El Capo opens underground, and that is the right place for it. Pedro Pablo León Jaramillo, the richest and most wanted drug trafficker in Colombia, is hiding in a bunker with his wife Isabel Cristina, his lover Marcela, and four of his gang: his brother Nancho, Chemo, Perrys and Tato. A cell phone call gets intercepted by a military spy plane. The army drops two bombs on the lake above them. Tato is left behind, injured, and captured.
Marlon Moreno as Pedro Pablo León Jaramillo
Gustavo Bolívar created El Capo for RCN, based on his own book of the same name, and the series ran three seasons and 226 episodes, from August 24, 2009 to October 3, 2014. Marlon Moreno plays the capo. Katherine Vélez is Isabel Cristina Marín. Óscar Borda is Tato, Maria Adelaida Puerta is Pilar Monroy, known as La Perrys, and Juan Carlos Vargas is Detective Diego Velandia.
The premise is a man who kept his work from everyone he loved. Pedro Pablo stayed quiet for years, and the quiet built a web of betrayals, loves and hates that outgrew him.
That is the engine. Not the shootouts.
A Car Bomb at the Senate
The first season does not waste time. Nancho talks a terminally ill man named El Moro into driving a car bomb to the Senate for 200 million pesos, money for his family. Nancho never tells Juan Carlos, El Capo’s son. The explosion kills him. Perrys and Chemo pull El Moro’s children out of the wreck and promise to raise them.
El Capo has Juan Carlos’ body stolen from the morgue, and brought to a series of caves they are hiding out in.
The cave sequence is where El Capo shows what it is. General Moncado and General Sarmiento turn out to be allied with El Capo, not against him. Chemo dies in the raid. Perrys escapes vowing to raise El Moro’s children alone. Every alliance costs someone.
What the Show Gets Right
El Capo understands that a drug lord story is a family story with guns in it. The show hides Pedro Pablo from his own household, then spends 226 episodes taking that decision apart. Moreno carries it. In this paper’s view the script keeps the betrayals close, while the military plot never quite matches the domestic one, but the first season earns its length.
It aired in the United States from 2009 to 2014, first on TeleFutura, then on MundoFox for the last two seasons. Fox Telecolombia and CBS Television Studios made it.
The cave raid is the hinge. After Chemo dies and Perrys walks out with two orphans, El Capo stops being a chase and becomes a story about what a man leaves behind. That is the part worth watching, and it holds up.
Score: 7.7 of 10, the TMDB audience score from 1264 votes.
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