DEA Agents Steve Murphy & Javier Pena: The War on Narco-Terror & Pablo Escobar

Special agents Steve Murphy & Javier Pena are the real DEA Narcos who together with the Columbian National Police (CNP), and the support of tier-one special operators from the U.S. NavySEALs and Delta Force, ended the reign of the world’s most notorious narco-terrorist, Pablo Escobar, and dismantled the infamous Medellin Cartel, one of the largest and most violent narcotics trafficking organizations in history, which at the height of its power generated $26 billion annually by smuggling 15 tons of cocaine per day into the United States. Murphy and Pena's pursuit of Pablo Escobar was recently the subject of the hit Netflix series Narcos, the first 3 seasons of which, are based on their efforts to bring the cartels in Colombia to justice. Murphy and Pena are also authors of the book "Manhunters – How We Took Down Pablo Escobar."

After cutting their teeth on the traffickers running in along the Texas-Mexico border and Miami, agents Pena and Murphy would be sent to the front lines of the war on drugs in Columbia, the source for 80% of the world's cocaine, to advise and help guide the country's fight to defeat the cartels and end the out-of-control violence that their reign of terror had ignited. Priority number one was taking down Pablo Escobar, the populist, charismatic head of the Medellin Cartel who also led the terrorist group known as "Los Extraditables," an alliance of the country's drug lords whose goal was to pressure the Columbian government into ending its extradition treaty with the United States, their motto being "We prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States."[

Escobar's campaign of terror made him public enemy number one, forcing him to manage his drug empire while on the run, while turning the streets of Medellin and Bogota into a warzone. Escobar formed an army of poor, teenage sicarios from the ghettos of Medellin and ordered the execution of hundreds of police, paying a $100 bounty for the murder of any member of the CNP. The devastation was total, beyond the wanton execution of cops, Escobar had green-lighted thousands of car bombings, the assassinations of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, and Columbia's attorney general, Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez, along with the downing of a jet airliner, Avianca flight 203, placing a bomb on-board that killed all 103 passengers.

Pena first arrived in Bogota during the height of Los Extraditables' war on Columbia in 1988 as part of a group of six new DEA agents tasked with infusing the Bogotá office with ambitious go-getters, as the previous crop of agents were making little headway in their efforts to put a dent in the business of the narco-trafficantes that ruled Columbia. He was joined 3 years later by Murphy who had seen the result of Escobar's handiwork first hand as cocaine found it's way into Miami, the central distribution point for American cocaine, and wanted nothing more than to personally put a bullet in Escobar's head. When Murphy's chance finally came to partner up with Pena and personally take the fight to the Medellin cartel, the politicians that ran Columbian government signed off on a deal that saw the drug kingpin keep his billions and surrender to a prison specially built by Escobar himself, a thinly veiled palace nicknamed "La Catedral," where he, his lieutenants and sicarios were to spend a mere 5 years in the most luxurious jail ever constructed.

Although the CNP, DEA, and DIJN were devastated by the deal, feeling their efforts to stem the bloodshed and bring down Escobar had been wasted, and the murder of so many left unavenged, they would eventually get a second opportunity to destroy the Medillian cartel and decapitate the head of the snake when Escobar and his people made a daring break from his gilded cage after the Columbian National Army raided the prison in an attempt to transfer Escobar to a maximum security facility after embarrassing the ruling politicians by continuing to run his narcotics empire in brutal fashion, including ordering the deaths of his rivals and personally murdering his own people, from the confines of La Catedral ... and the manhunt was back on.

Links

Steve Murphy & Javier Pena: https://www.deanarcos.com/
Manhunters: https://amzn.to/3b7Rj0Z
Pablo Escobar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Escobar