9 episodes
Pablo Escobar: Escape from La Catedral Spotify Podcasts
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- Society & Culture
Pablo Escobar was one of the most powerful men in the world in the 1980s. Through terror and a network of corruption, he gained almost total control over the police, the army and much of the Colombian government while operating an international cocaine trafficking network. After a series of savage attacks which involved the downing of an aircraft, bounties for killing police and the bombing of government offices in broad daylight, the Colombian government was forced to act. Their solution was the negotiated surrender of Escobar in exchange for a series of concessions such as allowing the kingpin to choose where he would be imprisoned, a site called "La Catedral" in his native Envigado.
Narrated by Univision nightly news anchor Jorge Ramos, Pablo Escobar: Escape from La Catedral is based on a mysterious set of audio tapes containing secretly recorded telephone conversations between Escobar, his cronies, and others during the months between the capo's surrender, eventual escape and death.
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1. Prologue
A mysterious set of audio tapes arrives anonymously at the offices of Detective, a multi-media production company in Mexico City. On those tapes are secretly recorded phone conversations of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. The head of the Medellín cartel used the telephone as a weapon of war, but it would also be the key to his ultimate demise.
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2. A priest, a drug lord, and a journalist
At the end of the 1980s, Colombia had become one of the epicenters of drug trafficking in the world. But a change of government in 1990 opened the possibility for peace and the Colombian government began telephone negotiations with Pablo Escobar for his surrender and an end to the violence that was crippling the nation. In the end, Escobar's surrender sounded like a bad joke, what happens when a narco, a priest and a journalist all board a helicopter?
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3. Get that gun out of my face
The DEA disagreed with Colombia's so called "policy of subjugation" that allowed the surrender of the Medellín Cartel leaders. In addition, they felt that “La Catedral”, Escobar's personal prison, felt more like a country club than a punishment. He even continued to run his criminal empire with no issue from inside the prison walls. That is, until he made a serious mistake.
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4. The dark at the end of the tunnel
The murder of two of Escobar's associates inside La Catedral prison forced the government of President César Gaviria to act. But an attempt to transfer the Medellín capo to a traditional prison resulted in the kidnapping of multiple high-level government officials. When the Colombian army managed to penetrate the prison to rescue them, they were surprised to find out that Escobar was gone. The government and U.S. intelligence agencies begin an intense operation to capture him in which the telephone lines became a battlefield.
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5. The good, the bad and the ugliest
Pablo Escobar is on the run and the Colombian government along with the military, the DEA and the CIA are in pursuit. Meanwhile, rumors of how the kingpin escaped were running wild. The rumors weren’t Escobar’s biggest problem though. As the government became more desperate to catch the escaped drug lord, they enlisted a dangerous group of allies to bring him down.
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6. A monster with a heart
Pablo Escobar's family tells how the pursuit of the capo caught up with them. They were cornered and could not leave the country to take refuge from the violence. This angered Escobar who would use his family to play the victim during new negotiations with the government.
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