In 1981, the Medellín Cartel, an alliance of Colombian drug kingpins including Pablo Escobar, the Ochoa family, Carlos Lehder, and José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, rose to power. Based in Medellín, Colombia, the cartel coordinated the manufacture, transport, and marketing of cocaine, dominating the global cocaine trade and initiating a period of extreme violence and corruption in Colombia and the Americas.

The Medellín Cartel's reign of violence and the figure of Pablo Escobar have become subjects of a vast literary and cinematic corpus, including the 'narcocorrido' ballads of Mexico and Colombia, which narrate the lives of traffickers in folk verse. The cartel's story has also inspired novelists like Fernando Vallejo and poets who explore the moral decay and social fragmentation caused by the drug trade.