Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel

I was very intrigued by Jessie’s presentation describing Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel when she said that they raked in up to $60 million per day in profits. As a result, I researched the topic and stumbled across a YouTube video (https://youtu.be/hAQJ9bNENyA) made by one of my favorite channels, RealLifeLore. This video was an eye opener because it revealed to me how powerful the cartel really was. In 1989, at the cartel’s height, Forbes estimated Pablo Escobar to be the seventh richest man in the entire world and his net worth was higher than the GDP of an entire Latin American country, Paraguay. The cartel in the late 1980s made more money than Southwest Airlines, Facebook, or Starbucks in recent years without accounting for inflation! This made me realize that there must have been thousands of workers involved in this drug trade. Unlike large American companies, the cartels had no wages, unions, or any form of labor rights. In an industry much larger than Starbucks, every single person from the lowliest planter to Pablo Escobar worked everyday with the fear that it could be their last because of the drug trade’s brutality and uncertainty. On December 2nd, 1993, Escobar’s last day finally came as he was killed, which brought down his cartel and everyone that worked for it.