Los Monos in the Cane Field
There is a particular kind of courage that looks nothing like courage from the outside. Two pale, six-foot-two Americans — called Los Monos, the fair-skinned gringos, by the very cartel hunting them — drive an hour outside of Cali in the blistering heat to meet the head of security for the most powerful drug organization in human history, in a sugarcane field, having thrown their guns and badges into the bushes so they can't be identified as DEA. They wait three hours in the heat. They almost get arrested by the only honest cops in the province. Their asset saves them by announcing, loudly, 'Somos homosexualis.' And then they go back to a police base they know is infiltrated, pretend to run normal operations all day, and go back out at night to do their real jobs.
What this conversation reveals about humanity is not the badness of cartels or the goodness of law enforcement. It is the universal architecture of obsession — how ordinary men from Kentucky and Newark, New Jersey, former basketball player and ROTC officer, find themselves making vows in failing foreign cities: we are not leaving until every one of those four motherfuckers is dead or in handcuffs. And they mean it. And they keep it.
Dax Shepard, who has made a career of sitting across from people who have stared into something enormous and survived it, keeps circling the same question he always circles: why can't they quit? Why can't Miguel Rodriguez, sitting on billions, just walk away? Why can't Jorge Salcedo, making a thousand dollars a month to manage the security apparatus of the biggest cocaine empire in history, just leave? The answer the episode keeps returning to is the same answer the whole show keeps returning to — you can't leave once you're in that deep, because the thing you built knows too much about you, and you know too much about it, and that mutual knowledge is a prison more effective than any concrete wall with horizontal bars.
And yet Jorge Salcedo, the man who organized a helicopter assault on Pablo Escobar's zoo and negotiated his exit from the cartel on the condition that once Pablo was dead he could go back to being an engineer, finds his way out. Not through heroism exactly. Through a lawyer friend who got indicted, a chance to maybe get out, a whisper into the right ear. The escape from the biggest criminal organization in history begins with a favor asked by a guy who needed his sentence reduced.
This is how things actually happen. Not with tanks. With a beeper code where you subtract one from every digit. With Afro-Colombian maids making a meal at 1 a.m. for a hypoglycemic billionaire. With a concrete door six inches thick in a walk-in closet three feet shorter than it should be. With a Navy commando pulling a man out of a dresser by his shirt.
Dax keeps noting, with genuine awe and genuine ambivalence, that the whole enterprise is Sisyphean. You get Cali, North Valley is already rising. You arrest the dealer, the consumer walks. The Federal Reserve in Miami has ten times the cash surplus of everywhere else combined and you look at that number and you just know. He has reversed his libertarian position on drug legalization after watching the Oregon experiment, which is itself a kind of intellectual courage — admitting that the clean theory didn't survive contact with reality. And the two DEA agents, men who have dedicated their lives to the war, sit across from him and say: it's not really a war. It's a skirmish. We put our finger in the dike.
What saves the episode from nihilism is Salcedo. One man, underpaid, trapped, watching murders and bribes and the slow ruin of his country, who finds a way to say: I'm still here. Come to the cane field. I'll give you fifteen minutes. And then stays three hours because something in him cannot stop talking to two Los Monos who are also, somehow, still there.