The conservative culturalism in Narcos

Abstract

This paper investigates the conservative culturalism discourse in the two first seasons of Netflix series Narcos (2015-2016). The conservative culturalism (SOUZA, 2015) is an idea-force that defines Latin-American societies as insufficiently western places, marked by perversity and corruption. Narcos narrates, from an American perspective, the rising of drug trafficking in Colombia and the trajectory of Pablo Escobar. Thus, it mediates schematic representations of Latin Americans. Narcos domesticates some aspects of narcoculture and, at the same time, celebrates them in an audiovisual industrial format. In this article, I discuss those issues by analyzing narrative elements of the series, which, between fiction and document, circulates, with some controversy, as an account of the recent history of Latin America.