Extradition and Sovereignty in Narcos
From Narcos (Netflix)
Categories:
Run time: 2:49
Clip Description: The Colombian government works with the American DEA against the Medellín cartel, and the two states move toward an extradition treaty that would let Colombian traffickers be tried under American law. Escobar understands immediately what that would mean for him.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This is a clip about sovereignty as something states trade away in pieces rather than hold whole. An extradition treaty transfers one specific piece of jurisdiction — the right to try your own nationals for acts committed on your own soil — to a foreign court, and it turns a domestic criminal problem into an international one. It connects to work on sovereignty and its erosion, to asymmetric bargaining between a powerful patron and a weaker partner, and to the question of what a state does when a non-state actor inside its borders is strong enough to shape its foreign policy.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use it in a unit on globalization and sovereignty, or on state capacity. It is one of the few readily available clips that shows the mechanism of sovereignty being bargained rather than merely asserted, and students who find sovereignty abstract usually grasp it here.
Discussion Questions
- Extradition transfers one specific piece of jurisdiction — the right to try your own nationals, for acts committed on your own territory — to a foreign court. Colombia’s constituent assembly banned extradition in 1991, which is usually read as a victory for Escobar. Was that ban a defense of sovereignty or a surrender of it? Make the case both ways before you choose.
- The treaty exists because the United States wanted it and had leverage. Set out what that leverage consisted of — aid, trade preferences, drug certification, intelligence sharing — and then take the harder question: is an agreement a weaker state signs under that kind of pressure meaningfully different from one it signs freely, and does international law recognize the distinction?
- A non-state actor here is strong enough to shape the Colombian government’s foreign policy, which is usually taken as the definition of a weak state. Yet Colombia had a functioning legislature, courts and army throughout. What does that suggest about measuring state capacity as a single quantity, and what would a better measure separate out?
Assignment
The Fragile States Index and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators both score Colombia every year, and both are free. Pull Colombia’s series from 1990 to the present on at least three components — political stability or monopoly on violence, rule of law, and government effectiveness — and put them on one chart with the major events marked: the 1991 constitution, Escobar’s death in 1993, Plan Colombia from 2000, the 2016 FARC accord. Roughly three pages. First, describe what the indices say happened, and when. Second, test that against a narrative account from a source that is not an index — a country history, a truth commission report, a journalist’s book — and note where the two disagree. Third, the hard part: these indices are built partly from expert surveys, and experts read the news, so a widely reported event can move a score without anything on the ground having changed. Identify at least one point in your series where you suspect that happened, explain your reasoning, and say what an index built to avoid the problem would have to measure instead.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons, uploaded by Amel Ben Abdesslem.
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 5: Political and Economic Changes and Development
Topics: 5.5 International and Supranational Organizations; 5.3 Challenges from Globalization
Also reaches: Unit 1: 1.5 Sources of Power and Authority
Skill: Argumentation
Big idea: Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: United Kingdom, Mexico, Nigeria
Colombia moves toward a treaty that would let its own nationals be tried in American courts, and Escobar grasps immediately what it would cost him. An extradition treaty hands one specific piece of jurisdiction to a foreign court, which makes it the sharpest small instance of the trade the course keeps posing: states give up pieces of sovereignty in order to get something they cannot get alone.
Discussion questions
- Explain what a state gives up when it agrees to extradite its own nationals, and what it expects to receive in return.
- The United Kingdom left the European Union partly over sovereignty. Name one power it recovered and one cost of recovering it.
- Sovereignty is often described as absolute. Is a state that has signed a hundred treaties less sovereign than one that has signed none? Argue one side.
Short activity
Write the thesis (15 minutes). One defensible sentence answering whether joining international organizations strengthens or weakens a state. Then two pieces of evidence drawn from different course countries, a clause each, and one sentence answering the strongest objection to the claim. A thesis, evidence from more than one country, and a response to an alternative view is the structure of the argument essay, and it is worth practicing at a length students will actually finish rather than at full essay length once a semester.