A documentary covering the history of the cocaine trade within Miami, and the attendant "drug wars", during the late 1970's, up to the end of the 1980's. What I was hoping to be a serious, sober look at the cocaine industry turns out to be nothing of the sort - starting out with gun pornography, this documentary wheels outs much-repeated cliches and tropes (including some rather racist commentary upon the Colombian and Cuban population of Miami), and seems to revel in death and murder (there are many gruesome still photos of murder victims featured throughout)
There are little actual insights from the law enforcement agencies and "experts" (no surprise there then), and those involved in the cocaine trade themselves seem to spend much time talking about the "good old days". Police corruption and political campaign financing is touched upon momentarily, but never followed up, and the documentary peddles the nonsense that Miami was "crime free" before the cocaine wars kicked in. George Bush Senior is shown in his "war on drugs" mode, which the documentary considers to be a "success", and other minor-league politicos get to air their views without being challenged once.
The last hour of the documentary spends much time upon the life of Medellin Cartel member Griselda Blanco, but even this gives no real insights into her control, power and influence within Miami and beyond - all we hear is that she had expensive tastes, was a lesbian (shock horror!), and was not averse to having rivals bumped off. The rest of the running time involves various small-fry gangsters and hitmen talking about their activities, and how they ended up being caught and imprisoned.
The documentary itself has a distinctive made-for-TV feel to it, and at 2 hours in length, is way overlong; the running time could easily have been cut by at least 30 minutes. There's absolutely no comment made on the impact of the cocaine trade on Miami's Latino population - all we're told is that the Latinos are essentially "bad" people, and that's your lot. There's also zero comment on the effect/impact of the cocaine trade within Colombia itself.
"Cocaine Cowboys" seems to possess all the accuracy and insight of your average "Mondo" film, and says nothing at all about how the influx of cocaine affected a major American city. In fact, the only thing to note on this documentary is that the incidental music was done by Jan Hammer, composer of the "Miami Vice" theme tune...and you'd probably get a more accurate idea of the drug trade by watching an episode of said TV programme!
An uninformative, slanted and cliched documentary, then. Doubtlessly there are other drug-related documentaries out there which offer far more in scope and information. Seek them out instead, and avoid this pile of nonsense. Not recommended at all.