This paper starts from the idea of the cultural relevance of television, according to which its narratives are central to knowing the history, politics, the stories about the nation and a recent memory of our Latin American countries.Here, I present the results of a research that illustrates, through development groups, how Brazilian viewers interpret Colombian narco-telenovela Escobar, el Patrón del Mal, with the aim of understanding how recent history was built, as well as the political and cultural conflicts of that society from a television product.My conclusion is that the meanings attributed by the participants of the groups revealed important aspects of this role of television in our societies.The narco-telenovela faced them with the intricacies of a problem that is deeply embedded in Colombian culture and politics; it also helped them to understand the phenomena and events of our own reality from a critical standpoint and showed them that our Latin American societies develop, for better or worse, their own strategies of entry into modernity.