Pablo Escobar may be gone, but a successor has emerged and he is just as dangerous and ruthless. You may remember that in the final scene of Season 2, DEA agent Javier Pena (Pedro Pascal) is asked, “How much do you know about the Cali Cartel?” In the first trailer for Season 3 of “Narcos,” Pena notes, “Cocaine cartels are about succession.” That successor is Colombia’s Cali Cartel, the organized crime organization specializing in cocaine distribution that arose in the deadly drug trade thanks to the power vacuum left by Escobar’s death.
The “Narcos” Season 3 synopsis:
“In a post-Pablo Escobar world, those final words spoken in the last season of the Netflix original series Narcos foreshadow the upcoming season’s pivot into the corrupt, powerful and wildly profitable world of Colombia’s Cali Cartel — the biggest drug lords you’ve probably never heard of. Now that the bloody hunt for Pablo Escobar has ended, the DEA turns its attention to the richest drug trafficking organization in the world: the Cali Cartel. Led by four powerful godfathers, this cartel operates much differently than Escobar’s, preferring to bribe government officials and keep its violent actions out of the headlines.”
“The Cali cartel aided in the dismantling of the Medellin cartel and benefited by going from being No. 2 to No. 1,” “Narcos” showrunner Eric Newman told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s a revolving-door aspect to narco kingpins and we’ll certainly exploit that. From the beginning when we decided to call the show Narcos and not Pablo Escobar, I had always had in mind to tell the continuing story of cocaine.”
Also gone from the show is Boyd Holbrook, who played the other real DEA agent Steve Murphy. The Cali Cartel is governed by four powerful bosses Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela (Damian Alcazar) returns as the leader of Cali Cartel, the “boss of bosses.”
Netflix also revealed the release date for the hit buddy cop show. Season 3 of “Narcos” premieres Sept. 1. So get ready to binge.