A waiter went to work in the cafeteria of Colombia’s highest court and never came home. His wife spent more than three decades asking the state where he had gone. Under Siege, a Netflix limited series released in Spanish as Palacio, puts that question at the centre of a Colombian historical drama about the M-19 guerrilla takeover of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá and the army’s assault to take the building back. Natalia Reyes leads the cast as Pilar Navarrete, a real name in this story: her husband, Héctor Jaime Beltrán, worked in the Palace cafeteria and disappeared during the retaking.

Netflix describes the eight-episode series as “a fictional series inspired by true and publicly known events”. According to the platform, the scripts grew out of more than seven years of research based on documents, testimonies and interviews. The official synopsis gives the series two time frames. One covers the siege and the military operation that ended it. The other follows the victims’ families in their pursuit of justice for more than 20 years. Netflix’s Spanish-language description sums up the gap between the two: “27 hours of horror followed by 40 years of unanswered questions”.

Who made Under Siege

Showrunner Natalia Santa wrote the series with Enrique Videla, Enrique Lozano, Jenny Ceballos and Estefanía Piñeres. The Colombian company Dynamo produces, with Mariana Berenguer and Mirlanda Torres as producers. Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante, whose latest feature is Cordillera de fuego, directs the first three episodes. Edgar Nito and Samir Oliveros direct the remaining five. When the trailer came out, Bustamante called it “an honour to be part of this series” and said he had been able “to get close to a story that deeply marked Colombia and Latin America”.

The production built its own Palace. Netflix says the series was filmed mainly in Bogotá on a set covering more than 4,000 square metres that took over three months to build, plus a 30-metre structure recreating the building’s original façade. Simón Crane is credited as action design consultant, David Gallego and Ximena Amann as directors of photography, and Manuel Gordillo wrote the score. The key art Netflix released shows the Palace’s main doors blown open, with an armoured vehicle visible through the gap.

What happened at the Palace of Justice

The facts behind the series are part of the public record. On the morning of 6 November 1985, an M-19 commando of 35 guerrillas entered the Palace of Justice through its basement. The building stood on the Plaza de Bolívar, facing Congress and a block from the presidential residence, and it housed the Supreme Court and the Council of State. The guerrillas took more than 300 people hostage, Supreme Court justices among them. The next day the army retook the building. Armoured vehicles knocked down the main doorway, and a fire destroyed more than 6,000 documents.

Netflix’s synopsis counts at least 94 people dead and disappeared, among them justices, guerrillas, civilians and soldiers. Other tallies run higher. Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes Echandía was among the dead, along with the M-19 commander Andrés Almarales. On the night of 7 November, President Belisario Betancur went on national television and said he took full responsibility for what he called a “terrible nightmare”. Most of those who disappeared were cafeteria workers. Irma Franco, a law student and M-19 member, was seen in military custody and was never seen again.

Who plays whom

The cast list reads like the index of a case file. Robinson Díaz plays Betancur and Santiago Alarcón plays Reyes Echandía. Carlos Manuel Vesga plays retired colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega, who was convicted in 2010 over disappearances after the siege and acquitted by the Supreme Court in 2015. Jorge Andrés Ruiz plays retired general Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, who led the retaking and was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2019. Andrés Castañeda plays Eduardo Umaña, the first lawyer for several of the victims’ families, who was murdered in 1998.

Luna Baxter plays Olga Behar, author of Noches de humo, a testimonial book about the takeover. Mariana Gómez plays the guerrilla known as La Mona, Irina Loaiza plays Irma Franco and Rodrigo Rodríguez plays Almarales. Camilo Amores and Nicole Santamaría round out the main cast.

A second fiction about the same building

Under Siege arrives a year after another Colombian drama about the siege. Noviembre, the debut feature by Tomás Corredor, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 and later reached Prime Video. It is set almost entirely in one of the Palace’s bathrooms. Natalia Reyes played La Mona in that film, and Santiago Alarcón played Justice Manuel Gaona Cruz. In Under Siege, Reyes moves from the guerrilla side of the story to the families searching for the missing.

That earlier film also shows how contested this material still is. In October 2026, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that Noviembre itself did not violate Gaona Cruz’s rights, because a work inspired by real events is not bound by duties of truthfulness and impartiality in its dialogue. The court did find that marketing the film as “the truth” harmed his honour, and ordered the filmmakers to apologise to his family. Netflix’s choice of words for its own series, a fiction “inspired by true and publicly known events”, lands in the middle of that debate.

Earlier screen versions touched the siege only in passing. Infobae notes that Netflix’s Narcos gave part of one episode to it and tied it to drug trafficking, while Caracol’s Escobar, el patrón del mal and the series El General Naranjo also referred to it. Under Siege is the first production to spread the events across a full season. That length is what lets the premise follow the families after the smoke clears, which neither a single episode nor a feature confined to one room could do.

The search the series inherits

For Pilar Navarrete, the search had an end of sorts. In 2017, prosecutors identified Héctor Jaime Beltrán’s remains in a tomb in Barranquilla that bore the name of a magistrate, Julio César Andrade. She has said that the search for Héctor Jaime and his disappeared co-workers was her reason for living. The Supreme Court set up a Truth Commission on the case in 2005, and court cases over the disappearances have run for decades.

Reyes framed the series in those terms when she shared the trailer. “Forty-one years later it is more urgent than ever to tell this story,” she wrote. “There are no verdicts here; there are many questions that remain open.” A drama made with documents, testimonies and interviews can rebuild a façade to the metre. The question it carries is harder: can a fiction tell a country what happened inside a building when four decades of investigations, trials and acquittals never settled it?

Under Siege: what to know

Is Under Siege a true story? It is a fictional series that Netflix says is inspired by true and publicly known events, the M-19 takeover of the Palace of Justice and the army’s retaking of it. Who is in the cast? Natalia Reyes, Carlos Manuel Vesga, Robinson Díaz, Luna Baxter, Mariana Gómez and Santiago Alarcón lead an ensemble that plays real figures from the case. How many episodes are there? Eight, directed by Jayro Bustamante, Edgar Nito and Samir Oliveros.

Under Siege premieres on Netflix on Friday, 6 November 2026, the 41st anniversary of the takeover.