UN General Assembly
2021

No doubt Netflix producers, particularly the writers of the show Narcos, are studying those recordings, because they offer a real and rare window into the thoughts and conversations of drug traffickers and assassins when they meet privately to conspire. As they talked to each other, they described their own reality. In the recordings, the drug traffickers complained that despite their best efforts, they had been unable to arrange any kind of deal with me and that I was not someone they could work or negotiate with. On the contrary, they knew that I would be ruthless when it came to organized crime. They even discussed how to try to kill me. In a recording made on 3 December 2013, after the elections, when they knew that I would be the next President, they said bluntly, “Now he will take us down.” They used a shorter and more vulgar phrase, but the gist was that it was all over, and they were right. Although the United States did not inform my Government about those meetings among drug traffickers, after I took office as President the subjects in the recordings ended up in jail in the United States for crimes related to drug trafficking.