Narcos · Season 1
[Ambassador Crosby and Agent Pena argue over the ledger discovered at Miguel Roridguez Orejuela's hideout and its details of payoffs]
So that's it. They bought [sighs] the president.
And for now, they get to keep him.
[begins to leave, then turns around] We never had a chance.
Like you've never cut a corner to get to the front of the line. The question is, what you do when you get there. There's always gonna be new bad guys to fight, agent, we make new ones every day. But, anyway you slice it, you're the agent that put cuffs on two Cali godfathers. No small feat. [offers him the red marker to cross-out Miguel on the picture board] Go on. You earned it.
[Javier Peña walks away from him without a word]
[narrating] Another deal. A compromise. A charade. A way for governments who don't give a shit about the war they're supposed to be fighting, to go on pretending they're winning it. But it can't be won. It'll never be won. At least not until people see it for what it is. Not until they know the truth.
[The news carries details of Agent Pena's revelations]
[turning off the news as Peña walks in] You didn't really call the country that we're guests in a "Narco-Democracy."
Are you saying it isn't?
The State Department's livid.
Good. They're responsible. We all are.
You know any aspirations you had for your career just got dragged behind the barn and shot.
I resigned from the DEA this morning...
[narrating] Chepe Santacruz never did make it back to New York. Without the government's guarantee that their sentences would be minimal, Chepe decided that prison wasn't the best place for him to be. And so he released himself, and set out in search of new alliances with partners who could help him rebuild the empire. You won't believe who he chose.
[Chepe visits an AUC camp with Carlos Castaño receiving him]
Don Chepe. I was happy to get your call.
[soldiers later strike Chepe with a shovel and Castaño shoots him multiple times]
[continues narrating] Predictably, it wasn't much of a partnership. It seems the Castaños expected a larger contribution to their cause than Chepe was comfortable making. So the alliance died quickly, and Chepe Santacruz's wild ride came to an end. Pacho Herrera didn't fare much better staying in jail. Vendettas in the drug game never end. And Pacho's war on the Salazars made him some lifelong North Valley enemies. [a thug shoots Pacho in prison yard as he drinks with a friend] And as for the Rodríguez-Orejuela brothers, political pressure from the US and a disgraced Colombian president, who needed to prove he was tough on narcos, brought back the only effective weapon we have in the war on drugs: extradition.[they are sent on a plane bound for the US] All out of favors, and unlikely to find more, they will spend the rest of their lives in a US prison. The good guys didn't do much better. [el Semana headline: DELATAR SI PAGA (BETRAYAL PAYS)] Back in Colombia, Jorge Salcedo was publicly branded a rat. And in the States, despite testimony that he was instrumental to our efforts to capture and prosecute the Cali godfathers, he still had to plead guilty to felony conspiracy charges. [cut to Jorge Salcedo working at an auto shop and ordering at a McDonald's] And from there, Jorge Salcedo, the guy who had the most to do with bringing down the Cali cartel, disappeared into the Federal Witness Protection Program somewhere in the US. A prison of its own.
[DEA official Mike Spencer sees Agent Pena viewing a gallery of DEA agents killed in the line of duty, specifically Pena's mentor Kiki Camarena]
It all started there. Before him, we didn't even know we were in a war. Another hot one down there for you, huh? You took down the big players in Colombia.
Yeah... we'll make new ones.
Don't turn a victory into a defeat, Javier. The Colombian super-cartels are gone. And whoever comes next are gonna be fighting amongst themselves for years. And they're still only going to be a shadow of what Medellin and Cali were. And now it's time to take the fight to the real enemy in The War on Drugs. "Mexico."
The real enemy?
Let me put in some calls. I'll make this bullshit resignation go away. What else is a guy like you gonna do?
[Agent Pena and his father Chucho set up a riverside fence]
[carrying a large fence post as he calls out to Javier watching a drug shipment cross by boat] You helping me with this or not? I thought I was getting a partner.
Come on, Pop. Give me that.
Stubborn. You can stand here for an hour and you'll count 20 of 'em going by.
[switching to Spanish] So do you have to fix the fence every time a storm hits?
Someone has to do it. That's how life works.
[switching back to English] You thinking of taking them up on it? Mexico. It's different there.
Son, let me tell you...
Dad. I've done enough. I'm through.
Hand me that cutter.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Narcos pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
