About this season
Narco Wars explores how opportunistic smuggling networks in Latin America turned into powerful and ruthless drug cartels with the power to destabilize and tear apart whole countries. The series combines gripping access to cartel members and the law enforcement agencies opposing them with a deep dive documentary exploration of the geo-political, social and cultural factors that led the cartels' rise.
Episodes (10)
1. How Cocaine Came to America
Aired 9 December 2020 • 45 min
Despite $1 trillion spent on enforcement and 2.5 million death toll, more illegal drugs are being produced, trafficked, and consumed than ever before. Featuring interviews and action filmed with key players on both sides of the law, this 10 part series will examine the drug wars - both past and present - to explain why.
2. Mexicos First Cartel
Aired 16 December 2020 • 45 min
How a group of marijuana traffickers created Mexico’s first-ever drug Cartel and committed murder to protect their billion-dollar operations.
3. The Battle for the Border
Aired 23 December 2020 • 45 min
El Chapo Guzman’s rise to cartel leader through his ingenious cocaine-smuggling tunnels and a war with the Tijuana cartel unleashes narco terror.
4. Escobar's Empire
Aired 30 December 2020 • 45 min
Pablo Escobar goes from cocaine tycoon in the late ‘70s to full-blown narcoterrorism by 1985, waging war against the Colombian state.
5. Escobar Goes to War
Aired 6 January 2021 • 45 min
Pablo Escobar goes to war against both authorities and his rivals, the Cali cartel, as his terror sees airliners blown up and politicians assassinated.
6. Rise of the Narco Army
Aired 20 January 2021 • 45 min
One drug lord uses millions of drug dollars to bribe soldiers to desert the army to form The Zetas, the most feared cartel in Mexico’s history.
7. After Pablo
Aired 27 January 2021 • 45 min
Upon Escobar’s death, the Rodriguez brothers take over as the new cocaine kings, specializing in corruption and buying Colombia’s presidents.
8. Narco Cult
Aired 3 February 2021 • 45 min
Meth kingpin Nazario Moreno turns a drug cartel into Mexico’s first narco cult: the gruesome Knights Templars.
9. Chapo Public Enemy No. 1
Aired 10 February 2021 • 45 min
The search for the world's most-wanted drug trafficker - El Chapo - as told by two women in Chicago whose drug-dealing husbands turned against the man who supplied nearly half of America's narcotics and the key DEA agents who finally brought him to justice.
10. The Last Don
Aired 17 February 2021 • 45 min
In the mid-1990s, left-wing guerrillas and far-right paramilitaries plunge Colombia into a civil war financed by the profits from cocaine trafficking