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A wide-brimmed hat, leather bandolier, rifle in hand: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar used to dress up as a Mexican revolutionary hero for amusement.
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But during his heyday as the world's most wanted drug baron, he could not have imagined that Mexicans - then mainly smugglers for the Colombians - would end up running the empire he had constructed with so much bloodshed.
From being a mere stop on the smuggling route to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican cartels have largely taken over, financing drug manufacturing in Colombia and controlling shipments to the United States via central America.
"Power has shifted to the Mexicans, because those who control the most profitable parts of the business have changed," Kyle Johnson, an expert at the Conflict Responses Foundation in Bogota, said.
For more than a decade in the 1980s, Escobar and his feared Medellin cartel dominated global cocaine trafficking with his rivals of the Cali cartel, which in turn controlled the trade after the drug lord was shot dead by police in 1993.
Forty years of America's "war on drugs" later, Colombia remains the world's biggest cocaine producer, and the United States its biggest consumer.
A kilogram of cocaine, which sells for under US$1,000 (HK$7,800) in Colombia, fetches up to US$28,000 in the United States and about US$40,000 in Europe.
The fall of the kingpins - first Escobar, then the Cali cartel's Rodriguez Orejuela brothers - had an unintended consequence.
Colombian drug traffickers "atomized" into smaller groups that are more difficult to trace and eradicate. It also left a void for Mexican cartels to fill.
In the 1990s, "there was a sort of division of labor: the Colombians produced the coca [while] the transfer to Mexico or the United States was done by Mexicans," said retired police general and former vice president Oscar Naranjo.
With the US market largely in Mexican hands, Colombian groups have increasingly set their sights on Europe.
In the past three years, their drugs have been arriving by cargo ship "in very large quantities" in Spain, Belgium or the Netherlands, said Esteban Melo of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia.
The Mexican traffickers are known in Colombia as "The Invisibles," said Melo.
For "financing they do not need to be visible, they do not need a whole armed body behind them as they are not involved in the territorial disputes for trafficking," he said.
"Mexican cartels today control everything from [cultivation of] the coca leaf to the sale of cocaine on a New York street corner," then-senator, now-President Gustavo Petro said in August 2019.
Experts believe they may even be financing Colombian armed groups - at a deadly price - to capture drug routes formerly controlled by FARC guerrillas who disarmed under a peace deal in 2017.
Petro, Colombia's first-ever leftist president, has an ambitious plan to extinguish the continent's last internal armed conflict.
He is taking a carrot rather than stick approach, offering benefits to organizations that renounce violence and "peacefully" dismantle the drug business - including non-extradition to the United States.
Though weakened, Colombia's drug groups still exact a heavy toll on a country that has seen six decades of internal conflict.
Last year, the Gulf Clan cartel - Colombia's biggest - launched a violent retaliation for the extradition of its leader Dairo Antonio Usuga, known as "Otoniel," to the United States on trafficking charges.
Three civilians, three soldiers and two police officers were killed.
If the Colombian drug networks accept the offer to lay down arms, "Mexican cartels will face their biggest challenge to cocaine production and supply since the United States launched the global war on drugs in 1971," the Colombian Association of Retired Armed Forces Officers predicts.
