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This essay engages with the local and global meanings that Pablo Escobar has ac-quired in media representations that range from a benign father to an evil social force. It argues that the myth of Pablo Escobar, as mediated by popular culture, has a social function: rewriting the collective memory of the War on Drugs. Es-cobar has become the embodiment of national and transnational trauma, and as the media commercializes trauma, it becomes a prosthetic memory of the past. Trauma and history intersect in complex ways, especially in the War on Drugs, which is interpreted through and constructed by mass media and individual memories, because historical events remain institutional secrets. Here, I analyze the myth of Escobar as a socially symbolic act that supports the continuation of the War on Drugs. The myth of the capo represses the past as it reconstructs the historical record
