Palacio on Netflix: More Than a Colombian Drama – 41 Years Later

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Palacio on Netflix: More Than a Colombian Drama – 41 Years Later.

On August 6, 1985, 35 M-19 guerrilla fighters entered the garage area of the Colombian Palacio de Justicia. After shooting guards, they took control of the building. The Supreme Court and the State Council were housed there at the time. The hostage-taking lasted 28 hours. When the military recaptured the Palace of Justice, it became a turning point in Colombia’s political and social history. Netflix now tells this story in Palacio – 41 years after the siege.

28 Hours That Still Echo Today

The historical starting point

The M-19 sought to react to an earlier, unfulfilled agreement with President Belisario Betancourt by taking the judges hostage. The hope behind the action was that this would allow the group to enforce its demands. The result was an act of violence, with the state’s security forces responding with military severity. Colombia’s political history was shaken by the events. The families of those abducted also endured more than a day filled with uncertainty; some of the hostages never returned home.

These very aspects of the event are at the center of the series. According to an extensive interview with the directors, Palacio shows not only the assault on the building, the military counterattack and the fighting. The series also addresses the pain of relatives who waited for news about the fate of their loved ones during the hostage-taking.

This required a large ensemble: guerrilla fighters, soldiers, senior military officers, judges, lawyers, secretaries and even cafeteria waiters all become characters. The perspective therefore extends far beyond the two strategic groups that faced each other in the Palace of Justice.

“Palacio” on Netflix: a drama more than Colombian, Latin American, 41 years later

Why “Palacio” Is Not Just Colombian

International directors instead of a single national perspective

The eight episodes were not directed by a single director. Guatemalan-French filmmaker Jayro Bustamante directed episodes 1 to 3, Mexican filmmaker Edgar Nito directed episodes 4 to 6, and Colombian filmmaker Samir Oliveros took over for the final two episodes, 7 and 8. Two of the three directors therefore did not come from Colombia. For Bustamante, this is not a secondary detail but part of the central idea: the story is Latin American because it touches on several countries and experiences.

Bustamante cites Guatemala as a concrete example. The Spanish embassy there was set on fire in 1980. The situation was different, and the attackers belonged to a peasant and student organization, but Bustamante sees an important parallel: in both cases, the state took control of the violence, the military intervened and the escalation answered the question of what the future might look like without further violence.

This connection shifts the focus away from a purely Colombian state crisis toward a regional pattern. “Palacio” thus tells not only what happened in Bogotá on August 6, 1985, but places the state’s response to violence within a broader Latin American context.

Empathy instead of a ready-made heroic narrative

Bustamante describes empathy as one of the main elements of the emotional storytelling. Showrunner Natalia Santa had previously worked on the screenplay for ten years. When the directors joined the project, they had to take over the existing material, break down established archetypes and develop the characters anew. The goal was to make the people behind the historical names understandable as people with their own realities and contexts.

This also explains why the series does not follow a simple classification of perpetrators and victims. Nito says the characters are complex and cannot necessarily be assigned to one side. His own casting demonstrates how broad this spectrum is: Robinson Díaz plays President Betancur, although the Latin American actor is best known for roles in “El señor de los cielos” and “El cártel de los sapos”.

The cast brings together different stages of Latin American film and television production. Palacio includes Jaisson Jeack as Alfonso Jacquin, Santiago Londoño as Elvencio Ruiz, Nelson Camayo as Luis Otero and Nicole Santamaría as attorney María Buitrago. Natalia Reyes plays Pilar Navarrete.

The Handover Between Three Directors

How eight episodes became a shared project

The transition between the three directors was the task Edgar Nito describes as a handover. Even before he joined, the team around Natalia Santa had gathered information, research and knowledge of the characters. Before the next director took over, this material had to be understood and adapted for their own work. Nito speaks of long conversations with Bustamante and Santa in which they established the transitions between episodes.

For Samir Oliveros, the same task became more concrete at the end of the series. He, too, had to be handed the research findings, the world of the series developed up to that point and the relationships already built with the actors. Bustamante emphasizes that the handover involved more than information. The familiarity between the director and the ensemble also had to be built so that the characters would feel like a cohesive unit despite the changing directors.

The solution therefore did not consist of directing every episode in exactly the same way. The aim was for each director to build on the existing material while also creating a consistent understanding for the next section. Nito describes the result as “a unified project instead of loosely assembled parts.”

Filming took place in 2025, 40 years after the historical events. Bustamante and Nito worked with the directors via Zoom for the series. This spatial distance did not alter the joint preparation: the lengthy coordination between episodes was precisely what made continuity possible.

From “Narcos” to “Palacio”

Dynamo’s path to becoming a Latin American Netflix producer

The connection between Netflix and Colombian storytelling goes back to “Narcos”. The series premiered on Netflix in August 2015. One of its most striking decisions concerned the casting of Pablo Escobar: Wagner Moura, who was born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, played the Colombian drug trafficker from Medellín even though he was not a compatriot of the title character. Criticism of the casting at the time gradually gave way to the series’ success.

For the Netflix series Palacio, the same sense of Colombian identity applies in an expanded sense. The production is handled by Dynamo, which at the time supported the US division of the French company Gaumont International. Today, Dynamo works directly with Netflix. The success of “Narcos” was only the first visible point in a larger production history.

The Colombian studio’s track record includes “Echo 3” for Apple TV+, “La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta” for Prime Video, “Historia de un crimen: Colosio”, “Frontera verde”, “Distrito salvaje” and “Cien años de soledad”. Dynamo also produced “Barry Seal”, “Los 33” and “American Made” for the cinema. Palacio now applies this experience to a historical story that reaches far beyond a single Colombian moment.

The Strongest Counterposition: No Political Message

A drama about memory, not about taking sides

The regional framing does not mean that Palacio formulates a political message in the classical sense. Bustamante explicitly says the series is not a political vindication and not an ideological production. It is intended to give collective memory its voice back.

The series therefore also stands against an overly simplistic reading. “Palacio” does not tell viewers which side was right in the violent situation. It presents the people within their respective contexts and leaves it to them to develop their own answers. The connection with Guatemala makes the story Latin American; the complex characters prevent it from becoming a finished good-versus-evil narrative.

This is how the title carries out its thesis: 41 years after the 28-hour siege, Netflix does not present the story as a closed chapter of the past. The three directors, who bring different countries and experiences to the project, turn the Colombian Palace of Justice into a regional space of memory – with characters who do not stand for a single cause.