500 Days of Escobar is a Dark Precursor to 2025

I saw the Netflix documentary 500 Days of Escobar, last night, and it woke me up to the very real dangers of a Second Trump Term: the possibility of making America a failed state. Let’s take the GOP at their word and say that they honestly don’t know what “Project 2025” is, and don’t have any intention of listening to some of their creepier sponsors, like Doug Coe, and create a theocratic state. Let’s just look at what happens when an enormously powerful individual rises to the top of a society, an operates from a place beyond the law, because that seems very much like the generally-agreed-upon outcome of a Second Trump Term.

The documentary details the 500 days between when notorious cartel kingpin, Pablo Gaviria Escobar escaped from his custom-made prison, and events immediately following his death. That second part is more-critical to the American Experiment than the former, because all of the hypotheticals I’ve seen from all sides are predicated upon us all somehow coming together after King Donald to rebuild and remake America. That is simply a possibility in the totally-avoidable outcome of a Second Trump Term. The parallels between Escobar and Trump are that both are megalomaniac narcissists who are incapable of admitting wrongdoing (there are interviews and statements from Escobar during this period, when he was violently railing against government control, and, I shit you not; he uses the words “fake interviews” to justify his violence); both have a strange but deep loyalty from specific groups in respected institutions; and both sit atop a precarious society.

I will admit that my knowledge of Latin American history is largely limited to my general historic and geographic knowledge, and some more-detailed knowledge of America’s history of imperialism in the region. However, I know that large swathes of the Americas were colonized by feudal — or very-recently-feudal groups who frequently tried to recreate that system — or component of it — in the New World. In his book Minority Rule, author Ari Berman argued that the US remains a minoritarian regime, by design. We never fully came together to properly address the social and government issues created by the American Civil War, and we remain a deeply divided, fractured culture as a result. I would argue that we never really ended our Civil War, we just turned it into a Culture War. And, make no mistake, if you heard of an “incident” in Pakistan in which a group of Punjab citizens in Pakistan overturned a local municipal council in a Uyghur dominated region, we probably wouldn’t say, “Boys will be boys.” But we did that for the 1898 Wilmington Coup, for the firebombing of white activists in the South in the 1960s, and for countless other acts of domestic terror that suggest we never fully ended that war.

My understanding of Colombian history is that it was started from a similar historic place of genocide, exploitation, and displacement, and probably never fully addressed those historic wounds. Colombia — again, from my limited, Wikipedia perspective — lurched around with extreme disparities in society and low-level political violence created by ongoing Colonial Exploitation (this time, by mostly-US multinational export operations). Like the US, nobody seems to know the exact “start” of Colombia’s ongoing internal conflicts, but, from an outside perspective, much like political violence in America, it seems to pulse with political turning points. Escobar’s attempt to create a narcostate for himself and his colleagues has direct parallels with Doug Coe’s ongoing attempts to create Lebensraum for white men in America. The Colombian government — in partnership with the US — fought indiscriminately against the cartels, and frequently used criminal groups and brutal, corrupt enforcement agencies to go after anyone who might be involved with the drug trade — usually massacring young men trying to find the most-likely perpetrators of the last round of narco-violence.

As an American, at that point in the documentary, my blood chilled colder than it did watching docuseries detailing parallels between American fascism and the Third Reich, because, if there is one thing America does historically better than anyone, it’s massacres. How do I know that? Just ask your Black or Indigenous friends about that. Or Google “My Lai,” or “Uvalde,” or “Tulsa Race Riot.” We do love sending in Our Boys to replace some Political Discourse with unrestrained Political Violence. Just as Escobar’s presence and ongoing perception as being above the law indirectly encouraged other political fringe groups to use political violence against him, the government, and, mostly, Colombians; there is no universe in which Donald Trump’s inciteful rhetoric doesn’t encourage a similar level of bottom-up political violence. Throughout the documentary, one aspect that is chilling in hindsight is how many Colombians interviewed seem to have accepted a low level constant political violence as the price of being in Colombia. I realize that we all might view Colombia as a significantly more-stable country than it was (checks notes)… 31 years ago at the death of Pablo Escobar, but I, personally, want to live in a country in which the there are no travel advisories issued (yes, I’m aware Canada and the EU warn their citizens about us: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/travel-warnings-other-countries-us-violence/index.html).

The genuinely upsetting part of the documentary, as it pertains to America, is that it does explain how Escobar and criminal elements throughout Colombian society, effectively took a permanent hold of aspects of government, and even entire regions of Colombia. The US government has been ceding government responsibilities for almost a century, usually under the name “privatization.” Which is, perhaps, a little different than the Colombian government ceding control of swathes of the country to armed paramilitary groups (AKA “Insurgents”), but an AI owned by a tech company will determine if this story is recommended to you, if Microsoft decides to update its software, this story may not be available, and on and on. Small but critical aspects of our everyday life are decided by private entities that are only accountable to shareholders, not the general public. How much encouragement would someone like Elon Musk require before he tried to make all technology integrated with his proprietary software? And would markets be able to resist immense economic pressure Muskrat could bring to bear without government aid? Do we really want to, as Escobar did, pour kerosene onto American Society’s existing fractures and traumas? Because that latter seems like a given for a second Trump Term — most Republicans admit that Trump will deepen economic divisions in society, to unsustainable levels.

So, let’s get to the Progressive Accelerationist fantasy. Donald Trump very effectively destroys Amerikkka through a combination of insane economic decisions, violent actions, and repressive measures, in the same way that Escobar destroyed Colombia’s legitimate political processes. Great. Next question: What next? Because that is the disturbing question posed for American viewers. Do we really think that we’re going to hold a Constitutional Convention and have a calm, democratic discussion about how we will all rebuild our society? Because Colombia, Russia, Southwest Asia, the Balkans, and Kashmir are all more-pertinent modern teaching cases than the formation of the EU or the Constitutional Convention.

500 Days of Escobar is particularly instructive about what follows a second Trump term because several interviews document the permanent institutionalization of political violence and how that left the government in permanent gridlock. Let’s take that accelerationist example with my hysteria, and say that Donald Trump is elected, and, as promised, repeals the posse comitatus law. He sends the US security apparatus against all perceived enemies; domestic groups here form pockets of resistance. As Trump becomes less-constrained by reality (as Escobar did during the course of his lawless reign), these pockets will resort to violence, as political violence replaces debate and discourse. At the end of all of this, as Colombia was in 1994, does anyone trust anyone enough to rebuild? Government forces just massacred your hometown. Antigovernment forces came in and cleared it out a few months later. Who do you work with to get your country back? I’ve checked, and Colombia’s global stability index has improved somewhat since then, but 500 Days of Escobar suggests that, after periods of extreme political violence, the only thing that remains is a low level of political violence that simply simmers and makes reforms and democratic institutions impossible to maintain.

And that is the real, true danger that the world must appreciate about Trump. Yes, he might briefly take us to fascism, BUT, that will look less like Nazi Germany, and probably much more like Federal Government ceding its duties to local criminal groups, who will make life considerably worse, until more-violent criminal groups successfully chase them out (which is what really happened to the Medillin Cartel — they weren’t arrested or killed; the Cali Cartel and paramilitary forces displaced them, and continued the overall problems Escobar created or exacerbated). And, yes, we may have an ascendant Boris Yeltsin or Mohamed Morsi figure briefly, but let us remember what happened 10 minutes after the fact. Who really trusts the institutions and government apparatus that was violent and volatile to lead us back to Democracy? The Colombians interviewed seemed almost burnt out at the prospect of civic participation; Americans will not have the energy to reform and harness the FBI after it spends 4 years killing political opponents. And, really, after 4 years of unchecked political violence, why would anyone bother with the ballot box? We learned in 2000 that not every vote counts equally, but ready access to guns makes violent solutions readily available. We’ve never collectively stopped shooting since Lexington and Concord in 1775, do we think that we’re going to stop after political violence becomes a substitute for Domestic Policy?

In all of the comparisons of Donald Trump, we tend to go to authoritarian figures like Hitler or Mao or Stalin, which seems to miss the mark after 500 Days of Escobar, simply because those figures viewed government and institutions as means to maintain control. Donald Trump is more akin to Pablo Escobar than he is to political figures, simply because he is, like Escobar, only interested in not being constrained by the law. Donald Trump’s stated reason for running is to escape criminal conviction. Escobar funded a Congressional campaign when he learned that Colombian politicians were shielded from criminal liability. My point is; although fascist leaders lean towards criminality and chaos, that was not, traditionally, their ultimate goal — we can talk about war crimes and imperialist expansion another time, but they didn’t seem motivated by the opportunity to legally do more crime. And that is Pablo Escobar and Donald Trump’s only discernible political ambition. So, to anyone saying that America survived Trump once, we’ll survive him again; I have to say, I no longer share your conviction. I am deeply, permanently afraid that a Trump Presidency will simply signal the start of a new failed state that never returns to stability.