. The Cali Cartel, on the other hand like to fly below the radar; they wrap bodies in chicken wire and dump them in the river. As the bodies expand from the gases of decomposition, the chicken wire cuts them into little pieces that are eaten by the fish. No body = no crime = no negative publicity.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • The paramilitary group led by the Castaño brothers slaughtered entire villages where communist guerillas had stayed, even briefly. And that was before they even signed up for the campaign to take down Escobar. As leaders of Los Pepes they take to slaughtering not just anyone who is associated with Escobar, but also innocent family members of the associates as well. That gets punctuated when they murder Blackie's girlfriend and father-in-law, and the entire family of Fernando Duquesne, including his ex-wife, his mother, and his 14 year old son.
  • After the Colombian government prevents his family from fleeing abroad and puts them in protective custody, Pablo orders a bomb to go off in the middle of a market district during the day, killing hundreds of innocent people. This act ultimately turns the people against him.
  • This is the reason the Cartels don't directly target DEA agents; as the Kiki Camarena case proved, the DEA will go to any lengths to dismantle your entire organisation as payback.
    "What the fuck were they thinking — they could kill an American government agent and get away with it? Uncle Sam doesn't fuck around; the cocksuckers paid in blood. The went after them so hard every single narco in the world got the message: The DEA was off limits."
• Dissonant Serenity
  • Murphy pulls a gun on a cab driver for yelling at him, then gets back into the car with his horrified wife and continues his conversation as if nothing had happened.
  • As the police raid Don Neto's beach house, he calmly lounges with his headphones in, even as blood splashes on his face from people getting shot around him.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Despite serving as head of security for a cartel, Jorge Salcedo doesn't carry a gun. He only reluctantly arms himself when the situation with the cartel has gotten volatile and he fears for his family's safety.
• Doomed by Canon
  • History tells who will prevail, but the show keeps it interesting nevertheless.
  • Within the show, Poison. He's killed in the first episode and it's a How We Got Here story until the end of episode eight.
  • Kiki Camarena in season 4. In addition to having died in real life, his death is discussed in season 1.
• Double-Meaning Title: In Spanish, narco is short for "narcotraficante", drug dealer, while in English it refers to a law enforcement agent specialized in narcotics, aka "narc."
• Downer Ending:
  • The end of Kiki's story. What makes it really tragic is that he was days away from moving to San Diego with his family, but ends up tortured and killed on the assumption that he kicked up a hornet's nest in Washington D.C. It turned out that the American powers that be were just going to sweep the info that Kiki gave them under the rug as always.
  • The end of Officer Tapia's story in Narco's Mexico Season 3. While he is able to find and kill a guy who was kidnapping, raping, and murdering young women in his community, he soon finds out that the guy wasn't the only serial killer operating in the area, and he is threaten to drop the issue by his superiors. He is then killed by his partner shortly afterwards because he believed Tapia was a snitch for the DEA. The ending narration points out that the kidnapping and murdering of young women was never solved and still happens today.
• The Dragon: Gustavo, to Escobar. He serves as a stabilizing force to Escobar's more volatile personality, and things go south quickly once he's killed.
• Dramatic Irony: Jhon aka Limón was the one to save Maritza from being killed by La Quica, but later on he ends up killing her in front of her daughter.
• Drugs Are Bad: Played straight with the narrator when discussing cocaine, but very much averted with his cynical attitude toward the focus on marijuana in the war on drugs.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Rafa's pride and joy is the creation of his seedless marijuana. Getting sidelined and left behind when Félix moves the Guadalajara cartel into cocaine leads him to Stupid Evil behavior that exemplifies that Evil Is Petty.
• Dwindling Party: Escobar's inner circle becomes this in season two. One by one they are killed by Los Pepes or arrested by police. By the time Escobar makes his Last Stand, it is just him and his driver.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Moncada and Galeano can briefly be seen in the second episode of season 1, before playing a important role in the second half of the season.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: The show highlights the Search Bloc, as well as the Colombian Special Forces, who are both played as a Badass Army. However, the main Centra Spike (AKA the ISA, the intelligence/paramilitary arm of top-tier US special forces) operative in Colombia, Jacoby (presumably based off of Major Steve Jacoby) is a scrawny and nebbishy looking figure.
• Enemy Mine: Season two finds Judy Moncada, technically with the Medellín Cartel, joining up with the Cali Cartel, the Right-Wing Militia Fanatic Castaño Brothers and their Vigilante Militia army (who are being supplied by "CIA Bill" Schencher), with Peña drawn in as well.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil
  • Escobar has a pretty diverse crew. His Medellín Cartel includes Blackie (a black man), Carlos Lehder (a half-German Neo-Nazi), Fernando Duque (a high-class lawyer), Lion (an Ambiguously Gay man), and Barry Seal (a Good Ol' Boy American ex-CIA agent). He also "hires" M-19 (a Communist guerrilla organization) and briefly contracts "the Spaniard" (a Basque separatist bomb maker).
  • Pacho's homosexuality doesn't hold him back in the Cali cartel, despite the prevalent homophobia in The '80s.
  • The anti-Escobar coalition that forms in season 2 is made up of various narco factions.
• Erudite Stoner: Escobar is constantly puffing away on joints. It doesn't seem to affect his business skills.
• Establishing Character Moment
  • In his first scene, Escobar and his men are stopped at the border by a new military commander, who looks ready to arrest him then and there. Escobar calmly lets the soldiers know that he knows everything about them, despite never meeting them before that moment: their names, where they live, and their families. He ends by introducing himself as future President of Colombia and offers them all a simple choice: "silver or lead." They let him pass without further incident.
  • Peña is introduced by CIA agent Owen as "an asshole." Subverted in that he's eventually revealed to be one of the nicest characters on the show.
  • Jorge Salcedo has two in the first episode of season three. First, he's trying to leave employment with the cartel; second, when he discovers a young man working as a DEA informant at a cartel party, he gives him the option to leave town rather than just killing him like anyone else working for the cartel would have.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Hermilda, Pablo's mother.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones
  • Escobar clearly loves his mother, and is sincerely devoted to his wife and two children (dalliances with Valeria aside). He is also utterly devastated when he's told of Gustavo's death.
  • Gacha has an only son, and goes into a Villainous Breakdown when he's killed.
  • The Cali Cartel have their spouses/lovers, each other, and their children.
  • Enedina is devastated by Claudio's death, and swears revenge on the Sinaloa cartel.
• Even Evil Has Standards
  • One of Escobar's thugs is visibly disturbed at being ordered to kill the young widow of the man they duped into blowing up Avianca and their two-year old baby daughter. It's not clear who shoots the woman, but he refuses to shoot the baby.
  • Escobar himself is horrified at Gacha casually shooting his dog, just because the dog couldn't detect the drugs Escobar had hidden on one of his cars.
  • Jorge decides to betray the Cali Cartel because of how they easily and viciously kill one of their most trusted men.
  • For many of the plaza bosses in S5, Félix Gallardo having rebel boss Palma's wife shot and having Palma's kids thrown off of a bridge is the last straw.
• Evil Genius: Escobar is anything but unintelligent, but he uses his immense talents for selfish and violent goals.
• Evil Is Petty: Escobar quadruples the war tax on his lieutenants because Galeano won money off of him at pool.
• Evil Matriarch:
  • Gerda Salazar is one within the North Valley cartel. Pacho raids a church and demands to know where to find her. No one in the congregation or in town will dare say a word, even despite Pacho's rather immediate threats. It helps that everyone knows her sons are a bunch of very violent psychopaths who will kill anyone at her bidding without the slightest hesitation.
  • The Arellano Félix brothers are not pushovers by any stretch of the imagination. But it's shown that Enedina is the real shot caller in the Tijuana cartel.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids:
  • A lot of the narcos try to keep their children sheltered from and ignorant of what they do for a living. The standout instance is Gilberto Rodriguez, who wants his son, Nicolas, to stay a legitimate lawyer without any involvement whatsoever with cartel business. But Nicolas insists on getting involved with fighting Colombia's efforts to incarcerate his father.
  • Noticeably averted with Miguel Rodriguez's son, David, who often acts as The Dragon for the Cali Cartel and is a grade-A Stupid Evil Sociopath.
  • Also averted with Gacha's son, who is not only just as Ax-Crazy as his father but a rapist on top of that. Not that his old man cares. Which makes it very karmic that he dies in his father's arms.
• Evil Power Vacuum:
  • Once it's clear to everyone that Escobar is done for, the Cali cartel wastes no time in taking over his operations in Miami, becoming the biggest Colombia drug cartel.
  • In season 3 the major problem with Gilberto's surrender scheme is that as soon as he announces it he creates a power vacuum. Worse, he intends to wait the full six months before surrendering. Neither his allies or his rivals want to wait that long before making a grab for power. He then gets greedy and tries to temporarily expand his operations instead of winding them down. This makes a Mob War inevitable.
  • At the end of season 5, Félix accurately predicts what will happen after the collapse of the Federation and the plazas become their own Cartels. They might get along at first, but eventually they'll just start competing for the best routes, product, and reach with the government and endless war is inevitable without a central leader controlling Mexico's entire drug trade.
  • Season 6 ends with the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes and other cartels immediately move in to seize his lucrative territory.
• Evil Versus Evil: A good deal of Season 2 focuses on Los Pepes, the coalition of rival drug lords and paramilitary groups trying to take down Escobar, and the police's uneasy relationship with them.
• Failure Hero: Walt Breslin, one of the main characters in Narcos: Mexico. After being the narrator of the first season, in season 2 he and other DEA agents embark on Operation Leyenda to avenge the death of agent "Kiki" Camarena. While they do manage to capture and kill the Torture Technician who actually committed the deed, they continually fail to seriously impede Félix Gallardo's cartel and eventually are almost completely wiped out when they walk right into a trap. Breslin himself doesn't even seem to understand why he's embarking on this crusade, with the suggestion that he's mostly doing it to fill a void in his non-existent personal life and Kiki's death (who he didn't know personally) is nothing more than a half-hearted excuse. Félix is ultimately deposed simply because the Mexican government withdraws its protection, even giving Breslin a stinging "The Reason You Suck" Speech from his jail cell. This continues in season 3 as Breslin sacrifices his own happiness and personal honour to take down the cartels and achieves very little. In the end he is unable to to even save the life of an informant.
• Fair Cop: Murphy and Peña are portrayed as two hunks. Carillo and Martinez also count.
• Faking the Dead: Implied to be the case with Amado. Although he supposedly died undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance, Jaime and Walt discuss how the body disappeared and the two doctors working on him ended up dead as well. Seemingly confirmed by the scene during the final credits featuring Amado's girlfriend in the house he bought her in Chile. Although we only see her, there are two glasses of wine visible; we also see the toy airplane that Amado carried with him.
• False Flag Operation: Escobar hires M-19 to storm the Palace of Justice. Ostensibly it fits M-19's war with the government, but Escobar specifically has them torch the room containing evidence against him.
• Family-Values Villain: Escobar is big on family and Thicker Than Water values, although this doesn't stop him from cheating on his wife.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • One of the only things that Pablo Escobar is afraid of is being extradited to the United States, where his wealth and power would be meaningless and he'd be living in a small cell just like all the other criminals. One of Escobar's mottoes is "Better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the United States."
  • The only named character to suffer this fate is Carlos Lehder, who remains in prison to this day. Until Gilberto and Miguel are extradited at the end of season 3.
• A Father to His Men:
  • Although Colonel Carillo is obsessed with bringing down the Cartel, he does not recklessly endanger the lives of his men. He avoids putting them in danger unless it's absolutely necessary.
  • Martinez is also this. And he's literally the father of one of them.
  • Jaime Kuykendall starts off season 4 as just going through the motions, and resigned to the fact that corruption in Mexico means a new and foreign law enforcement body like the DEA is not going to make any progress. He also plays the Obstructive Bureaucrat to Kiki. But Jaime becomes the Father when Kiki starts to make headway, and the rest of the Guadalajara agents buy into Kiki's efforts. He personally leads his men on missions as a Frontline General, and always plans out the missions to minimize the risk to his men. He becomes The Determinator once he realizes that Kiki has been kidnapped, and leaves no stone unturned in the hopes that he can find and save Kiki. And that means going hard into Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Escobar starts off as legitimately Affably Evil, but slides into this midway through the series. Pacho Herrera as well, who is far more snide and cold when not negotiating.
  • "CIA Bill" Stechner uses friendly words, in the most hollow way possible.
• Fed to the Beast: Escobar threatens to feed Félix to his hippopotamuses, but doesn't follow through.
• Feed the Mole: Trying to lure Félix into the United States to be able to arrest him, the DEA leverages his American accountant into (falsely) telling him that a recent cash shipment they intercepted also contained financial documents and he needs to come North of the border in order to move his accounts before they are frozen. To sell the deception the DEA agents offhandedly tell their Mexican law enforcement liaison about the supposed financial documents, knowing the information will filter its way back to Félix.
• Flowery Insults: Pablo has a penchant for dropping half a dozen of insults in as many seconds. Most of these parlache (Paisa/Medellín slang) words sound wonderful to non-Colombians (hijueputa, gonorrea, malparido, pirobo, sapo...) and became popular in other Spanish-speaking countries during the show's heyday. Netflix even asked the Royal Spanish Academy via twitter about the correct spelling.
• Foil
  • Carillo and Martinez — Carillo is ready and willing to do whatever it takes to bring Escobar, even shooting an unarmed teenaged scout of Escobar's to strike fear into his other men; Martinez is completely by-the-book and makes it clear to his men that he doesn't tolerate vigilante justice.
  • The Cali Cartel and Salazar Cartel — The Cali Cartel is all about being discreet and maintaining a good public image, the Salazar Cartel couldn't care less for either one.
• Foregone Conclusion: Not too surprising, considering Escobar's eventual fate.
• Foreign Fanservice:
  • In season 1, Pablo takes a couple of Brazilian prostitutes into the Colombian jungle with him as a present to "the Cockroach", his original drug manufacturer. Pablo specifically boasts that Brazilian girls have "the best asses". Ironically, Pablo himself is played by a Brazilian actor (Wagner Moura). Also, the Cockroach is a Chilean who fled the Pinochet junta.
  • In season 4, as Felix sets up a relationship with the Cali cartel, his contact advises him to bring along Isabella, stating that the Colombians will be more inclined to hear him out with a piece of Mexican eye candy by his side.
• Forever War: The end of season 3 of Narcos: Mexico depicts the entire War on Drugs to be this. At the time of this writing, the Mexican cartels are still at large, and the Mexican and American governments' fight to take them down appears no closer to victory now than it was decades ago.
• Freudian Excuse: Pablo wasn't exactly raised to be a model citizen. It's heavily implied that his mother Hermilda instilled the idea that it's right to just take what you want. She relates that when Pablo was a boy, a little girl from his school made fun of his ragged shoes. They didn't have any money to buy him new ones, so that night, Hermilda went into town and stole a pair from a store.
• From Nobody to Nightmare
  • Limón is just a taxi driver hired for a day for his clean record. He becomes a Cop Killer and develops Undying Loyalty to Escobar.
  • Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the antagonist of Mexico, starts out as an ordinary Sinaloa State Police officer who grows pot on the side, until he manages to pull off uniting all of the competing smaller cartels under one banner, nearly monopolizes the illegal drug trade throughout Mexico, has a lot of people killed, fixes an election, and becomes one of the biggest drug lords ever.
• Frontline General: Carrillo frequently leads his Search Bloc troopers on raids.

G-L

• Gayngster: Pacho of the Cali Cartel is one of the Cali Godfathers and is also openly gay. None of his peers hold it out against him.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply:
  • Averted for the most part. The high-level drug traffickers of the cartels are nowhere near stupid enough to indulge in their own product.
  • This also gets a Lampshade Hanging in Narcos: Mexico by a couple of Gangbangers who just introduced crack cocaine to their Mexican partners. They've seen Scarface, but unlike Tony Montana himself, they actually take the lesson to heart.
  • Played straight with the members of the Prisco gang that aren't Ricardo, who are shown to party heavily with booze, hookers, and their own cocaine. This leads to the fatal mistake of one of them calling their associates on a satellite phone, giving away their location to Los Pepes and the cops.
  • Zigzagged with the Guadalajara Cartel's bosses as featured in Mexico. Félix sticks to Cigarettes of Anxiety and broody glasses of liquor and is consequently the most clearminded of the lot, Don Neto partakes in the odd line of coke but is otherwise a Functional Addict, but Rafa gets high so frequently that he becomes a liability to the organization with his erratic and stupid decisions.
• Gilded Cage: What La Catredal becomes for Escobar. Murphy even calls it one. Escobar has any and every luxury he ever wants brought to him, and he's surrounded by his loyal sicarios to keep him company. But being restricted to that one spot gets to him and makes him restless and stir-crazy. It eventually becomes a contributing factor to his murders of Kiko and Galeano, his subsequent abandonment of La Catredal, and the renewal of the Colombian drug war.
• Gilligan Cut: After their cat is killed, Murphy insists that his wife quit her volunteer job and go back to Miami, telling her "I'm not giving in on this one!" Cut immediately to him dropping her off at work the next day.
• Godzilla Threshold: In-universe, Gaviria orders an exiled Carillo to return to Colombia after Pablo has scores of policemen murdered, even though he knows how brutal Carillo can be.
• Gold Digger:
  • Valeria. A variation in that although she doesn't initially seem to be getting money from Pablo directly, she does it indirectly by using her access to boost the ratings of her show. After Escobar begins his campaign for Congress by handing out dollars to the poor, she seduces him in no time. In one scene, she boldly asks Escobar for her 'fair share' in helping to cultivate his political persona. Towards the end of the series, as Escobar becomes more notorious and violent, she blatantly tells him that she has to break up with him because it would be negative for her own image as an anchorwoman. She's later seen having dinner with Pacho Herrera.
  • Maria Salazar during season 3. She's upfront about not caring about Claudio and having married him for money from the beginning. Claudio gets murdered. She hardly skips a beat in propositioning herself to Miguel, a partner of the man (Pacho) who killed her husband no less. And she comes out and explicitly demands a monthly stipend for her services. She then approaches Miguel's son, David, once Miguel gets imprisoned.
• Good Is Not Nice: This is shown from the very first episode with Carillo's forces shooting up a night club, killing innocents, to catch some of Escobar's sicarios.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The CIA, which actively sabotages the DEA's efforts in order to keep some disposable assets to deliver guns and resources to the anticommunist Autodefensas in Colombia and the Contras in Nicaragua.
  • The corrupt PRI politicians that profit off their protection of the Guadalajara Cartel but are quick to drop Félix the second they need NAFTA approved by the US Congress.
  • Carlos Hank González for Narcos: Mexico as a whole. Although not introduced until the third season where he becomes the Big Bad, it's made clear that he has played a huge part in the growth of the cartels with his international business empire and has been a kingmaker for the PRI for many years.
    Andrea Nuñez: Presidents may come and go, but Hank stays.
• Great Offscreen War: The decades-long war with the FARC guerillas goes unseen, beyond a few references when introducing the Castaños.
• Guns Akimbo: Escobar wields two pistols during his final shootout.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Escobar is known as a very volatile person who can be both diplomatic and unforgiving. This makes him especially feared within his organization, since "El Patron" often kills people over perceived slights.
• Happily Married: Escobar and Tata. Carillo and his wife count as well. Murphy and his wife don't always see eye to eye, but still stay together and support each other. At least until season two, when she's finally had enough and flies back to Miami.
• Hate Sink: David, Miguel's son in season 3. He's impulsive, idiotic, totally sociopathic, and extremely petty towards Jorge, simply because his father seems to value him. He's not for nothing often compared to Joffrey.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam:
  • A few weeks after hiding on his father's farm and living peacefully, Escobar seriously contemplates retiring for good to raise his family in an adjoining farm. Once he brings up the idea to his father, however, he's bluntly told that he is a 'murderer' with too much blood on his hands to ever be just a peaceful farmer. Escobar and Limón return to Medellín not long after.
  • The whole plot of Season 3 is this. The leader of the Cali Cartel cuts a sweet deal with the Colombian government. He, along with his 3 business partners, turn themselves over to the authorities and surrender all of their illegal activity after six months of sowing up loose ends and getting their business in order. They do a little jail time. And in return get to keep all the billions they made over the years and direct it into legal businesses. In other words, going legit. However, each episode shows how this plan falls apart because of problems that happen both on the inside and outside of the organization.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A political one happens when vice-minister Sandoval falls on his sword to protect Gaviria.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Pablo and Gustavo. They bicker, but love each other other to no end. When Gustavo is killed, Pablo goes deep into mourning and becomes unhinged.
• He Who Fights Monsters: A major theme in the series, particularly with how Peña and Murphy struggle with it. Carrillo has less qualms about it, and the police under him get more and more brutal over time.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier:
  • Used several times to keep Murphy sidelined. He does eventually start to pick up Spanish, however, but never gets fluent.
  • Conversely, Carrillo staffs one of his command centers with men who don't speak English, so that he can talk to Murphy in front of them without worrying that one might be a mole.
  • In Season 3 when one of the Cali Cartel leaders, Jose, who operates out of New York makes a phone call in a diner, he noticed someone might be listen in. After the call he confronts the man speaking Spanish, but the man claims he doesn't understand. Thinking he is being paranoid, he leaves the man alone. Episodes later, after the meth lab he controls blows up by accident, the same man is the main reporter on television speaking Spanish and revealing that its the Cali Cartel who controlled the lab, not the Dominicans who he took it from. He confronts the reporter and offers him a bribe. After the reporter refused, he kills him an goes back to Cali.
• Historical Beauty Update:
  • Almost everyone, but most notably Pacho Herrera, who in real life looked nothing like the dashing character he is portrayed to be throughout the show.
  • Steve Murphy also gets an upgrade. At the end of series two, when Pablo Escobar is finally killed, the real life photograph is shown immediately after one shot of the aftermath. In the photo he is an average, balding, middle-aged man, whereas his actor is - dated facial hair aside - quite good-looking.
  • Even Pablo Escobar, in series one, is prettier than his real life counterpart.
  • Another standout instance is Justice Minister Lara, who looks nothing like Mexican actor Adan Canto.
• Hitman with a Heart: Jorge Velásquez, better known by his nickname Navegante, is one of the deadliest sicarios working for the Cali Cartel, but is also an Animal Lover and good with children, in his own, strange way (he hands an unloaded gun to a little boy to play with). He also refuses to kill Jorge Salcedo despite the latter being revealed as The Mole, which costs Navegante his life.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • After Murphy assaults and threatens Suarez to get some information from him, Suarez tries to take revenge by calling Escobar and telling him that this new DEA agent is a threat. However, Escobar decides that Suarez has spent a little too much time talking with the DEA, and has him killed instead.
  • Félix is the epitome of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. It becomes a bit of Laser-Guided Karma when Guerra betrays him by making his own deal with Pacho and the Cali Cartel.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Helena, one of Peña's informants.
• Homage: Murphy's omnipresent narration mixing snark, incredulity and detachment is an acknowledged nod to Goodfellas.
• Hope Spot: The prospect of a new life in America frequently becomes one for informants, and it usually ends badly for them. Maritza becomes an especially tragic example.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Despite at one point being the most powerful and wealthiest criminal in history, Escobar's continued war with the government and his narco rivals slowly chips away at his empire through sheer attrition. Eventually, all but one of his soldiers are wiped out and he has to go into hiding at his father's farm. When he resurfaces in Medellín with delusional plans to rebuild the cartel from scratch, the Search Block quickly finds and kills him.
• How We Got Here: The series opens with a Colombian military raid (with American support) on a nightclub that results in some of Escobar's men being killed, as well as innocent civilians. The story (up until episode 8) is told in flashback.
• Humiliation Conga: Tata goes from being in "protective custody" to being on the radio with her husband while the police begin the raid that leads to his death. With nowhere left to turn, she goes to the Cali cartel for protection — which Gilberto grants, but on the condition that she surrender every last resource that she has, while his colleagues gloat over Pablo's death in the background.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Gustavo is described by one character as the brains behind Escobar's empire. After his death, it doesn't take long for Escobar to lose control. In his "conversation" with Gustavo in season two, Pablo admits that everything started to fall apart once Gustavo died.
• Hypocrite:
  • Escobar. He says he works and listens to the people (and despite being one of the richest men in the world and head of the Cartel, never calls himself rich, rather "a poor man with money") and rails against the oligarchs, or "men of always." But it's ultimately revealed that he desperately seeks those very men's approval, and has no issue with getting those same downtrodden people caught in the crossfire of his terrorism.
  • The Medellín Cartel's first incarnation was an organization known as Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers) in response to M-19 holding the family members of the Cartel leaders for ransom. Later on, Escobar mounts his own kidnapping campaign against the families of politicians to pressure them into accepting his demands.
  • Pablo's mother is a devout Catholic and insists on praying and going to church regularly, even though she lives in luxury bought with the blood and suffering of tens of thousands of her fellow Colombians. When her real-life counterpart publically grieves Pablo's death and wishes for no mother to feel the way she feels, the intercut montage of drug war casualties makes it apparent her son did exactly that to many thousands of parents.
  • The Castaño Brothers claim they're an army fighting against the communists, and that they hate drug cartels and are only working for Judy, to help destroy Escobar. During the season finale, Los Pepes make a business deal with the Cali Cartel selling drugs, get Judy's The Dragon, Don Berna, on their side, and sell her to the CIA. A case of Laser-Guided Karma for Judy, because she was going to sell them all out to the DEA.
  • Navegante tells Salcedo he's dissappointed that Salcedo became an informant for the DEA, the very same thing Navegante was doing in season 1.
  • While building the marijuana field, Rafa confiscates a joint from one of his men, lecturing him that they're supposed to be growing marijuana, not smoking it. He then takes a long drag as he walks away.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: In season 4, when Mexican drug kingpin Félix Gallardo realizes that he can expand his cartel's activities to transporting cocaine for the Colombians, he approaches the Cali Cartel first because of their more business-like reputation than the Medellín cartel, whose leader Pablo Escobar is known for his Hair-Trigger Temper. However, Félix is kidnapped by Escobar's sicarios, who threatens to have him killed as this move presents an existenial threat to Escobar's dominance of the cocaine market. Félix counters that he would have already had him killed if that was his intention, and he's right: it speaks to the importance of the Mexican corridor for Escobar's empire that instead he arranges an identical deal as the one offered to Cali.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • In order to get extradition revoked, the Cartel resorts to kidnapping the heirs of Colombia's richest and most powerful families, up to and including the only daughter of a former President.
  • In season two, the Colombian government resorts to this when they put Escobar's family in "protective custody" (essentially house arrest). It is meant to put pressure on Escobar to surrender to the authorities rather than see his family suffer.
• Imagine Spot: Pablo Escobar has one where he imagines himself being elected president of Colombia on the day of his death.
• Immoral Journalist: Valeria Velez is a reporter and anchorwoman who seduces notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar to gain more insight into his operation, but just becomes a mouthpiece for the cartel in the process and ends up getting her killed. Valeria was loosely based on a Real Life reporter, Virginia Vallejo.
• Implied Death Threat: Pacho lets Félix know that he isn't really bothered by Félix' betrayal of Matta, as Matta wasn't directly tied to the Cali Cartel. It becomes a warning not to screw over anyone the Cali Cartel values. He also lets on that the Cali Cartel will be fine with the deal so long as they make money, but then adds a "we'll see" if the deal doesn't work out.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Escobar's sicarios are about to murder an infant, but our heroes arrive just in time to send them running.
• In Medias Res:
  • The series begins with Murphy and Carrillo shooting up a diner to kill Poison. Chronologically, this takes place in episode 8.
  • One episode starts with Gustavo and Escobar fleeing through the jungle at night, shirtless, with gunfire behind them. The Search Bloc ambushed them as they moved between safe houses.
• Informed Flaw: Peña is called an asshole by Centra Spike within the first few minutes of Season 1, but, apart from butting heads with other DEA agents and their allies, he's one of the nicest and most moral of the "good guys". Its likely he gained a reputation as a Jerkass with his cavalier attitude.
• Inspector Javert: Carillo. His obsession with catching and killing Escobar is paramount in his life and leads him to carry out tortures and even the extrajudicial execution of at least one child who acts as a lookout for the Medellín cartel.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: A non-comedic example. While hiding out in a safehouse from both the law, attacks from a rivaling drug cartel and Los Pepes, Pablo's mother gets the bright idea to go out and celebrate Christmas Mass. When she returns, everyone else in the house rightfully calls her out on doing something so incredibly stupid, but she assures everyone that she didn't put anyone in danger. Literally mere seconds later, Los Pepes arrive at the safehouse and start gunning down every living thing from the dandelions on upwards.
• Interservice Rivalry: The DEA, CIA, and military are constantly bickering between themselves.
• Intrepid Reporter:
  • Valeria, a news reporter who seduces Escobar. While this initially provides her a unique insight into the Medellín Cartel, she eventually just becomes a mouthpiece for Escobar and ends up getting her killed by his rivals.
  • A non-corrupt example would be Andrea Nuñez from Season 6. As a reporter for the independent Tijuana newspaper La Voz, she spends all her time investigating and trying to expose cartel activity and government corruption as Mexico slowly descends into chaos.
• Ironic Echo: After Murphy feels guilty for indirectly contributing to the assassination of Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Peña tells him to "look on the bright side". Later in the same episode, when Peña learns about the killing of Barry Seal, he chews out Murphy for being responsible. Murphy sarcastically tells Peña to "look on the bright side".
• Ironic Echo Cut: In the first episode, there's archival footage of a PSA put out by the Reagans where First Lady Nancy Reagan implores people to "just say no to drugs." The footage immediately cuts to Cockroach pleading "no, no, no..." just before Escobar shoots him dead.
• Ironic Nickname: The Basque terrorist is called "The Spaniard", a name he would surely hate, being a nationalist separatist. It's like calling an IRA member from Belfast "The Briton".
• It's All About Me: Escobar, especially towards the end of the series, where he starts taxing his associates to pay for his ongoing wars, the construction of La Catedral and the upkeep of his lifestyle.
• It's Personal: For many of the members of Search Bloc who have lost relatives due to the violence of the cartel.
• I Was Never Here: The DEA isn't really supposed to be out on operations with the police or military, so they claim to only be there "in an operational capacity" while assisting Carillo with raids. "CIA Bill" goes even further with this in season two.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Rafa in season 4 starts out as a relatively soft-spoken botanist who upbraids his men for excessive screwing around. Once his seedless marijuana makes him rich it doesn't take long for this newfound wealth and power to completely go to his head, and before long he's indulging in Conspicuous Consumption and going hog-wild on Hookers and Blow.
• Just a Gangster: Gustavo has his variation(Somos banditos-we are bandits), which is why he opposes Pablo's political abmitions. Orlando Henao also be believes this, which is why he opposes the Cali godfathers' decision to surrender to the government in exchange for light sentences.
• Karma Houdini: Despite being deeply involved financially with the narco cartels, and also dabbling in money laundering, corruption, and criminal threats, Carlos Hank González never faced any legal persecution or sactions for any of these things. With the money vested in his business empire and his political connections, Hank had plently of threads to pull when it came to effectively shutting down or redirecting any investigation that touched upon his shadier activities. Even when the US National Drug Intelligence Center launched a larger investigation into his business, the so-called "Operation White Tiger", in 1997 and caught him and his sons dead to rights on tape dicussing the coordination of drug shipments, Hank leveraged his network that reached as far the US Senate to get the United States Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, to make an official statement contradicting the results of the NDIC investigation and send him a personal letter of apology. Hank eventually died from cancer in 2001, at the age of 74, surrounded by his family and without never having been made to answer for his substantial part in the creating the chaos and violence that would continue to haunt large parts of Mexico in the decades afterwards.
• Knight in Sour Armor: In his rooftop conversation with Pablo Acosta, DEA Agent Walt Breslin describes himself as this.
• Knight Templar:
  • Major Wysession will do anything to defeat communists.
  • Colonel Carillo is obsessed with bringing down the Narcos, due to the fact that they've killed so many of his fellow officers.
• Lady Macbeth
  • Tata has shades of it. When in brief exile from Colombia, she urges Escobar to do whatever it takes to go home.
  • Moncada's wife pushes her husband towards dissent, complaining that Escobar's "war taxes" prevent them from buying a new house.
• The Lancer: Peña to Murphy, and Eduardo Sandoval to Gaviria (and Gaviria himself was one to Galán).
• Language Fluency Denial: In Mexico, Kiki goes undercover to gain access Félix's office. At one point, he throws off one of Félix's underlings by speaking Spanish to him with a halting, exaggeratedly American accent.
• Lemony Narrator: Murphy's dry and cynical narration of the events, most prevalent in Season 1 but toned down for Season 2.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: A strong case can be made for Gilberto Rodríguez, almost near Anti-Villain levels. He's a quite reasonable and pragmatic kingpin who in some regards is the anti-Escobar. He keeps a low profile, which involves a very low level of public violence and not waging wars against civilians or the police.
• Living Legend: By season 3, Peña has become the hero who bought down Pablo Escobar, but some resent him for his compromise with Cali and Los Pepes.
• Lonely at the Top:
  • While its implied in Narcos Mexico: Season 1, its played very straight for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in Narcos Mexico: Season 2. While he runs the operation because of his ability to move cocaine from Colombia throughout Mexico into the United States, he is not liked or respected by the people he works with. He has no friends he can really count on, and even his closest men are with him for the money. Eventually even his wife leaves him when she can't stand how awful he's become, which he soothes with a string of hookers and mistresses. He admits this himself, by claiming he doesn't have friends, only employees. By the end of the season, all of them turn against Félix and freeze him out of his own empire, leaving him to get arrested by the new Mexican government he helped put in power.
  • Amado Carrillo Fuentes discovers the same reality in Season 3 when he is at the top. His clever maneuvering against the other Cartels and his deal with Cali to be paid in product allows him to transform the Juarez Cartel into the wealthiest criminal empire in the world. However, while he lives in a ridiculously lavish mansion, he spends much of his time by himself in said empty mansion instead of indulging in Hookers and Blow like his counterparts. This is partially because of his failed marriage and the death of his daughter, partially because he knows his time is limited. He's forced to betray the one person he truly considered a friend, Pacho Herrera, to keep his empire intact. He strikes up a romance with an Afro-Latina singer in Havana, Cuba, but only visits her infrequently as a way to briefly get away from his daily life.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Alex Hodoyan is introduced as one of these, waking up in a house alone with a bunch of servants. He asks his brother if they can hang out, which leads to his meeting cartel members and becoming involved in their activities.
• Loose Lips
  • During a dinner with Herrera, Valeria lets it slip that Escobar's wife and children are holed up in an apartment complex while he goes about his business. A car bomb is detonated there shortly after, resulting in Escobar's young daughter becoming permanently deaf in her right ear.
  • Later, Moncada's wife (likely while drunk or high) mentions briefly that Moncada had complained about the war tax Escobar imposed. This contributes to his death.
• Lucky Bastard: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the head of the Guadalajara Cartel in season 4. While it is his vision and diplomacy that creates a massive drug empire, many times he survives deadly encounters or stays out of handcuffs through sheer insane luck, such as Mexican government officials calling him to confirm their support and tipping him off literally seconds before he walks into a trap orchestrated by US law enforcement.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Escobar has Limón provide his location to Maritza, who in turn provides it to Peña, who in turn provides it to Carillo. Carillo takes the bait hook line and sinker. Escobar springs the trap with heavy trucks both behind and in front of Carillo's convoy. Carillo and his men become fish in a barrel for Escobar's sicarios.
  • Amado during season 5 discovers the trackers on his planes while attempting repairs, in what amounts to a Diabolus ex Machina turn. Amado anticipates a raid coming on the big shipment that Cali is bringing in. So he has some men go through the motions pretending to load the air strip with what looks like cocaine keys. Breslin's team reaches the cache easily enough. But one of the team members notices that the keys are too heavy to be cocaine, and then tastes a sample from one of the keys to confirm that it's definitely not coke. He gets taken out the very next instant with a Boom, Headshot! That moment marks Amado springing his trap, an ambush by Cartel men who not only vastly outnumber Breslin's team, but have the drop on them too. Breslin and two others barely make it out alive, and even then only with the help of Double Reverse Quadruple Agent Calderoni.
• Luxury Prison Suite:
  • Escobar forces the Colombian government to allow him to build his own "prison," which is really just a gigantic mansion for him and his sicarios. However, despite the numerous luxuries and visits from his family, he does eventually grow tired of his captivity.
  • Notably averted in Mexico; Rafa, Neto, and Félix all end up in what appears to be a very average prison. However, when Chapo joins him in prison in season 6, it's clear that Neto has more privileges than your typical prisoner.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Carillo's widow presses Murphy about whether Carillo beforehand murdered a teenager in Escobar's employ. Murphy senses that telling her the truth would lead to Carillo becoming a Broken Pedestal for her. He gives Blatant Lies of "Absolutely not", even though he had been present and saw it himself.

M-R

• Mafia Princess: Maria Ochoa fits this trope to the letter.
• Male Gaze: There are some loving shots when a U.S. money man working for Félix admires his wife's body in a "Let's Get Physical"-type workout outfit from the breakfast table.
• Man of Wealth and Taste:
  • The Ochoas are the most sophisticated members of the Medellín cartel. They're branded as "soft" by their peers, but they prove to have more teeth than others thought.
  • Pacho Herrera of the Cali Cartel is a sophisticated and stylish cartel don. He dresses well, goes to fine restaurants and makes exotic cocktails. His bosses, the Orejulas, also fit this.
• Manly Gay: Pacho Herrera might have a slightly flamboyant manner of dress, but this man is as far from a Sissy Villain as a man can get, being completely unafraid to smash someone's head in with a bottle, have someone drawn and quartered by motorcycles, and even leading a raid in which he personally kills several people.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Rodriguez brothers who are the real heads of the Cali Cartel, with Herrera handling operations and the public image.
• Married to the Job: True of a few of the law enforcement protagonists:
  • Murphy, particularly in season 2. His wife grows frustrated not just at the amount of time and energy he spends on the job, but also the changes she sees in his personality as a result. She ends up leaving for the states with their adopted daughter.
  • Kiki becomes increasingly obsessed with his pursuit of Miguel, spending more and more time and effort and neglecting his family in the process. His wife is eventually able to convince him that he's done enough and to accept a transfer, but by that time his efforts have already brought him to the cartel's attention.
  • A theme for Walt in seasons 5-6, as he's repeatedly shown struggling, and failing, to find the balance between his professional life and his girlfriend, with the implication that he'd need to leave the DEA in order to have a healthy relationship. In the last episode he's shown having a heartfelt conversation explaining his motivations and the effect his actions had on him, and we assume he's finally chosen his girlfriend — until we see that he's actually using his old ruse of attending AA meetings to get close to suspects, and nothing has changed.
• Marry Them All: Gilberto Rodriguez is a polygamist with three wives. He has divied up his schedule between his three homes, spending time with each of his wives two days a week, except for the seventh day, when they're all together.
• Meet Cute: Murphy's comrades trick him into believing that Connie was staring at his ass. When he tries to hit on her, she rebuffs him, but agrees to give him a "fake" number to show up his friends. He calls it anyway and discovers that it's her real number. In the next scene they're married.
• Military Brat: Jorge mentions having an army father during his childhood.
• Mirroring Factions: Even those police and soldiers who aren't corrupt and do want to take on the cartels are often as brutal and cruel as the narcos they're hunting down. One example is Colonel Carillo, who often uses Cold-Blooded Torture in his interrogations, and commits extrajudicial murders without blinking. Walt sums it up in the finale of the Mexico series, "We're not the good guys".
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • Jorge Salcedo in Season 3. The season starts off with him wanting to quit the Cartel after giving them years of faithful service and hearing about the surrender plan in six months. However, he is forced by Miguel to keep working until the surrender plan is successful, ruining his personal plans with the family. After Gilberto is arrested, Jorge’s head of security and friend is murdered in front of him, along with his wife by Miguel's son as a warning. Angered by this senseless murder and intimidation, he contacts the two DEA agents operating in Cali and makes a deal with them for immunity and protection for himself and his family. He succeeds in the plans after many close calls, and helps bring the Cali Cartel down. By the end of the season, he is put into witness protection and lives his life as a mechanic named Eddie, but he is miserable with his new life.
  • This is why Félix's coalition eventually falls apart. After he betrays Rafa and Don Neto, sanctions the killing of Cochiloco, has Palma's wife and children murdered, and makes multiple huge business decisions without consulting any of them, the plaza bosses have finally had enough and withdraw from the federation.
• The Mistress:
  • Valeria, to Tata's disgust. And Maria Ochoa to Gustavo.
  • In Season 3, Miguel Rodriguez takes Maria Salazar as his mistress after having her husband killed, ostensibly for disrespecting the Gentlemen of Cali.
  • In Mexico Félix has several, straining his relationship with his wife.
• Mob War:
  • While Escobar is a rival to the Cali godfathers, for much of the series they maintain an uneasy detente. However, throughout season 2 he is also fighting off splinter groups of his own cartel, all the while the government is on an endless hunt for him. Cali also gets involved indirectly, as Medellín's fall would give them a virtual monopoly over the Colombian cocaine market.
  • In season 3, after Gilberto Rodriguez is imprisoned, the vassal Valley North cartel smells blood and turns on the Cali Cartel, carrying out assassination attempts on both Miguel Rodriguez and Pacho Herrera. Despite Gilberto's pleas, Miguel orders to fight back.
  • In season 5, tensions between the Tijuana and Sinaloa chapters of the Guadalajara Cartel reach a fever pitch, with the final straw being Sinaloa building a tunnel on Tijuana territory to skirt the 10% tax Félix placed on them. A series of killings and reprisal killings ensues, until Félix puts a stop to it by decapitating the Sinaloa organization, since he can't afford to lose the west coast corridor.
  • In season 6, the plazas have become their independent Cartels, but Tijuana and Sinaloa start another war after previously agreeing to a truce immediately following Félix's downfall. The Arellanos start abusing their superior position to tax the poorer Sinaloans even more and refuse any resolution that would satisfy the latter. The resulting violence between the two groups eventually gathers national and international attention when they accidentally murder a beloved cardinal during a shoot-out, which deeply shocks the majorly Catholic country. Tijuana in particular suffers greatly from the ensuing government crackdown. This and the Cali Cartel deciding to call it quits creates an opening for their former allies to screw them over, so they declare war on ALL the other Mexican Cartels.
• Mole in Charge: Par for the course as many in the leadership of the Colombian police, military, judicial and government are in the pocket of the Cartels.
  • Fernando Botero Salcedo, the Minister of Defense for Ernesto Samper, is a collaborator of the Cali Cartel while also being one of the leaders of the government's efforts to fight the cartels.
  • In season 3, after Carlos Córdova is executed along with his wife as punishment for the arrest of Gilberto, Salcedo is made the new head of security. Fearing sharing the same fate, Salcedo becomes The Mole for the DEA and aids in the attepts to arrest Miguel Rodríguez.
  • In Narcos: Mexico, Félix-Gallardo eventually has the entire Mexican government in his pocket. He starts out allying himself to the DFS chief Nava, then the unnamed Minister of Defense, and finally the President of Mexico.
  • In the third season of Mexico, following the murder of Cardinal Ocampo, General Rebollo is put in charge of hunting down the cartel members responsible and Agent Breslin joins him in the hunt. It's later revealed that he's on the payroll of Amado Carillo Fuentes and has been destroying his rivals for him.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • In-Universe example for Pablo in season one. While he had always been a popular, if contentious figure among Colombia's people, public perception of him turns decidedly negative when he blows up a city square and kills hundreds.
  • In-universe season two for Carrillo after he executes an underage prisoner and then follows it up by throwing prisoners out of a moving helicopter.
  • In Narcos: Mexico Season 2, Félix Gallardo having Hector Palma's wife and children murdered, because he wanted to scare the other plaza bosses into submission, has the complete opposite effect. All of them are disgusted with Félix's actions and it becomes the last straw for them, even for El Azul. They freeze Félix out of his own empire and leave him to get arrested by the Mexican government.
• More Hateable Minor Villain: The series is full of psychopaths of all nature in the cartels, and several nefarious CIA types who are willing to deal with them or do anything to "win" the war on drugs. However the cartel are often very badass, and the main CIA badguy, Bill Stechner, is very machiavellian and cool-headed. When Bill makes a deal with Félix Gallardo, the main bad guy of the first two seasons of Narcos Mexico, he has the state department send in an obnoxious smug bureaucrat named Ted Kaye. Ted Kaye proceeds to act like an entitled ass to Walt Breslin, the main protagonist, telling him that he made a shit sandwich, and he's trying to put a little mustard on it. He later ends up giving Breslin an award, while forgetting that they met before. Ultimately the likes of Bill Stechner or the cartels have far more direct influence on the story than Kaye who only appears in two episodes of the entire series.
• Mouth of Sauron: Fernando and Valeria serve as this to Escobar, meeting with Gaviria to talk him into renouncing extradition if he runs for President.
• Mundane Utility: Ricardo Prisco, the doctor working for Pablo as an underboss mostly has his criminal side highlighted, but he also does an examination on a stressed out Pablo.
• Murder by Mistake: The Arellano-Félix organization brings unwanted scrutiny when, in a botched assassination attempt on El Chapo, they accidentally kill the highest ranking Catholic official in Mexico.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: The season premiere of the third season makes it obvious that Miguel Rodriguez is smitten with Maria Salazar. He and the other Cali godfathers later meet to discuss who should be done away with as traitors. The recorded conversation between Claudio and Maria Salazar is ambiguous as to whether Claudio intends to betray the Cali cartel, or whether they were just having an ordinary marital argument. Pacho is obviously chomping at the bit to kill Claudio to settle a score. Gilberto Rodriguez is hesitant. Miguel ends up persuading his brother that it's better to be safe than sorry. Anyone who's been paying attention will realize his real motivation is to get Claudio out of the way with the hope of having Maria to himself.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Peña's reaction once he realizes his actions might have gotten Murphy abducted or killed.
  • And again in season two, once he realises that feeding Los Pepes confidential information has led to even more violence and terror.
  • Murphy, when he realizes that tipping off Carillo to Poison's location led to at least one innocent woman getting killed in the crossfire.
  • Blackie is visibly disturbed when he sees the destruction caused by the bomb he planted in Bogota. It's heavily implied this is what causes him to effectively turn himself in.
  • Jorge, as a contigency, planted an American pager on Enrique. He ends up having to use it when Miguel and David are firmly set on killing either Enrique or himself as a "ratta". That means a conscious decision to let Enrique be murdered in order to keep himself alive. He breaks down sobbing when he visits Paola afterwards.
  • When Kiki realizes that he got his neighbor killed for participating in the wiretap of Félix and his associates.
  • Breslin and his team fall in with Calderoni's suggestion of tipping off the Tijuana Cartel to the tunnel built underneath their noses by the Sinaloa Cartel. They're well aware that it's going to mean more deaths, but decide it's worth it if it means the end of Félix' Federation. But it's clear from their facial expressions that they're wracked with guilt as they watch the execution of the Sinaloa tunnel workers from a rooftop.
• My Master, Right or Wrong
  • Gustavo calls Escobar out on his decision to wage a terrorist campaign against the Colombian government. He still goes along with it, with the full knowledge that innocent people will be caught in the crossfire.
  • Blackie is clearly disturbed by Pablo's orders to detonate an enormous bomb in the middle of Bogata, killing several people, including women and children. He still refuses to give up Pablo to the police.
  • Limón develops this towards Escobar. He's fond of his Patrón, the man who built his childhood neighbourhood.
• My New Gift Is Lame: Félix is underwhelmed by Palma's and Chapo's gift of a tiger to him, and immediately thinks of donating it to a zoo.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: The Ochoas don't take kindly to Gustavo messing around with their sister. They sell him out to Carillo in exchange for light jail sentences and an implied future partnership with the Cali cartel when they get out.
• Narrator: The series has a rotating cast of narrators, each of whom is also a main character. For the first two seasons, Agent Murphy narrated and in the third season, his partner Peña takes over. Walt Breslin narrates Narcos: Mexico seasons one and two. Andrea Nuñez takes over for season 3.
• Never My Fault: Hermilda, after her sneaking out to Christmas mass despite warnings leads Los Pepes to their hideout and gets around a dozen people killed. Pablo occasionally slips into this, but only briefly, until his paranoia and hampered mental health eventually cause him to blame everyone else (the police, the government, rival drug lords) for his situation.
• Neutral No Longer: El Mayo is an independent drug trafficker on the Mexican west coast who is approached by both the Sinaloa and Tijuana cartels with offers to join their organizations, both of whom he rebukes. When war breaks out between the two cartels, Tijuana is dealt enough setbacks that they're forced to collect on anybody who's in debt to them. El Mayo owes them 5 million USD^note The Cartels prefer American currency over the Mexican pesos. Incidentally, this shields them from the 1994 devaluation of the pesos, so they burn one of his boats to scare him into submission. Instead, he sides with Sinaloa.
  Enedina Arellano-Félix: El Mayo has made his choice.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Félix Gallardo is put behind bars he points out that the DEA has merely removed the only person keeping all the other Mexican groups in check. Rather than focusing on one person, they will now have to cope with multiple cartels with their own agendas. Making the situation volatile and chaotic.
• Nice Mean And In Between: The founding members of what would become the Medellín Cartel: the cultured and savvy Ochoa brothers are the Nice, ruthless Gacha is the Mean, and Escobar is enough of both to be picked as the leader.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In Narco's Mexico Season 3, Victor Tapia is a corrupt police officier who decides to do the right thing for once when he is asked by a local woman he knows to find her missing teenage daughter. His search soon makes him realize a serial killer is raping and killing girls in the community. He eventually finds the teen girl as another victim and becomes personally determind to find and kill the guy. By the end of the Season, he succeeds in finding and killing the guy, only for him to find out shortly afterward, that he wasn't the only killer operating in the area. He is then murdered by his equally corrupt partner, because he found out Tapia talked with a DEA Agent, even though Tapia did so to get help in tracking the serial killer with a DNA test, not to snitch on their corrupt criminal actions.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Gustavo is brutally beaten to death by Carillo's men.
  • Escobar delivers one to Galeano with a pool cue.
  • The Castaño brothers chain Chepe to a truck, then beat him with a shovel and their fists before shooting him four times.
  • Part of Kiki Camarena's torture, along with other much less pleasant things. His torturer gets one too once the DEA "Smash and Grab squad" get their hands on him.
• No Honor Among Thieves: Omnipresent and discussed.
  Murphy: It is often said there is no honor among thieves. That's doubly true of drug dealers.
• No Kill like Overkill: How Escobar has Carrillo killed, with at least a dozen bullets, if not two dozen.
• Not Allowed to Grow Old: No adult characters seem to visibly age throughout the 14 year period between 1979-1993 during which the series takes place. The only sign of age is Escobar getting gray in his hair.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: After spending most of the season being the "softest" of the Medellín cartel, the Ochoas sell out Gustavo and get him killed.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Pacho Herrera makes a passion fruit cocktail for Murphy while being a gracious host to his (abducted by force) guest. Via narration, Murphy does say the drink was good.
• Number Two: Trujillo, who serves as this for Carillo, Martinez, and Murphy and Peña.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat:
  • In season 1, Murphy and his wife are held up from entering Colombia by a customs agent due to not having the correct paperwork for their cat (they are missing a form that confirms that it is, in fact, a cat, and a second form that confirms that it is, in fact, American). However, we learn that he was purposefully stalling so his supervisor could get a copy of Murphy's passport to inform the narcos that a DEA agent had arrived in the country.
  • Exploited by the Mexican government when they're trying to impede the DEA's investigation of Kiki's kidnapping. Unable to act without Mexican approval, DEA agents are given the runaround and sent on an endless loop of filling out forms, obtaining signatures, and bouncing between various agencies.
• Oddly Small Organization: Season three lampshades the fact that before the events of that season, the DEA was very small for a federal law enforcement agency. The murder of Kiki Camarena prompted the US government to assign more resources to the agency and it grew from there to the large organization it is today.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse:
  • Pablo's specialty is giving these to cops: "plata o plomo".
  • President Gaviria pressures Colonel Hugo Martinez into leading the Search Bloc (a job no one wants by that point) by informing him that Hugo Martinez Jr. has volunteered for the high-casualty unit.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted with Bill Heller and Bill Steincher, who refer to each other as "DEA Bill" and "CIA Bill" respectively.
  • When a henchman introduces himself as Joaquín, Neto states that they have a lot of Joaquíns, leading them to use his nickname — El Chapo.
• The Oner:
  • When Poison and other sicarios go to kill Jaime's widow and baby the camera follows them for a two-minute continuous shot as they walk into the house, check each room, climb the stairs, and end up on the roof.
  • A casual conversation between Pablo and his wife is interrupted by a car bomb, with the camera still not cutting as he runs out to check on his son.
  • Pablo walks from his house's pool to the kitchen overlooking it, educating the audience on the house's layout. The following episode has another one when Los Pepes attack the house.
  • The aftermath of the Orejula daughter's wedding being bombed is shown in one take, with the bride rushing back inside, searching the room for her father.
• Only Sane Man: The Ochoa brothers aren't quite insane, but Gustavo is the one person in the Medellín Cartel who's fully pragmatic. Later, Don Berna for the anti-Pablo alliance.
• Outliving One's Offspring: In season 2, a family is finishing up shopping for school supplies when a massive car bomb explodes. The injured father desperately looks for his young daughter before finding her bloody shoe.
• Papa Wolf: As Murphy states, "You threaten a man's family and you find out what he's made of."
  • Pablo's few heroic actions in the show come as he protects his children.
  • After a car bomb goes off outside Escobar and Tata's building at night, the two immediately panic about their two children. Escobar gets a rare heroic moment as he rushes through the dust cloud to grab his kids and get them out of further danger.
  • Martinez is a sterner version of this, looking out for his son.
  • Gilberto finally decides to take on Escobar after he planted a bomb during the night of his daughter's wedding.
  • After a failed assassination attempt, Fernando Duque takes his son out of school to protect him from the Los Pepes. It doesn't save either of them in the end, as Trujillo reveals his location to the death squad.
  • After they arrest La Quica, Murphy nearly beats him to death, because he was one of the sicarios who were about to shoot his adoptive daughter in season one.
• Permanent Elected Official: Downplayed example. In real life, no US ambassador to Colombia has ever served over five years. The fictional Ambassador Noonan serves for at least 10 years.
• Pet the Dog: Pablo is consistently shown as a caring son, father and husband. It takes a lot of ruthlessness in his business activities to negate what would otherwise become a Sympathetic P.O.V., and the show also makes it clear that the concern for his family is also the drive behind some of his most heinous deeds.
• Playing Both Sides:
  • Navegante acts an informant to the DEA while working for Gacha. Later, the organization he joins, Pacho Herrera's Cali Cartel, tries to cut a deal with Escobar while also setting the DEA after him.
  • Suarez, the Corrupt Cop happy to sell information, for a price. At one point he takes payment from the DEA to give up Poison but then, after realizing that Poison is transporting $3 million in cash rather than an easily replaceable drug shipment, calls up Escobar and gets $150,000 for saving the shipment that he had given up in the first place.
  • Technically, the US government. Even as the White House pressures the DEA for Escobar's capture and stopping the drug trade, the CIA is in league with the Cali Cartel due to anti-communist efforts.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • A rampant sexism and a toxic mucho-macho culture is prevalent among the narcotraficantes and their sicarios, who deliver plenty of casual homophobic remarks. It's a bit downplayed by the English subtitle track, which often omits them. For instance, Escobar uses the word "marica" (fag, sissy) during his introduction, and is unsubbed.
  • This is played with in the Season 3 premiere. Pacho Herrera slow dances with and then kisses another man in front of everyone in a club to taunt his rival Salazar. Considering how homophobic the general culture is, this demonstrates just how feared and untouchable the "Gentlemen of Cali" really are.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • The narration explains that the cartels absolutely will not kill DEA agents specifically because, as the death of Kiki Camarena proved, the backlash from the DEA far outweighs any benefits.
  • The Cali Godfathers under the leadeship of Gilberto Rodríguez actively avoid any kind of flashy violence that would draw the focus of law enforcement, being discreet in their wars with other rivals and preferring to quietly corrupt the Colombian elite instead.
• Private Eye Monologue: DEA agent Murphy's narration style is a combination of this and Lemony Narrator.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • The few times Gacha's paranoia kicks in, his instincts are usually right on the money.
  • Subverted horribly with Escobar.
  • Berna turns out to be spot on when he suspects the Prisco gang of playing Jaime for a fool, and the Priscos do indeed feed Jaime to Escobar.
  • Guerra, the boss of the Gulf Cartel, lets on that he knows Félix' reputation for Chronic Backstabbing Disorder proceeds him. He decides he wants no part of Félix' grand plan for a Mexico-wide federation, and makes his own deal with Pacho and the Cali Cartel.
• Psychopathic Manchild:
  • La Quica, who goes from lewd and murderous in one scene to whining about wanting ice cream.
  • Ramón, the youngest of the Arellano siblings. Always the fastest to resort to violence, prone to tantrums, hangs around with teenagers (so-called narcojuniors), and giddily watches saturday morning cartoons.
• Put on a Bus:
  • After being an important supporting character, Elena leaves the show two-thirds of the way through. Justified in part because, as a communist, she needed to escape the hunt for M-19 members to protect herself and the Murphys and Peña. However, since she was the one person who could link Escobar to the Palace of Justice attack, that thread dies as soon as she leaves. At least Escobar does something just as heinous to warrant attention.
  • Despite being founding members of the Medellín Cartel, the Ochoa brothers are last seen being given a slap on the wrist prison sentence for illegally importing bulls from Spain towards the end of Season 1.
  • Colonel Martinez returns in season 3 to help bring down the Cali Cartel but political backlash to the arrest of Gilberto causes him to be reassigned halfway through the season.
• The Queenpin: Briefly, Judy Moncada becomes one after Escobar murders her husband Kiko and founds La Oficina de Envigado alongside Don Berna.
  • In Season 1 of Mexico, Isabella Bautista afer Félix's downfall begins.
• The Quiet One: Navegante in season 2, despite his prominence in many scenes.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: Pablo's sicarios, including Poison, La Quica, Velasco, and Blackie. Fittingly, they're all taken down one by one.
• Race Against the Clock: Pretty much every operation by the DEA or the Search Bloc plays out like this. And we see the urgency from both sides. The cops desperately try to get their man or their evidence before the target escapes, or the Corrupt Cops show up to interfere, or the Cartel lawyers show up to threaten complaints of illegality. The cartels in their own turn try desperately to call on their own advantages as fast as they can before the DEA and Bloc find what they're looking for.
• Race Lift: César Gaviria is portrayed as mestizo whereas the Real Life figure is more caucasian-looking, with light gray eyes.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Pablo is chubby and a stoner, but he's the boss, and any time he's forced into a fight, he dominates.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Observed by the opening text of the first episode. It comments how the genre of Magic Realism was born in Colombia, a genre characterized by "something unbelievable" entering a reality-looking environment, and then notes that this is no coincidence. The story then proceeds to tell the bizarre and absurd tale of Pablo Escobar, much of which is based on true events.
• Really Gets Around: Javier gets intimate with a lot of women, one of whom is an informant for him. Barry Seal, the cartel members, and quite a few other characters display this trope as well.
• Real-Person Cameo: The real Javier Peña and Steve Murphy appear in the last episode of season two as two bar patrons toasting the news that Escobar has been killed. And technically many of the real people as the show's semi-documentary nature uses actual footage and photos of the major players in the series.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Diana Turbay gives one to Escobar as she's held hostage.
  Diana: What did you expect? To get into Congress like it was nothing? Without it mattering that you, in fact, traffic drugs?
  Escobar: I expected respect.
  Diana: You had respect when you built homes for the poor. But when you didn't get that respect from a herd of egocentric bureaucrats, you threw a tantrum.
  Escobar: ...I was going to do marvelous things for this country. If I have made myself a monster, like all of you say, that is the fault of people like your father and those politicians "of always." Those oligarchs and those people were never going to tolerate that little paisa from Medellín, who had more money and was more intelligent than all of them!
  Diana: ...Yes. You would have done marvelous things. And that is the saddest part.
  • Javier Peña finds himself on the receiving end of more than one. One comes from Hugo Martinez:
  Peña: Not a lot of police work these days.
  Martinez: Yeah. What did you expect? When you sell your soul to the Devil, you're not allowed to ask for it back. The men who set Los Pepes loose on Colombia should have been arrested. Instead, they got promoted.
  • He also receives a blistering one from Christina for putting her in danger, and for willing to accept significant collateral damage (i.e. considerable loss of life) in his obsession with taking down drug cartels.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Colonel Martinez. He's intentionally brought in by Gaviria to avoid Vigilante Man tactics and do things by the book, but he realizes the necessities of his job, hears out his men, and adapts to be more proactive.
  • Claudia Messina is specifically brought in by the DEA to curtail the free reign Murphy and Peña have been enjoying in Colombia, but she proves herself a fair boss with a sound judgment and a logical, independent thinking. It is implied she gets reassigned because she is not what the brass expected, a yes woman.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • Carrillo gets shipped off to Spain after his tactics provoke political pressure, although it's also partly for his own protection from the cartel's retribution..
  • Messina is reassigned and sent back home, "likely to spend the rest of her career busting meth labs in Indianapolis". The reason hinted being she was not hardass enough to control and railroad Peña and Murphy.
  • The DEA higher-ups fully intended to bury Breslin in a desk job in Sacramento for the rest of his career after he lost most of his team to the trap set for him by Amado. Averted when he's allowed back into action at El Paso. The DEA decides they need a hero for good publicity following the arrest of Félix.
• Reckless Gun Usage: From episode 3; though the camera is situated so we only see their faces, Pablo is heavily implied to be using the barrel of his pistol to stimulate Valeria's lady parts during foreplay. Very reckless indeed.
• Redemption Equals Death: Valeria returns in season two, a far cry from the gold digger she had been in the last season, and goes out of her way to help Pablo communicate with his family while they're in protective custody. She even refuses his money when he offers to pay her. Her reward for this is to be brutally assaulted and murdered by Los Pepes.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Gustavo is the blue to Escobar's red. Played With since Gustavo is more prone to raising his voice and acting out, but it's purely from a business perspective.
  • The cautious, pragmatic Gaviria is the blue to Galán's red, and later Sandoval becomes the red to Gaviria.
  • Feistl is the more headstrong one compared to his DEA partner Van Ness.
  • Escobar is seen as emotional and volatile compared to the Gentlemen of Cali, who have a reputation of being much more professional and calculated. Discussed in season 4; when Félix wants to start moving cocaine through his smuggling ring, he decides to do business with Cali instead of Medellín for that reason.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • After he and his wife survive an attempted assassination, Carillo decides to let Pablo Escobar know he isn't afraid of him. How does he do that? By calling Escobar personally on the satellite phone that they'd tapped, and letting Escobar know that not only does he know everything about Pablo, but everything about Escobar's family, too, down to where Pablo's mother was shopping that day. An enraged Escobar threatens to kill off Carillo and basically the entire Carillo bloodline, so what does Carillo do? He hangs up before Escobar is finished.
  • How does the seventh richest man in the world get around town after escaping prison and getting every single cop in the country on his case? Ride in the trunk of a cab driven by a friend of one of his men who has a spotless record.
  • While in a very light disguise of sunglasses and a beard, Escobar goes out to the streets of Medellín, buys an ice cream, gives a cop a lighter he dropped, and just has a casual stroll.
• Refusal of the Call: Gaviria is hesitant to run as President on a pro-extradition campaign at first, especially since his predecessor was murdered for doing so.
• Renegade Splinter Faction:
  • After Escobar murders Kiko Moncada, Judy Moncada and Don Berna break away from the Medellín Cartel and form La Oficina de Envigado. They ally with the Castaño brothers' far-right paramilitary group and, briefly, the Cali Cartel to form Los Pepes and destroy the Medellín Cartel.
  • Due to Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela's surrender deal with the government and Pacho Herrera's murder of Claudio Salazar, Orlando Henao and Gerda Salazar split with the Cali Cartel and become the Norte del Valle Cartel.
• The Remnant: In Season 3, Don Berna's La Oficina de Envigado has become this for the Medellín Cartel. By the end of the season, the Norte del Valle Cartel is this for the Cali Cartel.
• Required Spinoff Crossover: While the main figures of the Colombian cartels (minus Gilberto, strangely) do little more than cameos in Season 4, the Cali cartel recovers some prominency in Season 5 when Pacho Herrera becomes a recurring crucial caracter.
• Retcon: In season one, Murphy mentions that the DEA agents are safe from being directly targeted because of Operation Leyenda. The DEA response to the death of agent Kiki Camarena, Leyenda is implied to be the full force of the DEA being brought to bear on those responsible in such a devastating way that no reasonable person would ever again target a DEA agent. When Operation Leyenda is portrayed in season five, however, it appears to consist solely of a handful of agents working out of an abandoned warehouse. While they have a few initial successes, they are pretty consistently out maneuvered and don't really damage the cartel in any meaningful way.
• Retired Badass: Crosby has a Navy background and worked in counterterror operations before becoming ambassador.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Lion's fate. After selling out Escobar's Miami operation to Cali, Cali kills him.
• Revenge: The main motivation for the cops who join the Search Bloc, as most of them have lost family members to the cartel.
• The Rich Want to Be Richer: Especially true of Félix; while most members of the federation are content with how things are going he continues to push the envelope, most notably with his move from marijuana to cocaine.
• Riches to Rags: During the height of its power, Escobar's organization is bringing in $70 million a day, making him one of the richest men in the world. By the end, however, he is hiding in decrepit safe houses with a single henchman for company.
• Ridiculous Exchange Rates: In season 6, Mexico faces a recession and the value of the peso plummets almost overnight; since the cartels deal mainly in US currency but are doing business in Mexico, this effectively multiplies their wealth and buying power.
• "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc:
  • The first season depicts Pablo gradually expanding his cocaine operation in Colombia, becoming fabulously wealthy and powerful in the process. In season 2, things begin to go wrong for Escobar, resulting in pitched street battles between his men and the Colombian police. After two of his men betray him, he goes on the run and ends up cornered by the DEA and Colombian military after trying to contact his family. Finally, he gets shot in the ensuing shootout, and executed by a Colombian police officer.
  • Mexico covers a similar arc for Félix; he starts as a local policeman, but manages to become the biggest drug lord in the world by uniting the plazas and switching from marijuana to cocaine. However, he eventually loses his political support and ends up imprisoned with his empire split into various factions.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • So much, on both sides. The entire first season is basically the Medellín Cartel and the Colombian Police exacting increasingly bloody revenge on each other.
  • This becomes Los Pepes' raison d'etre in season two.
  • The Sequel Hook ending to Season 4. After Kiki was tortured and murdered, the DEA in Mexico form a secret group whose job is to find and assassinate the people they believe are responsible, as well as key members of the Mexican Cartel.
• Rock Beats Laser: Despite having the latest in surveillance tech and U.S. intel support, Search Bloc is continually outsmarted by Pablo's use of human spotters, walkie talkies, and corrupt informants to tip him off.
• Rule of Three: Government officials' views on bulletproof vests. First Lara refuses to wear one and dies for it. Galán wears one, even Tempting Fate by saying he'll be fine because of it, but is shot just below the vest and bleeds out. Gaviria and Sandoval express incredulity at the bulky, absurd bulletproof pants Murphy provides, but in contrast to the first two, are still heavily focused on security.
• Rural Gangsters: Specifically a Rural Cartel in the form of the Sinaloa Plaza of the Guadalajara Cartel, who have been growing and smuggling Marijuana to the US for generations, and prefer the old style of Vaquero dress. When they get involved in the cocaine trade, the extra money and cosmopolitan contacts lead the younger generation to re-style themselves as urban Narcos.

S-Y

• Sacrificial Lamb: Lehder is the first narco to be extradited, highlighting the danger the cartel faces.
• Sanity Slippage: In Season 1, La Quica is the sane man in his partnership with the sociopathic Poison. In Season 2, Limón is his saner partner, and La Quica acts as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Poison.
• Sarcastic Confession: After Peña tells Elisa, when they are introduced to each other, that his job is to hunt down communists, she straight up tells him she is part of a communist paramilitary organization. They all share a good laugh with that.
• The Scapegoat:
  • In Narcos: Mexico, El Azul and the PRI politicians in league with Félix organize the kidnapping of Kiki Camarena, coordinated with Rafa and using Rafa's men. Félix points out that they only worked with Rafa so they could pin the blame on him when things inevitably went bad (ironically, it is Félix himself who later gives up Rafa to protect himself).
  • After Kiki's death, the Federal Police massacre the family of an opposition politician and dump the body near a ranch of their property to tie them to Félix.
• Scary Black Man: CIA Agent Owen for the US government, Blackie as part of Escobar's crew.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: This would be the pro-extradition bloc's creed, but special mention has to be given to Carillo. This goes for Lara, Galán, Gaviria, and all of the Colombian politicians and law enforcement who refuse to be bought off.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: If Escobar had a creed, this would be it.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!:
  • Fernando Duque tries this after Los Pepes goes after him. He's too inept to succeed.
  • La Quica tries this rather than go into the gang war, but is captured soon after.
  • Amado Carrillo Fuentes builds the Juarez Cartel into the most powerful cartel in Mexico but is smart enough to realize that his time at the top is limited. With the downfall of his Cali Cartel partners and a nearly-successful attempt on his life, he decides that it is time to cash out and disappear. He has his accountant move millions to secret accounts and plans to retire to Chile. This costs him his government protection and he has to scramble to find a way to get out of Mexico. He tries to disguise himself through plastic surgery and apparently dies on the operating table, though The Stinger heavily implies that he might actually be Faking the Dead.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Félix Gallardo ends up being the main cause of his own downfall just when he is at the height of his power, having ensured himself the favor of the PRI by helping them rig the 1988 Mexican Presidential election and shipped a record-setting 70 tons of cocaine into the US in one go. However, he overplays his hand when he tips off the US about a Colombian warehouse in Los Angeles to use as leverage against Cali, and orders the murder of Palma's family to scare the Plazas into submission. Rather than fall into line like he had hoped, they all break away from the Federation and start dealing with the Colombians separately. The resulting loss of power ensures that the government withdraws its protection of Félix and has him arrested.
• Self-Made Man: Whatever else Escobar and his cronies are, there is no denying their entrepreneurship.
• Sequel Hook:
  • The last line of Season Two: "Agent Peña, how much do you know about the Cali cartel?"
  • The last episode of Season Three echoes this, when Agent Peña is offered the chance to rejoin the DEA and transfer to Mexico. He declines.
  • The last scene of Season 4, when a group of heavily armed DEA agents arrive in Mexico to get vengeance for Kiki Camarena.
  • The last scene of Season 5, when Félix, from prison, predicts the cartel wars that will come now that the federation has fallen apart.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In season 6, a major side plot is officer Tapia investigating the disappearance of a neighbor's daughter and uncovering and pursuing a possible serial killer targeting young women along the border. The investigation spirals into an obsession, with Tapia informing to the DEA in exchange for support he can't get from his own department. Any help he gets from the DEA proves to be useless; the DNA samples Tapia provides are too contaminated and the killer is using a false license plate. He finally finds his suspect and kills him by waiting for him in his car every night at the kidnapping spot — only to quickly find out that the man was only one of many such killers. Tapia himself is then killed in retribution for informing to the DEA, and the narration states that the killings of young women continue to this day.
• Shout-Out:
  • La Quica and Poison start to count up their kills and turn it into a competition with each other during season 1. And they often argue over who actually gets credit for a given kill. It amounts to a Dark Comedy play on of when Gimli and Legolas were competing between each other for the highest number of Orc kills during The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
  • The scene in S3E3 where Salcedo notices a stray bundle of $100 bills on the floor in Pallomari's office during a police raid, and kicks it under a piece of furniture, is a shout-out to a similar sequence at the end of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
  • In a jailhouse phone call to his brother Miguel in Season 3, Gilberto asks his brother, "¿Por qué no te callas?" ("Why don't you just shut up?"), echoing King Juan Carlos I of Spain to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in Real Life at the Ibero-American Summit in 2007.
• Silent Credits: Mute, songless final credits are used in "Deutschland 93" after Escobar places a bomb near la Casa de Nariño, the Presidential Palace in downtown Bogotá, with bloody results.
• Silver Spoon Troublemaker: Season 6 gives us the "Narcojuniors", children of Tijuana's elite escape their boring lives by hanging out with cartel members and becoming involved in their activities.
• Skewed Priorities: Initially the CIA and US intelligence groups are completely obsessed with anti-Communism efforts and neglect the ever-growing cocaine problem. It's only after the protagonists conclusively prove that Pablo was working with Nicaraguan Communists that the DEA gets the resources it needs.
• Slobs vs. Snobs: The Medellín Cartel and the Cali Cartel, respectively. Murphy's narration even compares them to their respective primary markets: loose, hard-partying Miami for the Medellín and professional, sophisticated New York for Cali. Pablo also views his war with the politicians and oligarchs as this.
• Smash Cut: Gustavo, when captured, refuses to give up Pablo. He then starts ranting that his captors are going to be killed along with their families, wives....smash cut to Gustavo's bloody corpse lying on the floor.
• The Sociopath:
  • Poison stands out in Escobar's organization as being particularly brutal, not even hesitating in his attempt to shoot a two-year old girl.
  • In season two, La Quica stands out as this.
  • Season 3 has David Rodríguez, son of Miguel Rodriguez who is one of the 4 leaders of the Cali Cartel. He treats everyone around him with disrespect, even his own men. Has a Hair-Trigger Temper that is a time bomb waiting to go off. He goes out of his way to make Jorge's life a living hell, just because his dad sided with him during a conversation. And he loves to torture and kill people.
  • Ramón is this in the Arellano-Félix organization; at one point he strings up a bunch of dead fish and uses them for target practice in a public park. It's implied this isn't the first time he's done it. He also brutally beats a night club patron for accidentally spilling a drink on his shoes.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: Escobar's sicarios are fearless in battle and aren't afraid to get their hands dirty, but they get curb stomped when they go up against the discipline and tactics of the Colombian special forces.
• Specific Situation Books: Inverted in the most Tear Jerker way possible. Mika is reading Charlotte's Web to hers and Kiki's son. The passages she reads indicate that Charlotte the spider was the least noticed character, and yet had the greatest impact on how subsequent events turned out even well after her early death. Mika's facial expressions convey that she's making the connections between the passages she's reading and her own increasing despair and resignation to Kiki dying and never coming home.
• Spotting the Thread: Peña listens in on a wiretapped conversation between Franklin Jurado, the money launderer for the Cali Cartel, and his wife. Jurado is careful to avoid saying that is indirectly incriminating. But then he says "Dasha Masha Danki" to room service. Peña figures out that the words come from a language known as Papiamento, which is used in several Carribean Islands. And one of those islands, Curacao, has several banks with less red tape which makes it the perfect laundering site for drug cartels. Peña thereby deduces that Jurado is in Curacao, and immediately siezes the opportunity to track him down and place him in custody.
• The Starscream:
  • Invoked in Season 3. Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela briefly usurps leadership over the Cali Cartel from his brother Gilberto after the latter is arrested but insists on carrying on with their planned surrender. The other two members of the leadership, Chepe and Pacho, go along with Miguel because neither of the three men want to surrender to the Colombian government.
  • Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo betrays his boss, El León de Sinaloa, to establish his vision of the Federation.
  • Amado Carrillo Fuentes admits to Félix at the end of Season 5, that he was never on his side and was pretending to be a loyal partner until he could strike when he was most vulnerable. Furthermore, he never believed in The Federation Félix created, preferring the Cartels run their own territories like it was before. Which is what he convinces the other Cartels to do by turning on Félix, making it clear he was the mastermind behind the coup.
  • Fuentes makes another such move to take over the Juarez Cartel in Season 6. While he starts as a junior partner of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, after Fuentes is arrested it takes 3 months for Aguilar to find somebody to bribe to get him out, causing him to miss his daughter's funeral. Further, Aquilar refuses to adapt to the changing nature of the drug market, so getting rid of him had become necessary to survive.
  • Downplayed by El Chapo in Season 6. He gets arrested and sent to prison, followed by his boss Hector Palma. Don Neto tries to position himself as The Man Behind the Man to El Chapo, advising him to dethrone Palma and take over the Sinaloa faction. El Chapo does so, but he has both Palma and Neto, his two biggest rivals, Reassigned to Antarctica instead of just killing them outright.
• Suspiciously Small Army: M-19, which at first seems to be less than a dozen people. Subverted later when they organize all of their forces to storm the Palace of Justice.
• Take a Third Option: In season two, Judy Moncada becomes a target for the Castaños, and is faced with two choices: going to war against them or becoming an informant for the DEA. Her righthand man Berna instead sells her out to the CIA, keeping her alive and ensuring that the Castaños - and by extension the Cali cartel - continue to get CIA support.
• Team Switzerland: The Gulf Cartel in Narcos: Mexico. While Félix makes overtures to join his politically-backed Federation, their boss outwits him using his own political connections to retain his independence. Despite this, Félix never attempts to make a move against them, knowing that a Mob War just wouldn't be worth the cost. Even after the Federation breaks up, the Gulf narcos remain in their own little corner while happily letting the other Cartels feud with each other like mad dogs.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The Cali cartel leaders, especially Pacho Herrera, are not particularly fond of working with Judy Moncada.
• Terror Hero: Colonel Carillo, the leader of the Colombian Search Bloc, instills fear among Escobar's minions by throwing people out of helicopters and shooting child spotters in cold blood. He's such a terrifying enemy that Pablo actually starts to have nightmares wherein Carillo executes his entire family in front of him.
• Theme Tune: "Tuyo", which was composed for the show by Rodrigo Amarante. Its lyrics (in Spanish) seem to be something of a low-key Villain Song for cocaine itself, boasting its power over the world.
• The Purge: After the Cali Cartel leaders announce that they made a deal with the Colombian government to retire from the drug business, many of their business associates are not happy. However, the cartel has them all under surveillance and quickly discovers who is against the plan. Anyone who is not on board or might make trouble further down the line is murdered.
• This Is Unforgivable!: The mission to find Gacha initially has Carillo wanting to kill Gacha, and Peña wanting to take him in alive for information. Peña ends up changing his mind after seeing the dead body of the maid who was murdered by Gacha's son, Freddy. Peña's chopper zeroes in on Gacha's truck, and Freddy is killed by machine gun fire. Carillo leaves Gacha's fate in Peña's hands. And Peña coldly issues an order to the machine gunner, "Give him lead!"
• Those Two Guys: Since they aren't the leads that Murphy and Peña were, Feistl and Van Ness have this dynamic.
• To Be Lawful or Good: The main struggle for Murphy and Peña, who remain frustrated with the restrictions they're under. Both become relentless in taking down the cartel, but Murphy leans more toward lawful and Peña more toward good.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Fernando Duque. Though a competent lawyer and negotiator, once he has to go on the run, he does a terrible job of hiding himself and his son. Peña lampshades this.
  • The Prisco gang in season 2 is wiped out (apart from Ricardo) because they were Getting High on Their Own Supply and were dumb enough to use their own satellite phones instead of payphones, when it's known they're being listened to.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Carillo is badass from the start, but once the war with Escobar heats up and he gets to form the Search Bloc, he (and the police in a way) take a level.
  • Judy Moncada in season two. She goes from a hard-partying cartel wife to cruel and Revenge Before Reason head of part of the Medellín cartel.
  • Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is introduced as an upcoming minion in the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico. He comes up with the idea to build a tunnel on enemy territory during the second season, but that soon falls apart with little to show for it. By the third and final season, he's leading armed raids against their enemies in night clubs, successfully evades dozens of men trying to kill him at an airport later on, and outsmarts all his rivals to take over the cartel for himself.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • DEA Agent Murphy, who becomes more aggressive and violent as the war against Escobar goes on, much to his wife's growing concern. Best exemplified by them discussing their adopted baby's name in traffic, being interrupted by a traffic accident that ends in Murphy nonchalantly pointing his gun on the other driver, then immediately returning to the first conversation as if nothing happened, to Connie's horror.
  • Félix over the course of season 4. He starts out as a loving husband and father and loyal friend with a vision to bring Mexico's drug traffickers together to make more money with less violence. By the end of the season he has left his wife (after callously telling her that he has outgrown her and no longer needs her), betrayed his best friend to save himself, and rules his cartel through threats and fear. And in season 5 it gets even worse. By the end he's despised and hated by absolutely everyone, leading the Plazas to remove him from power.
• Tragic Villain: When Escobar says that he could have done marvelous things for Colombia, Diana Turbay agrees that it's true, and that this is the saddest part of his story.
• Tranquil Fury: If Escobar gets mad, he won't raise his voice or act out in an extreme way. Except for his initial phone conversation with César Gaviria and when he loses it and beats Galeano to death with a pool cue.
• Translation Convention: Notably averted, with likely more than half the dialogue being in Spanish.
• Turn in Your Badge: Martinez's predecessor resigns when nearly a hundred of his cops are killed in one afternoon, turning in his Colonel's cap along with the letter.
• Undying Loyalty:
  • Gustavo is beaten to death without ratting on Pablo.
  • Velasco, Escobar's primary Yes-Man. When captured by Los Pepes, he apparently endures extensive torture without giving Pablo up.
  • Limón in season two. He continues to work for Escobar even after the fall of his empire, staying with him until the end.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation:
  • Isabella Bautista is an old friend of Félix-Gallardo, with enough Unresolved Sexual Tension for Félix's wife Maria to suspect they're having an affair. Félix does have several mistresses, Isabella is just not one of them. Félix dismisses this when his wife confronts him, pointing out that she's "like a niece to me". According to the Mexican authorities, her real life counterpart Sandra Ávila Beltrán actually IS his niece.
  • The Arellano-Félix clan is apparently unrelated to Félix-Gallardo (hint: the name is a big give-away). Not only is there no mention of any family ties, at multiple points they scheme against and attempt to depose him. They were his nephews and nieces in real life and were in those positions in the first place because the Guadalajara Cartel was largely a family empire.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Pablo and his sicarios recruit a young man, who thinks that he will have the opportunity to prove himself to the cartel by recording a presidential candidate's conversation on an airplane. What he doesn't know is that the tape recorder is rigged with a bomb which ends up killing him and over 100 other people on board, escalating the drug war.
  • A poor farmer finds millions of dollars buried on his property. Realizing that it is cartel money, he hands it over to the Medellín Cartel. The money does in fact belong to Escobar but the people who buried it there are all dead now. The increasingly paranoid Escobar suspects that his business partners are cheating him and they are the ones who buried the money after they stole from him. He murders them but Murphy and Peña find out about it and inform the Colombian government that Escobar broke the terms of his deal with the government by continuing his criminal activities. This restarts the Colombian Drug War.
• Vigilante Man: The Search Bloc edges into this in the final episodes. And in season two, a Badass Army of far-right vigilantes and rival drug lords, Los Pepes, emerges.
• Villainous Friendship:
  • Pablo and his cousin Gustavo are very, very close.
    Gustavo: So, do you miss me, you son of a bitch?
    Pablo: ...Every fucking day of my life, brother.
  • The Cali cartel kingpins disagree over their surrender, but they're still unified when they're all in prison at the end. Pacho considers Chepe and the Rodriguez brothers his family after they made him a partner in the cartel despite others' homophobia. He would rather surrender with them than accept Amado's business proposal.
  • Amado is quick to remind Pacho that he never judged him for being gay, and commends him for his loyalty to the other Cali godfathers. Pacho, in turn, becomes genuinely fond of Amado and remains his biggest supporter among the godfathers.
• Vigilante Militia: Los Pepes are an anti-communist militia who later take the fight to Pablo Escobar's cartel, enacting vigilante street justice against anyone involved with his drug empire. However, they're also sponsored by several of Escobar's rivals in the cocaine business.
• Villain Protagonist: Pablo Escobar and the Cali Godfathers get at least as much focus as the people who are after him.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • For a while, Escobar enjoys quite a bit of popularity from the lower class for spreading his wealth around the poor, particularly in his home town of Medellín, where people revere him.
  • Invoked by the Ochoas who, during the fight against extradition, hire a PR firm in an attempt to gain support.
  • Despite being a far-right paramilitary organization, Los Pepes gets a lot of support because of how they go after Escobar.
  • The Gentlemen of Cali, who are described as "the biggest drug lords you've probably never heard of." They spend vast amounts on lawyers and political influence to maintain their legitimate image and are careful to conceal any acts of violence.
• The War Has Just Begun:
  • Season 1 ends in this note-the war is resumed but this time there will be no quarter.
  • Likewise, Season 5 ends with Félix getting arrested, but he omnimously warns Breslin that without him in control, the Mexican cartels that were once united under Félix's banner will slowly grew apart and inevitably come into conflict with each other, kickstarting the Mexican Drug War that is still ongoing even to the present day.
• Western Terrorists: Escobar hires a Basque separatist, who's a master of bomb making, to help him in his ploy to kill Gaviria. This results in the bombing and destruction of Avianca Flight 203, killing over 100 innocent passengers. It launches Escobar himself into a Western terrorist, and helps create narco-terrorism.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: When Limón shoots Maritza, he leaves her daughter there. No mention is made of her fate.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Although the Sinaloa/Tijuana conflict has already resulted in the deaths of foot soldiers from both sides, it's seen as a Moral Event Horizon when Félix allows the Arellano-Félix family to kill one of the Sinaloa plaza bosses, Cochiloco.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Connie calls out Steve, or at least tries to, after he pulls his gun on a taxi driver during a traffic dispute and shoots the man's car.
  • In the Season 1 finale, Murphy reacts violently to Peña after he thinks his partner caused him to be abducted.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Moura does a good job as Escobar, but any native Spanish speaker can tell the difference between him and the real deal, especially when he's angry, as his vocalization gives away that the actor is a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese.
• White Male Lead:
  • DEA Agent Steve Murphy serves as a subversion. He's one of the few American characters on a show with a primarily Hispanic cast and looks the part of the square-jawed white lead leading the fight against the narco-terrorists, but for most of the series he's really more of a First-Person Peripheral Narrator with the Colombian characters getting more focus than he does.
  • Walt Breslin in Narco's Mexico is a deconstruction of the trope. He tries his best to make a difference, but his actions don't get him any meaningful results. Instead, he encounters nothing but setbacks and even gets an informant killed. He also loses his love interest, because she realized how obsessed he is with the job and gives up on him. By Season 3 his story ends the same way it started, with him working undercover befriending smugglers before arresting them in a major takedown.
• The Worf Effect: Carillo is killed off midway through season two, showing how much Escobar is escalating the fight.
• Worthy Opponent: How Don Berna views Peña.
• Would Hit a Girl: The drug cartel and Los Pepes have no qualms about murdering women.
• Would Hurt a Child
  • Carillo shoots a teenaged boy for helping Escobar move unseen in Medellín, and gives his traumatized ten-year old friend a bullet to give to Escobar.
  • The Los Pepes will even kill the children of Pablo's followers.
  • Later, Escobar has a car bomb set off near the Presidential Palace to strike at Gaviria, and many children are killed. It appears to be the breaking point for his loyal henchmen Blackie, who deserts him then makes a deal with the police.
  • In Mexico Season 2, Félix Gallardo ordered his Venezuelan driver Rafael Clavel to kill Hector "El Guero" Palma's wife and children. The bodies were then dropped off the Puente de la Concordia bridge along the border between Colombia and Venezuela. The move, initially planned to strike fear upon Félix's disgruntled plazas, served as the last straw for all plazas involved, and Maria (Félix's first wife).
• Yes-Man: Velasco, to a T. To an extent, everyone holed up at La Catedral with Escobar.
• You Can't Go Home Again: As Escobar and his family leave Hacienda Napoles, Murphy notes with a degree of smug satisfaction that Escobar would never set foot in his most opulent home again.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Escobar and his men murder the M-19 leadership after they complete the task Escobar hired them for.
  • Carrillo at his most ruthless throws suspects who claim to know nothing out of a helicopter.
• You No Take Candle: Navegante's English is broken, but surprisingly understandable.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Murphy gives a very brief rundown of both the far-right and communist "freedom fighters" in conflict with each other in Colombia. His tone presents both groups as murderous thugs with neither having the moral high ground.

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