The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar

newyorker.com

26 points·pmcpinto··6 comments

Escobar’s cartel died with him, but, despite a U.S.-assisted war on narcotrafficking that has cost thousands of lives and more than nine billion dollars, international consumption has spread enormously, and the drug economy remains strong; last year, the United Nations reported that Colombia was the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

Damn, that's so sad. All that effort for a drug war, and for what? People still do drugs, and narcos still run Colombia. What was the point?

Who the money funnels through was the point.

Enjoyed watching Narcos on Netflix recently, reminded me of my days backpacking though South America. One thing I didn’t know was how much money we were talking about, like Bill Gates level, in cash!

70 million in cash per day, 10% of their cash written off because of rats eating it, and $1,000 per week just in rubber bands for the cash.

It's just insane to think about cash flowing illegally at that scale.

Puts historical cash faucets into perspective.. eg the opium wars.

I saw a report years ago on that cash, bales of it, so much they literally didn’t know what to do with it. Apparently they learned that rats will happily chew it to shreds, and they lost whole bales thst way.

Imagine the human suffering, energy, and time that went into that, just to end up as rat turds.

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