Luckily for us, the good people atNetflixwere able to connect us to Salcedo for an exclusive interview.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How much ofNarcoshave you seen, especially the new season?
And what do you think?
Credit: Juan Pablo Gutierrez/NETFLIX
How did you get involved with this project?
And what stories did you tell Eric?
I was invited to L.A.
I’ve never seen so many important people in terms of the movies and TV sector.
And I went there just to resolve questions.
And they had all read the book, but I was interested that they knew me personally.
I wanted to be questioned.
So they had a lot of questions.
It was kind of a double-checking of everything: How was that?
How did you do that?
What did you say?
It was a cross-examination of everything.
How accurate is what you’ve seen so far?
The story in general remains the same [as the truth].
Do you have an example of something that might have been embellished?
I will say, though it’s horrendous, it’s not far from the [actual] happenings.
They did that the same.
Not with Harleys, they used two Land Cruisers.
I wasn’t there, but I had people who were actually in the execution of these things.
Instead, it ends up being an execution.
Oh yes, that was a very tense moment.
I was taken there.
I was never told the truth, I was lured to the place as a standard procedure.
So all of a sudden the scene became violent.
I started hearing screaming.
I did not go near it.
My role was to be on the outside, confirm the road was clear.
But I’ve thought many times, why did they make me do that, to be there?
I didn’t have to be there.
Was this a “welcome to the club” situation?
Will you tell everyone what was done here?
But whatever it was, I got the picture.
They could do this to anybody.
To me, to anybody.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a wife or anyone.
They could do it to me.
There’s a scene where the Americans are coming to arrest Miguel in his home.
That was attempt number one [to arrest Miguel].
Was that how it really happened?
Something very close happened to that.
Because at that point, they were suspecting about me.
They were having a meeting, and they were excluding me of everything.
I got to know I was excluded when I got a call saying I had to get there.
That’s where the scene of suffocation comes fromit could have happened if I didn’t have that news.
If that call didn’t happen, I most likely wouldn’t be alive.
In reality, I never killed him.
It was one of those things, I think the DEA guys did that.
My logic is fantastic: How could you think that I would be going to the streets?
But they have some information that somebody killed him, I don’t know how.
For a long time, I was thinking that it was the DEA who killed him.
I was hiding for a long time.
I didn’t do that.
It didn’t happen that way.
It doesn’t make sense that I’m going to go kill a killer.
I’ve never killed anybody!
The show presents a very tense relationship between you and Miguel’s son, David.
Was that true to life?
Yes, well, William Rodriguez was his oldest son and his successor.
He sometimes complained to me.
But because I was always at the meeting, I was a witness to everything that was spoken there.
And William would be there, and he was given jobs too.
One day, I came first, and he came second.
I asked as a courtesy, “How are you doing?
You look tired.”
He said, “Yes, frankly, my father is putting me to so many things.”
He was openly complaining.
Let it pass."
But a few months after then, everything was falling.
Everyone was going to jail and Miguel said the best thing was to put William in charge of everything.
He became a new king, and my position was: He’s the worst enemy I have.
He is a new king who has to prove to his dad and everybody else that he’s capable.
And there was nothing I could do.
How did you get involved in the first place?
That part is true.
Not much has been said about what sort of person was I.
My father was a general.
He had very good connections, and when he retired he started working for some oil and chemical companies.
So I thought, why don’t I use my knowledge for more.
So I established connections with very high-level companies in Great Britain.
I started using very high-level equipment for communications and location detection.
In December ‘88, my friend retired from the army abruptly.
They said, “We need somebody like you to protect us.”
They were in total despair.
So they told [my friend] Mario, “We need you.”
He said, “Well, I know someone who’s good.
Back then, GPS was in the hands of the military only, and I had them.
So I got locked in a room by the cartel.
I had no option.
Nobody asked me, “Would you have a problem with this?”
or “Would you consider it?”
They just said, “This is the plan.”
I had no option of saying no.
So your first assignment was to nail Pablo Escobar?
But those guys look like Boy Scouts compared to Pablo.
He had put a bomb in the building that destroyed the equivalent of the FBI in Colombia.
I don’t even remember how many people he killed just that day.
So I had sympathy [for the Cali Cartel’s goals] at that time.
[Escobar] was bad, killing soldiers and civilians.
And then after Pablo was dead, you tried to leave the cartel?
After Pablo was dead, I said, “I’m going.
They said, “No way, you have to stay.”
They just changed my functions.
So they needed to capture all the politicians onto their side.
So my role became other than just Pablo and became to focus on intelligence.
It was a mess.
Did those dangers include the North Valley cartel depicted in Season 3?
That was the other thing.
Now that Pablo was dead, not everybody wanted to make peace with Cali.
They had already developed another enemy, the Norte Valley.
And I told them [Cali], with these guys, you better give up.
We don’t have one chance with these killers.
These guys are too bad.
My strategy was to avoid confrontation.
Obviously, they didn’t listen.
My role kept changing.
And at that time, there were other things going onthey were reorganizing narco-trafficking and all that.
I never wanted to be a part of that, I wanted to be outside.
But I knew too much already.
So the family said, “No, no, no, you stay here.”
So how old are you now?
Today I am in the late 60s.
I have been in witness protection for 22 years.
How has your life under witness protection been?
Because when I arrived here, I was already in my late 40s.
So I had to give up.
Fortunately, I had the means to start a company.
So first thing was her learning English properly.
So she was forced into being a full-time student.
So there’s not much to do.
[Laughs] So we had to accommodate to the lifestyle.
That people might start wondering, Where is he now?
And not just the cartel, but the entire corrupt government and the system.
But that’s the thing in intelligence, sometimes when you do something good, don’t tell anybody.
