Narco Cinema

Latino Pop Culture

Series Editor: Frederick Luis Aldama

Books in the series give serious critical attention to all facets of Latino
popular culture. Books focus on topics that generally pertain to the mak-
ing and consuming of Latino pop culture, including music, performance
and body art, TV shows, film, comic books, web media, pop art, low-
riders, sartorial wear, video games, sports, and cuisine, among many
other areas.
Frederick Luis Aldama, The Ohio State University, USA.

Titles:
Latinos in the End Zone: Conversations on the Brown
Color Line in the NFL
by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González
Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency
by Cruz Medina
Narco Cinema: Sex, Drugs, and Banda Music in Mexico’s B-Filmography
by Ryan Rashotte
 Narco Cinema

Sex, Drugs, and Banda Music in

Mexico’s B-Filmography

Ryan Rashotte
NARCO CINEMA
Copyright © Ryan Rashotte, 2015.
Chapter artwork by Ayumi Shimizu
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-50147-9
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-50551-7 ISBN 978-1-137-48924-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137489241

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rashotte, Ryan, 1979–
Narco cinema : sex, drugs, and banda music in Mexico's
b-filmography / Ryan Rashotte.
pages cm. — (Latino pop culture)
Summary: "This book provides the first comprehensive study of narco
cinema, a cross-border exploitation cinema that, for over forty years,
has been instrumental in shaping narco-culture in Mexico and the US
borderlands. Identifying classics in its mammoth catalogue and analyzing
select films at length, Rashotte outlines the genre's history and aesthetic
criteria. He approaches its history as an alternative to mainstream
representation of the drug war and considers how its vernacular
aesthetic speaks to the anxieties and desires of Latina/o audiences by
celebrating regional cultures while exploring the dynamics of global
transition. Despite recent federal prohibitions, narco cinema endures as a
popular folk art because it reflects distinctively the experiences of those
uprooted by the forces of globalization and critiques those forces in ways
mainstream cinema has failed"— Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Drugs in motion pictures. 2. Exploitation films—Mexico—History

and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.D78R38 2015
791.436561—dc23 2014043322
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Joanne Gagnon and Michael Rashotte
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Oye, Lecteur xiii

1 What Is Narco Cinema? 1

2 Hecho de coca: A Sentimental Education 23
3 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 43
4 Narcas y Narcos 103
5 . . . and Narco Gays? 135
Postscript: From Culiacán to Cannes 157

Notes 165
Works Cited 179
Index 191
This page intentionally left blank
 Illustrations

I.1 Unbelievable, unbelievable xiii

1.1 The blood- and coke-smeared mirror 1
2.1 “But our country, too.” 23
3.1 One harsh dose of catharsis 43
4.1 La Mariposa Traicionera 103
5.1 ¿¡ ¿¡ ?!?! 135
P.1 ¡Que viva narco cinema! 157
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

Thank you to Ayumi Shimizu for her illustrations and to

everyone else involved in research and production. Frederick
Luis Aldama, Erica Buchman, Robyn Curtis, raculfright_13,
Christian González, Patricia Rojas, and David E. Wilt: your
efforts are much appreciated.
For their support, advice, and unreasonable kindness,
thanks also to Tomás Diez (R.I.P.), Chris Montgomery,
Martha Nandorfy, Bill Nericcio, and Pablo Ramirez.
Above all, thanks to the Gagnon, Rashotte, and Shimizu
families, especially my parents (see dedication), Kesatoshi,
Mariko, Emi, Vicky, and Pat. Let’s add Glenn Brown, Pete
Dos Santos, and the rest of the Ajaxians (wherever they roll
today).
Ayumi, Ena, and Matt: _______________________________
(space reserved for something
mawkish and copyright)
This page intentionally left blank
 Oye, Lecteur

Figure I.1 Unbelievable, unbelievable.

Let’s begin in an unlikely place: the Royal Ontario Museum,

Toronto, Canada.
In its atrial lobby, to be exact. An elegant soft-lit won-
der hall where, on this frosty evening in November 2011,
Mexico’s premier novelist Carlos Fuentes will be discussing
contemporary Mexican culture (this being opening night of
the Mayan exhibition, Secrets of their Ancient World).
xiv Oye, Lecteur

At 25 dollars a seat—50 for orchestra pit, which guar-

antees some catered schmooze time with the distinguished
visitor—the hall is surprisingly packed. Row after row of
grad students, professors, artists, expats, and all-around
cognizant-looking people is thawing raptly next to nimble
Crustaceous bones, a bronze Buddha Viarocana, and two
faux-Renaissance murals of jousting knights, which frame
Fuentes in twinned lance tips as he takes the stage to warm
applause and begins to lecture on the past and future of his
country.
To call this evening my delight would be underselling it.
Major neural pathways in my noggin are blocked off for a
semi-annual love parade is more like it. For the better part of
my post-Hardy Boys readerly life, Fuentes has been a hero of
mine and, because he’s 83 years old and a rare visitor to the
north country, I’m sure that tonight will be my only chance
to collect his signature, maybe swap some oxygen.
Given my state of reverence, it will come as no surprise
that I remember little of the lecture today: a word or two
about the Revolution; something stern and excursive for the
millennial crowd; maybe there was a bit in there on Diego
and Frida, or maybe that was just the happiness talking—
anyway, it’s not important. What matters, for our purpose
here, is an incident about to happen at the end of the Q&A,
and this incident I do remember more clearly:
It’s time for the final question of the night. A trembling
hand is chosen from the audience. The microphone makes an
eastern relay through the VIP. The crowd hushes itself, refo-
cuses. Fuentes winces at the thundercrack of a young man
clearing his throat into the mike. A young man whose tweed
jacket and baroquely ruffled scarf smack noisily of junior
faculty. A young man who, with the full attention of one of
the world’s greatest living authors and his 400-strong crowd,
wonders if Fuentes “could perhaps say something about
Mexican archetypes as they relate to the drug war today.
 Oye, Lecteur xv

“What is it that persists in the idea of lo mexicano as a

kind of dangerous, macho, passionate character; a self-de-
structive, hyper-violent sensibility; a distinctly Mexican cool-
ness, or what you might call . . . ” This adjectival troop carries
on, and is paraphrased here to the best of a dubious memory,1
but doubtless you’ll gather its implications for a book intro
such as this one: this scarf guy is a dickhead. A grade-A bigot.
I’ve summoned him only so that we might recoil cleverly into
a thesis on the politics of his bigotry. One doesn’t generalize
about racial or national “character”—especially in negative
terms—in 2011, and if this fellow has undergone a period of
self-flagellation and banishment for his smarter circles then
maybe there is something like justice among the more lus-
trous ideals lighting the tenure track.
Now I’ll stop you right there. I know what you’re thinking,
that old conceit: this dapper claude happens to be none other
than yours truly, moments before some sort of rhetorical Zen
slap from Fuentes corrects my pompousness in a necessar-
ily public way. In that case, I’ll be happy to disabuse you: le
claude ce n’est pas moi (and Fuentes, incidentally, proves far
too nice a guy to take his questioner to task. I don’t remem-
ber his entire response, something about Al Capone, and
Mexico, past or present, holding no monopoly on gangster-
ism). To find me you’ll have to scan the seats in the adjunct-
faculty price range. Thirty rows behind the velvet rope (as the
scarf flutters), five seats left of the resident hadrosaur—there
I am: tweedless, in less pretentious academic fatigues (khaki
sport coat, Franzen glasses); alternating looks of disbelief and
outrage seemingly slapped across my face by the force of each
new modifier—“dangerous,” “criminal”; mouth frozen in a
Munch scream, maybe doing a little puling so as not-so dis-
creetly to reveal the moral distortion the question continues
to cause me as it crackles along. Unbelievable, unbelievable.
More than unbelievable, it’s uncanny. Weeks before
this gala, I’d defended a graduate dissertation about these
xvi Oye, Lecteur

stereotypes to a word—about how North American represen-

tations of a “lawless,” “violent” Mexico influence everything
from maquila-workers’ rights to migration laws to cultures of
tourist licentiousness. I am, at this moment, a mental reposi-
tory for decades of Chicana/o and Latina/o scholarship (to
which own my contribution is best considered an endnote to
a footnote). And so to hear my fellow Canuck, and clearly a
smart and articulate one, present these stereotypes as objec-
tive facts—and to Carlos Frickin Fuentes no less—of course
you’ll understand my angry hands, this Munch and pule
business of my face.
The moment at which a leather man-purse, incontinent
of several hardcover throwable items, can be heard purring
open from the cheap seats is probably a good time to draw
curtains on this memory and admit something that would
make my younger, more indignant self cringe: our bescarfed
inquirer has a point.
It’s not a good point. It’s not a fair point. What it is is . . . you
see . . . four years later, after watching upward of a hundred
Mexican narco films—films which on the surface (and it’s
a wide and thick surface) showcase an orgy of ruthless cho-
los and brutalizing federales and gold-hearted sicarios and
treacherous patronas; films stocked with real-life bazookas
and ostrich-skin chaps and blood jewelry and cowboy autos-
da-fé; films that have done substantial resistance training on
my egad and zounds receptors—how could I not concede that
this guy, like Octavio Paz (whom surely he got this from,
either Paz or Breaking Bad), wasn’t onto some history-vetted
truth about an abiding violencia in Mexican culture? Not
something “essential” perhaps, but a certain something none-
theless that needs be teased out and argued for 200 pages or
so, but that still might end up, I’ll admit upfront, supporting
the stereotypes that had irked me not so long ago.
It’s true: watch any narco film and you’ll appreciate why
the Mexican government and intelligentsia have roundly
 Oye, Lecteur xvii

dismissed this b-cinema as vulgar and corruptive and why,

in this attempt to celebrate its virtues, I need to acknowl-
edge a fraternal level of hypocrisy from the start. Because
as much as I’ll resist the temptation, in the pages ahead I
already see myself retreating from the hellacious civics of
today’s humanities departments to the mid-century author-
ity of someone like Paz, someone who pondered essences
rather than “cultural constructs,” who could say with a
straight face things like, “The Mexican views life as combat”
or “The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effu-
sions” or “One of the most notable traits of the Mexican’s
character is his willingness to contemplate horror” or “The
Mexican tells lies because he delights in fantasy, or because
he is desperate, or because he wants to rise above the sordid
facts of his life.”2 There’s a kind of gruff self-confirmation in
generalizing like this that sounds tyrannical, if not derelict,
today. These films have it in volumes. And, if I’m going to be
honest, that’s partly what makes them so satisfying to this
junkie’s taste.
So what’s my point? Judge not lest ye be judged? No.
Is “give Paz a chance” all that I’m saying? That would be
a slim chance, though not so slim as I’d have thought in
2011. It’s not even that I want to tell you grand definitive
things about peoples and cultures in a manly voice, but that
because, like any addict’s, a defense of my degradation will
naturally reflect the terms of my vice, I already see myself
slipping into some very harsh octaves in the pages ahead
and should be clear about this while you have a chance to
back out.
Maybe my point is just this: If you read what follows
and take umbrage and come to fantasize about strangling
me with an elaborate scarf—and with equally elaborate rel-
ish, the strangling; or gashing, clawing, belting; really, just
let the demons go to town—please know that I, too, used
to be aghast by this sort of thing. And that I could grasp
xviii Oye, Lecteur

deconstruction and track the hegemonic baggage of the dull-

est aphorism and never in a decade of scholarly inquest had
been so massively entertained. If you can forgive me, I would
appreciate it. If you can spare some indulgence, I’ll take that,
too.
Now let’s get a little atrocious.
 1
What Is Narco Cinema?

Figure 1.1 The blood- and coke-smeared mirror

Narco cinema is a low-budget direct-to-video cinema pro-

duced by Mexican and Mexican-American studios, predom-
inantly for US Latina1 markets. It’s a remarkably lucrative
industry and in over 40 years of production has furnished
2 Narco Cinema

a catalogue of thousands of films about narco culture in

Mexico and the borderlands.
Beyond these preliminaries is where explanation goes off
by itself to die. This is difficult cinema to describe to view-
ers unfamiliar with Latin American melodrama. Try to pic-
ture what The Young and the Restless might look like with
Steven Seagal as head writer and you may get something like
the Anglo equivalent in mind: shootouts, explosions, French
kisses, roundhouse kicks, more explosions, boobage, hysteri-
cal sobbing, punch-outs, and finally, explosions; at center,
the steel-eyed hero violently resisting (or maximizing a stake
in) the hematic vortex all has become. Imagine a Harlequin
Romance sponsored by the NRA. Imagine a décima to the
Lone Man crooned by a group of lonely men strumming their
AK-47s under a corrugated yellow moon. Add to this (what-
ever the hell “this” is) the tortoise-and-hare narrative pace at
which scenes of extended exposition rival quick shoot-’em-
ups, and the Bollywoodesque regularity of musical interludes
(in this case by celebrity corridistas) and it’s easy to appreci-
ate why the first-time viewer may feel a bit disoriented.
Before I get to the films, some distinctions will be use-
ful. Though they share subject matter and stereotypes, you
wouldn’t consider American blockbusters like Traffic and
Savages narco films. Nor would you those critically acclaimed
Nuevo Cine offerings like Miss Bala and El Infierno (even if
it’s these major-studio releases that journalists tend to cover
in the few editorials our genre receives). And while other
Latin American countries, Colombia in particular, produce
correlative narco films and novelas (which tend to be better
funded and more widely embraced by the mainstream); and
while films about narcotics thrive in just about every mod-
ern culture for which drugs and cinema are both prevalent
social diversions and climbable economies, those aren’t what
I mean. For its fecundity and longevity, its superlative vio-
lence and kitsch, there is nothing quite like Mexican narco
cinema.
 What Is Narco Cinema? 3

Having said this, there’s no cause to fret if this is your first

encounter with the genre. Narco films don’t often show up on
Blockbuster shelves or in Netflix queues. They aren’t playing
in a theater near you unless you happen to live in a Mexican
metropolis with a perennial schlock fest or campus “irony
night,” in which case you might find an old Almada brothers
caper sandwiched between a sexy-comedy and a Santo flick
in some late-night celebration of blecch. But root through the
bargain bin in an El Paso Wal-Mart or a San Diego 7–11 and
you’ll find what I’m talking about. Look for the DVD six-
pack with the bashful sex bomb on the cover, the ranchero
bruisers charging alongside her in their military-fitted Range
Rover. Make the five-dollar investment, go home, insert disc
one, press play, and zing off to an entertainment landscape
that will, I guarantee, trouble your understanding of the
power of film.
Or, if it happens that you don’t live in Aztlán, simply pay a
visit to a flea market in any major city in the Americas where
Latinas commune and you’ll find pirated copies of the same
films (five pesos in Tepito; five bucks in Toronto); or sub-
scribe to Cine Latino where these movies loop day and night
between the regular melodramas and the unfunny comedies
like malicious needs in a recovery ward; or go online and find
a narco-film blog that hasn’t yet been taken down, or just
head straight over to YouTube where you can stream some
of the latest dec- and viginti-annual shoestring releases from
Imperial or Raza Mex or JS Films, those studios that have
come to perpetuate the trade and ensure the luminosity of
a unique and decidedly anti-Hollywood star system in the
popular Latina astronomy.
Two things you’ll observe early: narco cinema is devot-
edly regional, with Baja, Michoacán, and, most frequently,
Sinaloa providing the backdrops, even for films shot in Texas
and California; and, while from picture to picture the cops
and narcos rotate as heroes and villains and the endings shift
from tragic to comic (sometimes leaving us with a smoky
4 Narco Cinema

question mark: a sequel looming on the horizon), there’s a

staunch moral lesson about being true to yourself and your
roots.
You may appreciate the moral lesson. You may also find
it hard to disagree with critics and even those filmmakers
themselves who’ll happily admit that this is not high art. But
it’s impossible to deny that in the past decade narco cinema
has become one of the most successful b-movie cultures in
the world, a truly populist cinema with a diverse fan base
overwhelming regional and linguistic barriers.
Like a very finicky species of lice, outside word of the
genre tends to travel on raised eyebrows. On controversial
reports about clandestine sources of funding. Some journal-
ists suspect that the industry is little more than a money-
laundering vehicle for cartels, 2 while others see the films as
PR campaigns designed to lionize questionable reputations
with bio-prop. And for every ten industry names who hur-
riedly dismiss such rumors, there’s one just as quick to sub-
stantiate them.3 José Luis Urquieta, director of such classics
as Tres veces mojado (Three Times a Wetback, 1988) and La
camioneta gris (The Gray Truck, 1989) estimates that at least
half of all narco videohomes are financed by the cartels.4
And whether this is true, or was once true, there’s an unde-
niable intimacy between the studios and the narcos whose
stories they tell. Actor, director, and industry grandee Jorge
Reynoso explains:
“The scripts are written in such a way that everybody can
participate . . . [The] strippers . . . the security guards, the cops,
the drunk guys, the hit men, and all the people who are in
that kind of environment always work with us. What you see
is what you get. The prostitute is a prostitute, the cop is a
cop, and the drug dealer is a drug dealer.”5
And here’s another curious fact: narco cinema makes for
a rare success story in the piratical age of film, generating
annual revenues of up to 30 million dollars,6 a figure even
 What Is Narco Cinema? 5

more remarkable for the fact that 89 percent of narco DVDs

sold in Mexico are bootlegs.7 El Bazukazo (2010), a popu-
lar film, but by no means exceptionally so, sold 20 thousand
DVDs on its first release,8 has, at the time of writing, received
1.5 million hits on YouTube, as well as spawned an unknow-
able amount of bootlegs up and down the Americas’ black
markets, and yet still stands, fiscally speaking, as a hit for its
studio. The reason being? It was cheap to make. I mean, like,
über cheap, and fast. An average narco film costs between
20 to 50 thousand dollars to produce, takes a month to film
(including pre- and post-production; writers get a three- or
four-day crack at a script), and a single director can put out
ten films annually.9 (Jorge Reynoso claims to have made 26
in a single year.)10 The business model is trial-and-error eco-
nomics. Studios write off the duds, recoup with modest sales
and cash out on the few hits that push them each year from
solvency to success.
To combat bootlegging, the films retail cheaply in US
chain stores (producers say their target market is Mexicans
in the United States),11 and some studios have begun selling
screening rights to TV stations in states with sizeable Latina
populations (Texas, California, and Illinois).12 Baja Films
Internacional—one of the studio titans and, based out of
Tijuana and San Diego, literally a cine fronterizo enterprise—
licenses its 400+ film catalogue to Los Angeles’s TV MEX,
and MCM Studios (La Raza Mex Films in its latest iteration)
now deals only in distribution.13 It’s partly the industry’s
financial acumen that has allowed it to create more jobs and
turn greater profits than Mexico’s better-established, state-
subsidized, internationally feted studios.14
All of which begs the question: given its financial success
and mass appeal, why is information on the genre so scant?
There are no complete archives for narco cinema that I’ve
been able to find.15 IMDB is shot through with rankling lacu-
nae (about a quarter of the films I’ve watched aren’t listed).
6 Narco Cinema

And while you could speculate about a lack of blog interest

or Internet access among its dependable fan base, I like to
imagine that this absence has more to do with the cinema’s
aesthetic. There’s something essentially anti-archival about
narco cinema. If the task of the narco novelist is to create a
“discourse of memory” that “restore[s] humanity to the dead
people in the street” (as Gabriela Polit Dueñas argues in a
recent study of Sinaloan literature),16 the job of the narco
auteur is much more mundane, his discourse of memory hew-
ing to the short-term. And unlike the narcocorridos, the bal-
lads of drug trafficking that have lately garnered highbrow
and academic attention (thanks in no small part to Elijah
Wald’s excellent book on the subject), narco cinema has no
readily apparent authenticity to trade on. Its kitsch at times
appears absolute that you wonder if it’s a purposeful affront
to authenticity-mongering audiences trying to look past the
flash for deep meaning. Put it this way: if the narcocorrido
has become a rare Robert Johnson 45, the narco film remains
a George Thorogood music video: a folk art pumped and
distorted into a combustible monster.
This is not meant to be an insult and I don’t mean to imply
that films are roundly . . . bad (there are some brilliant gems
in the catalogue, as we shall see in the pages ahead). It’s just
to say that the filmmakers are aware of their product’s shelf
life. The films spill into the market in scads to be watched,
discarded, but rarely celebrated. The nature of the business
is such that the cinema persists over the films themselves
and the stories and tropes are less flashes of inspiration than
worn industrial machines with which to repurpose the latest
song or headline from the drug war into a popular ephem-
era. Of course, for scholars and fans, this is a problem, and
what prompted this study was partly the desire for a substan-
tial survey of a cinema that seems aesthetically devoted to its
own obsolescence.
 What Is Narco Cinema? 7

But two years of research and thousands of death scenes

later, at a point where my interest is no longer just that but
seems more like a full-blown addiction, I have to be honest:
I do question whether it’s wise to promote anything that cel-
ebrates narco culture. Maybe it was just after I’d watched a
squadron of cinematic Zetas brutalize a group of migrants
(a Narco News report on the San Fernando Massacre fresh
in my mind) that the ethics of this project began to worry
me. Because even if the films aren’t always glorifying narco
violence, at least they’re participating in what political scien-
tists call the “banalization of atrocity,” that is, normalizing a
culture of large-scale and indiscriminate murder, feminicide,
and torture.17 And when I consider that this project indi-
rectly deals with an industry that employs child soldiers and
directly with an industry that glamorizes a sexy, well-remu-
nerative narco lifestyle in such a way that may seem attractive
to impoverished youth, I admit that I am conflicted.
And I suspect that you will be too. Whether it’s the schlock,
the violence, or the machismo, there are elements of narco
cinema that you won’t enjoy. And so before reading any fur-
ther, I ask that you take seriously a few discretionary points:

Warning: The Following Pages Contain Scenes

with Coarse Language . . .
¡Órale, carnal, pásame la pinche merca!
Narco cinema is a Rosetta Stone of borderlands jargon, but
I don’t mean only slang when I say “coarse language.” Slang
is just part of the vernacular of narco culture at large, a sys-
tem of signs that is regional in its expressions (its fashion
and music) and motivations (its faith in codes of honor and
local allegiance), but cosmopolitan in how it articulates the
anxieties and occasional joys which its endangerment can
inspire. It’s the language of campesinos and migrant workers
8 Narco Cinema

and seasonal gomeros harvesting poppies for the cartels; of

obscenely wealthy second-gen narco juniors debauching their
weekends in Guadalajara and Las Vegas; of awkward Chicana
teens battling suburban malaise in the great American mall.
The language that passes borders unchecked and with which
our cinema’s diverse viewership may make claims, or defy
fixed positions, on the torn and messy roadmap that global-
ization unfolds. But it’s also a language that has powerful
enemies and what particularly riles them is its coarseness.
In 2011, the heads of Mexico’s media conglomerates signed
the controversial “Agreement on Informative Coverage of
Violence,” an editorial manifesto on crime reporting that
offered much-needed dentures to recent state and federal cen-
sorship policies. The Agreement calls for relentless dedica-
tion to facts in covering narco news, and, more ambiguously,
mandates that artists and journalists be extra-sensitive to the
potential appropriation of their work into cartel propaganda.
Representations of the drug war are “to avoid the language
and terminology employed by criminals” and should not
depict narcos in ways that may be construed as “heroic.”18
That old trick in the new-media playbook—bombard the idea
with new representation and watch the zeitgeist regroup—
has essentially prohibited narco cinema in Mexico under the
aegis “free expression” (regardless of how effective the ban
will prove).
It’s not just Mexico’s “media elite.” In the later aughts,
when narco violence began to evolve a Fallujahesque bru-
tality, famous industry names came out against narco cin-
ema, as well. Veteran director Mario Hernández called his
a “terrible business” and pitched his retirement as an ethi-
cal decision: “Given the current situation, no responsible
person would make films which encourage admiration for
the narcos.”19 He chastised fellow directors for continuing
to produce sensationalist work and, anticipating the 2011
Agreement, called on his colleagues to “ . . . make films that
 What Is Narco Cinema? 9

reflect the reality. Films need to be objective and try to help

eradicate the problem.”20 Hernández’s retirement came a year
after Agustín Bernal, cliff-faced antagonist in hundreds of
narco films, returned to his hometown in Michoacán to run
for mayor on an anti-poverty platform. In an interview with
El Universal, Bernal (aka Romualdo Bulcio—who knew?),
while not dismissing his legacy, somewhat cagily admitted
to a connection between the media’s normalization of drug
culture and a tendency for youth to glorify the cartels.21
On one hand this is an elitist argument. Narco cinema
has always been dedicated to the hardscrabble majority, and
apologists insistently remind us that videohomes came about
in the first place because most Mexicans couldn’t afford a trip
to the Cineplex (an argument that is a little belated for our
culture of the bootleg). That Mexico’s politicians and media
leaders would prohibit a 40-year-old popular entertainment
is not only patronizing, it alienates those regions where narco
culture is the dominant culture, the culture that has organi-
cally flourished around an industry that now keeps entire
communities from (and not to be hyperbolic) Malthusian
collapse.
Furthermore, prohibiting an artist from choosing how
to portray a deeply rooted cultural problem (“problem,” or
“institution”) without taking real steps to eradicate the prob-
lem itself (which steps would be flimsy and gargantuan—im-
possible to climb without bringing the whole building down)
is obscenely hypocritical. And if this sounds vaguely like
contemporary American literary debates about the supreme
merit of fiction vs. nonfiction, realism vs. experimentalism,
remember that what north of the border amounts to a bat-
tle of smirks and salutes over the satay platter is in Mexico
a wartime proposition: abandon your craft or pursue it in
exile.
On the other hand, a clear case of state repression this
isn’t. Beyond the simple but compelling argument that narco
10 Narco Cinema

cinema desensitizes viewers to violence and attracts poor

children to the cartels, consider that what’s also put detrac-
tors on the offensive is narco culture’s increasing popularity
beyond its historical bases. The more diverse the fan club,
the further narco cinema and narcocorridos are able to dis-
seminate unseemly representations of Mexico, which, when
you examine them closely, resemble those stereotypes about
“crude,” “criminal,” “barbaric” Mexico that have been
imposed, more often externally, on Mexico for over a century
(and with consequences pretty involved, but obvious enough
not to go into here.).
Complicating this even further is the fact that narco cin-
ema is itself a heavily censored medium.22 Producers admit to
shying away from certain topics for fear of cartel retribution;
words like “dignity” “friendship” and “respect” repeat fre-
quently when actors are asked how they feel about their sub-
jects.23 As Juan Manuel Romero, head of JC Films, admits,
“We’re not afraid that [the narcos are] going to come after us
because we behave.”24
Who could blame him? For Mexican media workers, fail-
ing to behave can require fatal punishment. At least 30 jour-
nalists and dozens of narco corridistas have been murdered
in Mexico since 1992.25 The country ranks eighth for killer
impunity, just behind Afghanistan and ahead of Russia. 26 If
narco cinema’s repertory players are allowed to live at the
discretion of cartels27 while journalists who expose the drug
war’s atrocities with a rigor and realism foreign to the narco-
cinema aesthetic can be killed, and often without reprisal,
it is heartening to consider the 2011 Agreement a defense
of free speech. Not the “free speech” that permits artists to
say whatever they want, of course, but the kind that defends
solidarity and anonymity as criteria for free expression—all
of which recalls that old freedom to vs. freedom from debate
taking place right now in freshman dorms the world over
 What Is Narco Cinema? 11

(and not in a few cases with the aid of some heady Mexican
agriculture).
Finally, if this rigmarole about free expression and censor-
ship weren’t fraught enough with representational politics, I
feel compelled to add one more level by throwing that whole
nasty bit about authorial intention into the mix. What you’re
reading, in English, obviously, are the quasi-lucid musings
of an Anglophone French Canadian whose reasonable claim
to an American Latinidad expired sometime around the
McKinley administration and who, never mind the violence,
will probably spend more time than is generous making lofty
pronouncements about the kitsch value of narco cinema, a
source of endless delight and frustration for this north coun-
try rube. Not only may you reasonably wonder how valid or
necessary is my outsider’s interpretation, or why my “con-
flicted perspective” should matter at all, you’re also right to
question whether I’m trying to infuse something that doesn’t
belong to me with hipster (or worse, academic) cachet. 28 Fans
of narco cinema have diverse reasons for watching. What for
some appear to be the shallowest pop culture receptacles are
rich sources of nostalgia for others, and because I haven’t
grown up with these films, my perspective will bear out a
slack-jawed come-lately quality that may offend long-time
viewers. No language, I hereby admit, will be coarser than
my own.
In the pages ahead we’ll have to dismantle this triptych I’ve
been overdetermining with the title “coarse language,” but
for now let’s move on to our second warning:

Scenes of Graphic Violence

I’ve never been a fan of the expression “no guff, ” but this
must be about as startling as the surgeon general’s recent
thoughts on tobacco. We’re dealing with a cinema that’s
12 Narco Cinema

inspired by the grisliest bulletins from the drug war. What

would be unusual is if these films weren’t depicting the tor-
ture, rape, beheadings, mutilations, and civilian massacres
that have come more and more to constitute write-offable
expenses in our thriving transnational economy of vice.
Granted, and especially if you’re new to the genre, you
may find a good deal of its violence mercifully kitschy:
the gore-bespattered droppers and rollers; the constipated
dead; the bullet-chewed bodies delivering long expository
monologues in very articulate, very sincere quietus-dim
rasps. For some fans, b-violence and the b-actors’ response
are part of the b-fun, the questionable mold that gives this
cheese its tang. And I don’t mean just those urban bloggers
with enough kilometric distance and years of higher-ed to
furnish their cynicism. Though its interest in the films is
more emotionally involved, the target audience, I suspect,
is laughing, too. Rare would be the Quixote unmoved to
chuckle at the sight of a three-day-old corpse with restless
leg syndrome.
Of course, reactions to the violence will be as diverse
as the audiences who react. It’s snide of me to begin with
snideness. Especially when you consider that migrants are
the primary (or at least target) audience and that it’s work-
ing-class Latinas who make the films popular, it might have
been fairer to start with other responses. Feelings of vicari-
ous vindication, for instance. Surges of regional, national,
ethnic pride when the hero (cop or narco) beats impossible
odds to restore dignity to his community (or to upgrade his
Chrysler, i.a.). Nostalgia for a clear code of ranchera justice
in a world where officials discriminate against your family
via faceless bureaucracy.
Furthermore, while I’d like to think the failure to suspend
disbelief amidst such extreme fiction would be universally
abnormal in contemporary spectatorship, the drug war has
for a long time tested the relativity of “normal” perspective. (I
 What Is Narco Cinema? 13

recall a passage in Ioan Grillo’s El Narco in which the author

asks a school psychologist in Ciudad Juárez about the trau-
matic origins of teenage gang-members who learn to murder
and rape before starting high school. The psychologist, writes
Grillo, “stares back . . . as if she hasn’t thought about it before”
and responds, “They don’t feel anything that they have mur-
dered people . . . They don’t recognize rules or limits.”29 And
then I remember an anecdote from actor Carlos Samperio
about being approached by a six-year-old on a film set. The
boy told Samperio that he wanted to grow up to be just like
him. “An actor?” “No, stupid, I want to be a narco.”30)
Imagine being a middle-class viewer in Ciudad Juárez, the
border city now infamous for its murder rate, which ran as
high as 9.9 corpses a day in 2010 (and this is only the official
tally).31 Consider what it would be like to watch one narco
film every night and compare the death toll on screen to that
of your neighborhood and wind up with a very volatile point
spread. (JC Films producer Juan Manuel Romero claims,
“We are not even close to reflecting reality . . . You can actu-
ally call our movies ‘soft’ because we don’t show as much
blood and killings.”)32 According to 2012 stats, 34 Mexicans
are murdered every day and only a third of the victims are
identified.33 And so, bizarre as it sounds, there is a kind of
documentary underlay to the schlock violence on screen. And
what’s disturbing is not really the violence itself (which can
be mild compared to what you see in American blockbusters)
but this rotten symmetry.
This is still fiction, of course; news reports may inspire
but they rarely dictate plots. But even through escapism the
films immerse you in the quotidian bloodshed of the actual
drug war, and I think for outside fans something strange hap-
pens: the more narco films you watch, the more implicated in
the spectacle you sense your viewership becoming. The more
the kitsch wears off and you recognize its unnerving correla-
tion to real tragedy. Or if the kitsch doesn’t exactly wear off,
14 Narco Cinema

the elements switch places: the form becomes sincere and the
subject matter ironic.
I don’t know if there’s something eerily synonymous in the
studios’ ability to grind out film after much the same film
with the human disposability of narco and maquila culture.
Or if it’s imperatively therapeutic to fabulate la violencia over
and over in similar tales—if the cinema helps make sense of
the drug war’s tragedies by compulsively revisiting them on
familiar terms.
I think the films do comfort, and in a number of ways, but
it’s through the representation of violence specifically that
catharsis is tested on the very edge of irony. Be forewarned:
there will be blood, and your reaction to it may be a source
of tremendous cynicism and horror.

May Contain Scenes with Nudity and Sexuality

I hedge with “may” because, uniquely among world cinema’s
contributions to T&A, narco films tend to be pretty chaste
affairs. You’ll likely surf a ten-film streak before glimpsing
a woman’s nipple, double that for one of those saxophonic
montages of the Cinemax-abridged Kama Sutra. (If skin is
what you’re after—and surely your viewing prerogatives are
utmost erudite and scholarly—stick with the 70s and 80s
ficheras.)
I’m not denying the sexiness. Bombshell casting is indus-
try standard and the wardrobes of female leads are stocked
predominantly with halter tops, negligées, hot pants, jorts,
bikinis, microskirts and other clothes cut stingily from fab-
rics meant to breathe. Such garden variety objectification,
together with an almost biblical proliferation of virgin and
whore archetypes (why goest thou daughters of Salome if to
quarrel us our Marias) can wind up concentrating a heavy
dose of machismo, which in my experience has proved fatal
to a few progressive thinkers I happen to watch movies with.
 What Is Narco Cinema? 15

Still, it’s worth pointing out that sex scenes proper are usu-
ally relegated to the shadows, making our genre a prudish
one on the shelves of exploitation cinema.
So with this in mind, let’s diffuse a stereotype: for all its
criminal heroics and grotesquerie, narco cinema is a conserva-
tive medium. A cinema for the good-old folk, suggests actor-
director Jorge Reynoso, who dismisses mainstream Mexican
films as “too risqué . . . for the majority” (“the themes they
talk about are a bit off from where they should be, in terms
of culture and values”).34 Mario Almada, the genre’s most
iconic actor, is blunter: “Y Tu Mamá También. That’s por-
nography!” And moreover, for Almada, an “elitist” pornog-
raphy: “People don’t like those complicated themes . . . There
need to be films that everybody can watch.”35
Putting sexy matters aside for a moment, we might trace
this conservative-populist impetus to the political sensibili-
ties of Mexico’s drug zones, those rural areas where codes
of “vengeance, prestige, loyalty, bravery, guile”36 trump
the republican ideals of state judiciary and equality before
the law. In general there’s a fierce anti-federalist sentiment
in many drug-producing states (and in many narco films),
where prevailing wisdom says that the national government
is corrupt, and that politicians and lawmakers are careless
about rural society, showily dismissing the drug trade as a
criminal enterprise (while grafting generously from it behind
closed doors). Critics of narco culture in turn lambaste the
regions as backward and troublesome, thereby inflaming the
whole rural vs. urban culture war we touched on earlier with
regard to censorship.
The states I’m referring to include Michoacán, Guerrero,
Sonora, Durango, Tamaulipas, and Chihuahua. But in no
other state have drugs so thoroughly permeated the economy
than Sinaloa, birthplace and inveterate mecca of narco cul-
ture in Mexico and whose capital Culiacán is a sort of heyday
Detroit for the drug industry. 37 Sinaloan drug cultivation goes
16 Narco Cinema

back as far as the late nineteenth century, when Chinese immi-

grants and local farmers from the mountains of Badiraguato
began refining poppies for American and border-city mar-
kets. By the 1920s, a narco-agricultural economy had taken
hold. According to drug historian Luís Astorga,
“[The entrepreneurs] who persisted . . . became profession-
als . . . created dynasties, transmitted their know-how to the
successive generations and succeeded in founding a source
of permanent drug trafficking leaders to manage the busi-
ness nation-wide. In the long term, they appear as a kind of
oligopoly: they have been leading the most important drug
trafficking groups since the beginning of prohibition.”38
Not surprising then is the state’s long-standing tolerance
for drug dealing, or the way that drugs have become seam-
lessly embedded in Sinaloan culture. Fashion, music, idioms,
even automobiles and religious practices, bear on narcotics.
A 2011 federal report on narco culture warns that Sinaloans
tend no longer to question the ethics of drug trafficking or
to consider violent cartel rivalries anything more than busi-
ness as usual.39 This may be true to an extent, but we’re still
a long way from Gomorrah. For generations, Sinaloans have
accepted trafficking as valid commercial activity (as early as
the 1950s its local press was calling for decriminalization),
but drug use has, until recently, been taboo. A similar atti-
tude plays out in narco films, in which trafficking is narrative
fodder but usage a tragic flaw, a descent into “American”
vice that may prompt a hero’s downfall.40
Even beyond codes and mores, Sinaloa’s influence on narco
cinema is aesthetically formative. This is the state that gave
us the corrido (and later the narcocorrido). The state in which
trading narco gossip constitutes a local pastime (Sinaloans
approach drug lore with a frankness and enthusiasm unlike
any other regional group in Mexico).41 Even kitsch is a kind
of narco aesthetic in Culiacán, where for many a nouveau
riche sensimilla baron, chintzy décor and “mail-order Louis
 What Is Narco Cinema? 17

XIV living-room sets” are mais oui.42 And so to bring us

back to the topic at hand, the Sinaloan influence might also
explain why the surface area of skin you encounter in a typi-
cal narco film is that you’d find in a local beauty pageant
(another cultural mainstay).
But if these are regional films, how do you explain their pop-
ularity across the Americas? Film critic Ernesto Diezmartínez
Guzmán says that, for Mexicans abroad, “watching this type
of movie is a way of staying connected to their people, their
land, their problems. It’s the same phenomenon that made
narcocorridos [popular] even for those people born [in the
United States] who aren’t fluent in Spanish.”43 But why this
land, these people, their problems? Why watch Los Cuates
de Sinaloa over a schmancy highbrow porn like Y Tu Mamá
También when your family comes from Oaxaca and both
bootlegs retail at the same price?
Maybe the answer has something to do with what I was
trying to say earlier about Octavio Paz and the emotional
merits of cultural identity—the use-value of essence, if you
will. Imagine for a moment that you’re a twentysomething
Chicana motorist in post-SB1070 Arizona, where police
have the right to stop brown people in public and demand
proof of citizenship. (This may sound a bit liberalishly cloy-
ing, but indulge me.) Imagine the whine and the red whirl
in your rearview mirror and the officer lumbering over to
your rolled-down window with a look of bored suspicion.
“You-sted hablay the English?” His flashlight scanning yes-
terday’s La Voz Arizona spread over the backseat, his ears
twitching to the Shakira undulating jihad-like on your ste-
reo (and in this fantasy scenario, you don’t care much for
Shakira because why not and me neither). Imagine, in short,
that in a moment of normalized interrogation, your body and
the culture that assists its incarnation become evidence that
you don’t belong, that you aren’t who you say you are. And
maybe this has happened a few times.
18 Narco Cinema

And then imagine coming home and watching a movie full

of norteño idioms and lush brazen banda music, a film in
which a definitive regional identity is a thing to be exalted,
lovingly owned. A film about a hero who is unambiguously
the proud son of his place and time, and who’ll fight with
those who say otherwise.
There are many scholars who insist that complexity is the
only worthy tactic with which to battle those who mean to
fix your identity in place. Maybe they’re right (it’s hard to
argue with a hundred years of mestizaje scholarship). But it
seems unfair to dismiss the power of a simple story, to deny
escapism the emotional value of its refuge. I’m not saying all
narco films are morally simplistic, just that most of them can
be if you need them to be.
And so awkwardly to loop this back to my original point:
if narco cinema pits the conservative region (with its virtues
of loyalty, community, honesty) against larger society (cor-
rupt, impersonal, hypocritical), there’s a similar moral con-
frontation echoed in the films’ representation of sexuality:
portraying sex modestly challenges mainstream skin-happy
Mexican and US films by advancing alternative community
standards, however ambiguously the audience is inclined to
accept those standards or envision the kind of community
they support.

And Mature Subject Matter

I suppose by now if these warnings have served an overlaying
purpose it’s been to share some of the confusion I’ve felt as
a longtime viewer and to prep you on the paradoxes that lie
ahead. We’ll be watching a regional cinema that’s becoming
a global phenomenon in Latina pop culture; a cinema that is
excessively violent and crude in its promotion of moral virtues
and conservative ideals; that is crotch-grabbingly macho and
driven by the flamboyant inclinations of melodrama; that is
 What Is Narco Cinema? 19

produced for migrant and Mexican-American audiences but

has found an expansive range of intimacy among Latinas and
even far-northern outsiders like me.
In the blood- and coke-smeared mirror that narco cinema
holds up to life on the drug war’s battlefronts, it’s often dif-
ficult for those of us further afield to pick out our reflections.
But they are there. Regardless of whether you use drugs,
whether your stance on legalization happens to resemble Bill
Clinton’s circa ’95 or Bill Clinton’s circa ’15, we’ve come to
the point at which a moral outside no longer exists. Of the
many nefarious economies that spur globalization toward
catastrophe, few are more fundamental than narcotics. This
might sound a bit like a haberdasher directing you to the
tinfoil aisle, but the facts are in. The narcotic industry is mas-
sively vital. Almost four times more profitable than Pemex,
Mexico’s state-owned oil corporation.44 So foundational not
just to the Mexican, but also the global economy, that taking
any kind of moral position against narcotics is at this point a
luxury that dazzles us into blindness. This is no longer, nor
was it ever, only Mexico’s or Latin America’s problem, as
much as the slur abides and is one people will fight for with
all kinds of funding to take to their graves.
The late Charles Bowden, who spent decades chronicling
the atrocities of the drug war in Mexico, put this much better
than I will:
“Drugs may be the major American story of our era, the
thing that did more to alter behavior and law, that redis-
tributed income to the poor far more dramatically than any
tinkering with tax codes, that jailed more people and killed
more people than any US foreign policy initiative since the
Vietnam War. But this vital force, this full-tilt-boogie eco-
nomic activity, is absent from our daily consciousness and
only surfaces when discussed as a problem. And this problem
is always placed on the other side of town or the other side of
a line or the other side of the river.”45
20 Narco Cinema

It’s a valid stereotype: the North American is either blind

to the problem or quick to displace it. According to Octavio
Paz, “He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between
reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for
being invisible.”46 Today, when the wall is no longer invisible
but 20 feet high and 350 miles long, the musing seems all the
more poignant.
But Paz isn’t referring to your typical North American
amnesiac, he’s talking about his archetypal self-conscious
Mexican. And it’s my hope that when you watch these films,
what you come to perceive in their kitschy excesses will be a
kind of personal reflection. Partly this book will attempt to
share mine.
Embedded in the drug war, the Mexican media’s job is
to report the harrowing details, but this can’t be all that’s
required. Not to discount facts or the talented journalists
who risk their lives gathering them. Nor to dismiss the high-
brow “narco films” that take the drug war to Sundance and
Cannes—we’ll watch a few of these as well. But as a commer-
cial product of (and not a news bulletin or auteur’s reflection
on) narco culture, narco cinema offers a different perspective.
We need facts and high realism, but sometimes we also need
the fantastic and fabulistic to fill out our expanding scope of
things. What is realism—what is reality—without the mawk-
ish bits, the wailing after the slaughter, the occasional brutal
dream that wakes us in the middle of the night?
On that note, and in the spirit of Paz, I invite you to put
your narco masks on, to stare into the screen and take stock
of what you see. To keep staring until the rude figures inhab-
iting your reflection take on the tension of an inner life and
you begin to discern what the films understand too well: that
we are all narcos in the range of our greed and indifference,
and in our longing for a better world beyond. I’m getting
off my soapbox now, not to worry. Just a final platitude, if I
may: the more intrinsically we’re able to recognize ourselves
 What Is Narco Cinema? 21

in the complex hemispheric dimensions of Mexico’s drug

war, the more inclined we may be to negotiate a resolution
on humanistic terms; and, if you can get past the kitsch, this
recognition just might be the rewarding side effect of taking
in some of the best and most bizarre footage in Mexico’s
b-filmography.
If you can get past the kitsch.
 2
Hecho de coca: A Sentimental Education

Figure 2.1 “But our country, too.”

The opening credits of our first film appear over black screen
in a font my word processor identifies as Lucida Handwriting.
This is not endearing type. The vibe is somewhere between
wedding-registry gauche and yearbook duplicitous. La
Raza Mex presenta. But foremost among its occlusive
virtues, what makes it an auspicious choice over, say, Big
24 Narco Cinema

Caslon’s competitive handshake, or the personality disorder

of Andale Mono, and what renders its acknowledgement
here a critical imperative rather than a waste of time is not its
form—forget about form—it’s the cogent poetry of the name
itself. Lucida Handwriting. That suggestion of something
luminous, brilliant trapped within a scrawl so personal it’s
difficult for others to understand, let alone divine its worth.
In the public domain of typeface, there is not a more pitch-
perfect metaphor for the film we are about to see or for the
genre you may eventually come to love. But we’re only two
seconds in; forgive my impatience.
Interspersed with these typographically aware credits is
the film’s opening vignette, which goes something like this:

FADE IN:
EXT. FIELD—MORNING
Scene opens with a close-up of a stuff sack: a
hobo’s bindle the size of a compact car, navy and
grease-patched. A muster of gloved hands circles
its brim, tugging on drawstrings before a horizon
of scrubgrass.
As the picture widens, the hands prolong into
windbreakers, K-Mart jeans, trucker caps and cow-
boy hats: laborers, four. Standing in the center of
the scrubby field, which is bordered far back by a
row of thin trees and one-story hovels and beyond
these by a mountain range whose titanic asymme-
try sometimes wades through the dull clouds. The
clouds are grey and ensconcing and filter grainy
sunlight into the scene. Mongrel winds chew the
boom mics. Overtop canned birdsong, at the rate
of raindrops falling from eaves after a storm,
a guitarist plunks. Indeed it is a dreary one
in the fictional Real de Ahuichila. The kind of
rural town that subsists on narco ag. The kind of
weather people feel in their scars.
The four men begin to run. From the stuff sack
in their hands a nylon canvass of Mexico’s tricol-
ors spills to the ground. It trails behind them,
flooding the patchy grass to the field’s edge where
the men divide and begin stretching it taut.
 Hecho de coca 25

What they are doing is assembling a hot-air

balloon, one of the oldest drug-smuggling tech-
nologies in the history of American dependence.
They do this in silence, in nods and syllables,
fastening the basket, hoisting the envelope into
a wind-trapping position. A burner is laid flat on
the ground and a man crouches behind it, straf-
ing the envelope with steady blasts of fire, like
a bomber pilot in a world war. With each blast,
the envelope billows to new latitudes, its tangled
gores distinguish themselves: green, white, red,
esperanza, unidad, sangre.
The balloon is now airborne, its anchoring ropes
snap at the ground, and we see that a patch of
bright blue has broken through the clouds along
the western firmament. After a final credit (dir.
Jorge Ortín) the untethered balloon vanishes
upward, beyond the gray and the blue, into an
over-exposed burst of sunlight, which shocks the
whole picture white. In the second it would take
to shield our eyes, the scene FADES TO . . .
INT. A POORLY LIT RESTAURANT
Where our story begins.

I wonder about the contrast between the blinding sun and

the dark restaurant, but understand it would be fallacious to
take it as any kind of symbolism other than accidental. Much
of the cinematography ahead will have severe photic deficien-
cies: offices are cavernously dark, dusk forces a lively evening
stroll into a midnight stumble. (I know nothing of the work
of Manuel Martinez but feel it only fair he shared lighting
credits with his deity.) Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t take it
at all. Accident and intention bleed together in narco cinema:
miscues assume narrative import, typeface becomes meta-
phor. When it’s your task to defend the genius of b-cinema,
it’s tempting to read craft into the genre’s impoverishments,
even at the risk of smugging up your argument.
But what is no accident, what is absolutely apposite, is the
opening depiction of a Mexico robust and fragile on course
to the United States. A Mexico hecho de coca, filled with
26 Narco Cinema

illicit cargo for northern markets, retreating from the hands

that put it together in one fragmenting blast of white light.
Don’t give second thought to the Coca, Inc. on your DVD
box (probably a last-minute revision, so last-minute it fol-
lowed postproduction); Hecho de coca is the better title: it
transmits, it resonates. Later in the film, the police comman-
dante places it in an American adage: “Mexico is the country
made of cocaine.” And when the governor in the film tells
us, States be damned, he’s going to reclaim his country from
the narcos, we already know from this opening vignette how
quixotic his plan is, for that country has escaped him, and
will return only to leave once more.
The title also plays on Hecho en Mexico, the stamp of
national production whose future looked more uncertain
the year this film appeared. By 2006, almost one thousand
maquiladoras had shuttered within the last five years.1 The
narcotics industry, meanwhile, had achieved the distinction
of producing 70 percent of America’s drug supply2; without
it, the Mexican economy could have shrunk by as much as
63 percent (according a leaked document from Mexico’s
Centre for Research and National Security). 3 Hecho de coca
suggests the present failings of a globalized Mexico and
wryly points at the obvious competitive advantage for future
success.
And so this is what’s at stake, the hazard and providence
of a tricolored balloon in perpetual flight through volatile
weather. I think Hecho de coca has two great moments and
this is the first: a glimmer of brilliance on the edge of the
scrawl. But it’s a far journey to the second, and I’m afraid I’m
probably going to get a little smarmy along the way.
Before we go any further, though, let’s take a closer look
at the opening credits. Felipe Perez-Arroyo is a familiar
name, belonging to the main producer of videohomes for the
wackily prolific La Raza Mex Films. RMF got its start in the
80s and early 90s making sexy-comedies, horror flicks and
 Hecho de coca 27

cholo dramas, but since the aughts its focus has been narco
cinema.4 El Clon de Hitler (2002), the parable of an emo
Führer who punishes his overeating henchmen by tweak-
ing their nipples, will be dealt with later on, while another
2002 offering, Qué se muera la cabrona (Let the Bitch Die),
may receive a page or two in our chapter on gender politics,
depending on how much space we devote to its timely cin-
ematic inquiry, Bill Gritón vs. Mónica del Wisky (1999).
Next on the bill is none other than Mario Almada, a
star who invites all manner of cliché about the OG or jōnin
or John Wayne or Chuck Norris (John Wayne-cum-Chuck
Norris would be chronologically apt) of narco cinema and
whose whopping 3.5 minutes of screen time as the troubled
town’s governor earn him top billing (and likely the highest
salary). Though it’s tempting here to enter a lengthy digres-
sion about the regal longevity and roisterous merits and kill
stats that have promoted Almada to one of Latina pop cul-
ture’s most beloved nonagenarians, we’ll have to save this for
the next chapter and instead say something about . . .
Rafael Rojas. I suppose, truth be told, I really don’t
have much to say about Rafael Rojas, other than that he has
the distinction of being the first of six Rafael Rojases listed
as actors on IMDB where our film has no entry. Primarily
known for his novela work, the Costa Rican actor will be
playing Lucio, a hard-boiled Sinaloan cop with a heart of
gold and a mean moustache.
As much as I share an affectionate (and often unreason-
ably fierce) loyalty to (most) people with a double-R allit-
eration to their full names, I admit to being not a little
miffed that Rojas’s credit precedes Diana Golden’s, and
that I’m even tempted to cry misogyny over this sequen-
tial blunder. Golden, originally from Colombia, might be
one of narco cinema’s better-known femmes, and in addi-
tion to being the star of just as many novelas as Rojas, she
also happens to be an award-winning playwright, a Playboy
28 Narco Cinema

cover model (at age 41) and a terrific actress to boot. Today
Golden will be playing Hilda Rebolledo, the top drug bar-
oness of Real de Ahuichila. (And actually, if Ahuichila5 is
narco central—Almada’s governor tells us “All roads that
lead to the border start here”—then that makes her the
country’s top drug baroness, meaning she’s really oversee-
ing the entire narcosphere from the crosshairs of her trusty
rifle, and not just her expansive spa-like hacienda and its
scraggly desert environs.)
It pains me to have to introduce Jorge Hernan, the
film’s lead, on a sad note, but according to his LinkedIn pro-
file, Hernan has given up acting to work as a “networker” for
a fruit juice company. I’m absolutely sincere when I say this is
terrible news, and that he’s a capable actor who gives a strong
show as Felix, the lone incorruptible cop. Hernan, who is
slickly handsome in a civil service sort of way, looks like a
muscular version of the late Andrew Koenig (“Boner” from
Growing Pains, anyone?). And even more than the names, it’s
he who upgrades our cast into an impressive A-list of b-cin-
ema. So let’s wish Hernan godspeed in the juice trade as we
bid our credits farewell and move on to the story:
And so back to the aforementioned poorly lit restaurant,
where Felix and his wife Maria are finishing dinner (black-
ened tortillas with shadow soup), whereupon Felix surprises
his young wife with plans for a belated honeymoon to Cancún.
The overworked junior officer has finally earned some time
off from busting narco chops (i.e., intercepting cargo at road-
blocks). Maria is delighted by the news and races her husband
home to pack sunblock, pestering him with details along the
way.
It’s only unfortunate for newlywed bliss that Felix has lately
proved too good at his job: that his multiple drug busts have
so dearly cost the Rebolledo cartel that boss Hilda requires a
little redress. Hence the three leotard-masked goons kicking
 Hecho de coca 29

in the front door. Don’t be fooled by the maraca-and-pan-

pipe score; if we know anything about narco cinema, we
know this won’t be a pleasant scene.
In break the narcos, out come the fisticuffs. The newly-
weds are repeatedly slogged, kicked, pistol-whipped (Felix),
vagina-punched (Maria, whose stoicism to the home invasion
and subsequent brutalization is a feat of unresponsiveness
remarkable in a genre known for its wooden acting) before
being forced to kneel before one another in what seems a
cruel parody of courtly obeisance, their faces a beseechingly
crooked arm apart. “You were told not to mess with us. But
you did,” the head thug informs Felix. He presses a revolver
to the back of Maria’s skull—“Too bad”—and sundry cra-
nial matter of Maria splatters across Felix’s aghast face. He’s
still wailing the next morning when the police arrive.
On our next visit to the restaurant, we discover Felix alone,
taking refuge in tequila and practicing the Brando variations
on the blubbering pout. He grabs an acoustic guitar from
Maria’s empty chair and begins to strum a morbidly tender
(if somewhat abstruse) ballad about jilted love: “If you’re
going to leave me, / I’m going to ask you / how I’m going to
die; / If I’ll be incinerated / with these ashes / you can plate a
brooch / to be in your chest, / both of us beating.”
Halfway through the second verse (“Make a comb of my
bones, / to stroke your hair”) a rush of wind rustles the cur-
tains and lo, in the empty chair appears the ghost of Maria.
She’s wearing the holographic aura of a vanquished Jedi and
a white tank top. As Felix croons (a lovely tremolo), Maria
bops cheerily to his sad melody, at one point reaches for his
right eyebrow, and blows him a farewell kiss. Felix, of course,
can’t see her, and once the sustain on his final Em chord dis-
solves in the empty room, he has but a second to pout before
the same rush of wind returns, this time for him, and away
fades Felix into the congenial ether of his indulgence.
30 Narco Cinema

Now is probably a good time to pause the video for a few

words from the OED:

Melodrama, n. 1. a. a genre comprising any of the types of melodra-

matic work, esp. exciting by exaggeration and sensationalism and
often (chiefly in earlier use) accompanied by music appropriate to
the action; the style of drama characteristic of such a piece.
b. Originally: a stage play, usually romantic and sensational in
plot, and interspersed with songs, in which the action is accompa-
nied by orchestral music appropriate to the various situations (now
hist.). Later (as the musical element ceased to be regarded as essen-
tial): a play, film, or other dramatic piece characterized by exag-
gerated characters and a sensational plot intended to appeal to the
emotions.
2. More generally: any sensational incident, series of events,
story, etc.; sensationalist or emotionally exaggerated behviour or
language; lurid excitement.
and,
Kitsch, n. Art or objets d’art characterized by worthless preten-
tiousness; the qualities associated with such art or artifacts. Also
attrib., Comb., and trasf.
2014 R. Rashotte Narco Cinema. The writer’s snooty approach
to a beloved subaltern craft came off as kitsch, precipitating his
banishment from academe.
v. rare (trans.) to render worthless, to affect with sentimentality
and vulgarity.
Ibid. Kitsch not lest ye be kitsched.6

A number of academics have written about twentieth-

century Latina melodrama, mostly with regard to the tele-
novela.7 When I began researching this book, I figured this
scholarship would help me translate the grosser sensations of
movies like Hecho de coca, make the ooze accessible along
some cultural and, ideally, political line. This it did, and for
a while the arguments sounded persuasive enough in their
cryptic grammar so that, by a few obscure turns, I would find
myself nodding at points which would normally make me
grimace. Points, for instance, about the dramatic superiority
of allegorical stasis to character development; about exagger-
ated emotion as premium narrative fuel. Such conventions,
 Hecho de coca 31

the studies argue, create an antielitist “emotional democ-

racy”; or “[offer] the Latin American social body a realis-
tic sense of redemption and revelation”; or attack/redefine
colonial power structures “to find human spaces of libera-
tion and agency, precisely because narco-dramas escape the
oppressive and inhumane civilizing norms that have defined
existence for much too long.”8
This is a snippet of the discourse, which you’re free to
pursue in the stacks. I didn’t think I’d have much to add to
it other than perhaps a confession: this melodrama stuff,
well, no thanks. “Lurid excitement” sounded like phone-sex
copy. I read “emotionally exaggerated behavior” and my first
thoughts were, one, Uncle Julliard on an appletini mission;
and two, that documentary Jesus Camp (the scary mulleted
lady addressing the children in tongues).
More to the point, I wondered about the validity of melo-
drama as a frame for something as complex as the drug war,
whether it weren’t another layer of Marx’s “sentimental veil”
masking capitalism’s cruel mechanics (and thus better to tear
away than appraise). And, along a more shameful but health-
ier apolitical vein, I’d started to suspect that the reason many
studies of Latina melodrama devote maximum space to theo-
rizing about their subject and minimum-to-zero space dis-
cussing any actual narco films was because the minds behind
the secret words had accepted the very thing I was seeking to
deny: these films are terrible. Slapdash matter with little art.
100 percent pure poshlost mexicano. I still think this is a fair
description of many narco films, even of aspects of the best
films. And doubtless, by watching this movie with me so far,
you’ve sensed my reservation in how certain elements will
conjure up Snicker and Hoot, my lonely familiars.
Melodrama will probably be the most unmooring char-
acteristic of narco cinema for new viewers. Unmooring and
then marooning—it will happen just like that, regardless of
one’s intimacy with Latina culture. An analogy from the top
32 Narco Cinema

of my head: narco melodrama is a rabid peacock throwing its

whole body against the glass cage of your TV screen. A nov-
elty to slacken the jaw, but after a few minutes one gets antsy
for a long shower and maybe an actual novel.
This isn’t an original argument, I know. From its earliest
incarnations and across cultures, melodrama has made an
easy target for satirists, perhaps easier for none more so than
the contemporary Western viewer, who is so practiced in the
real-time translation of melodrama into kitsch that she can
cut straight to the camp rewards with nary a full groan. And
because it’s such an easy target, bashing it seems unfashion-
ably simple and requires pretty well obvious arguments with
none of the sexiness of the “melodrama as subversive vox
populi” school of thought.
The other danger in admitting this, of which danger
I’m acutely aware, is that it will strike a certain kind of
tenured reader as culturally insensitive, neo-imperialist,
Gallo-fascist, phallopressive, and so on. Just another white
man attempting to tell nonwhite people that what they’re
enjoying is false consciousness. One leading scholar calls
the genre’s critics a stuffy “bourgeoisie” lot, “members of
the elite . . . less concerned with a channel or outlet for their
emotions than with a manner of expressing the education of
their emotions.”9 Eep.
In my defense, though, isn’t it just as pernicious to treat the
audience as a single irony-free unit? Even today, from my pew
in the church of True Belief, I still cast with those critics who
emphasize the parodiable aspect of melodrama, and I remain
skeptical about narco cinema’s overall subversiveness.10
But furthermore, because I didn’t think the genre itself
was all that sincere about its commitment to the viewer—
remember this is big-bucks mass entertainment—and when
talented artists who share “elitist” aesthetic commitments
(characterization, script revision, for ex.) are more and more
ignored by mainstream audiences or summarily dismissed as
 Hecho de coca 33

hegemons by brand-name professors—well, I’ll just be hon-

est: I found something deeply manipulative in asking audi-
ences to accept the most artificial ploys as worthy narrative
strategies. Is it “elitist” to distinguish good and bad art, to
think critically about how a narrative “educates emotion”
(and, more to the point, how it might reserve and reassign
the sentimental)? Does any authority on craft automatically
mean neocolonial authority when it comes from above los de
abajo? Maybe it does. But ten years of higher ed have taught
me this: we can wax academic all the livelong day on the
proletariat’s love of corndogs until winding up with a thesis
that eating corndogs is an act of radical gastronomic disobe-
dience, but it doesn’t get us any closer to ascertaining the
relative, say, nutritional value of certain art forms in mobi-
lizing social awareness, cultivating introspection, offering
solace, stimulating the pathetic imagination—in short, doing
the things we used to think art was supposed to do. And this
film, I’m afraid to say, is starting to smell like a corndog.
Back to our story: it’s now been two years since Maria’s
death and things have only worsened in our poor pueblo.
Narcos are cackling, goons are slaughtering, locals are trem-
bling—answers are required. We’re walking over to a press
conference on the steps of town hall, threading through scrum
toward our first recognizable figure: an 84-year-old Mario
Almada playing the governor of Ahuichila. In high-belted
slacks and checkers, he looks like everybody’s grandfather,
and it’s with a gentle senescent authority that he reiterates
his commitment to safe streets. But this isn’t enough for the
reporters. Local trafficking has increased by 25 percent. As
governor of “the state that deals the most drugs,” when does
he plan to take action? “Today we’ll reassert our commit-
ment,” he promises. “We have to eliminate the drug taboo
from this town.” It’s a genuine commitment and a rare one for
surviving the journey from press conference to private office,
where the governor fist-bangingly declares that the only way
34 Narco Cinema

to stop this menace is to go after Rebolledo once and for all.

His aide quibbles: the local police are corrupt; cleaning up
this town would call for a solo mission and good luck finding
someone for that job. The governor’s not bothered, though.
In fact he’s got just the man in mind.
Meanwhile, the cartel is re-upping another hot-air balloon
with half a ton of cocaine under the direction of Sofi and
her boyfriend Eleazar, Hilda’s second-in-commands. Once
they finish the transfer, the couple meet with their patrona
to discuss business. Which is going well. Given their daily
payments to Commandante Barrero and the fact that Barrero
is next in line for the post of attorney general, the Rebolledo
cartel is set to eliminate their rivals and monopolize regional
trafficking.
The only problem, as Sofi explains to Eleazar, is that
Barrero, their police insider, is a “sexual degenerate.” She
worries what his new power as attorney general could show
him capable of—a fear that proves well-founded when, a
few scenes on, the musteline commandante slaps Sofi uncon-
scious, rapes here, covers her in bruises and abandons her
roadside (true villains in narco cinema can be this metastati-
cally immoral).
Unfortunately for the cartel but fortunately for the good
citizens of Ahuichila, the governor has bypassed the appall-
ing Barrero to appoint Lucio his new attorney general. This
is a dour, sardonic mustachioed cop imported from Sinaloa,
and though his hard-drinking, spurs-on-the-desk manner
frightens the secretary and rumors of his righteousness strike
fear into the hearts of Felix’s corrupt seniors, we like him
right away, a man who gets things done. And Lucio likes
Felix. In Felix he can sense a kindred spunk and so decides to
test the junior officer by placing him on Barrero’s roadblock
mid-shift. It’s a good plan—under Felix’s watch, the police
stop a van packed with Rebolledo cocaine and haul its driver
back to the precinct for questioning.
 Hecho de coca 35

Despite the death of several officers in the pre-arrest shoot-

out (presumably, they warrant no further mention) Lucio is
impressed by Felix’s initiative, though he warns Felix not to
take his job too seriously as this will cause “more problems
than benefits.” Lucio then shares with Felix this chestnut
of career wisdom: “Sometimes you have to get your hands
dirty. To get shit off the floor, you have to pick it up first.”
Subsequent meetings belabor the master-apprentice dynamic
and the point of Barrero’s guilt, but they are tremendously
more watchable than the montage of Felix’s wedding day
(inspired by a tearful visit to the cemetery).
The Rebedollo cartel has hit a snag. The smuggler Felix
captured happens to be a blabbermouth, and so Hilda orders
Sofi over the precinct to take care of him. With a nod to the
jailer, Sofi enters the holding cell, unsheathes a combat knife
from her garter belt and slices his traitorous throat. Problem
solved. Only Felix and Lucio now threaten Hilda’s monopoly.
And because Barrero has warned the patrona of Felix’s long-
standing righteousness, our hero stands unwittingly in her
crosshairs.
If I may, I’d like to pause for a second and ask an important
question: Where the hell are the corridos? Other than Felix’s
early cancion triste, there aren’t any actual songs to speak of,
though the mood-educating score is almost incessant and can
be divided into: spa sounds (minimalistic plunks and strums
and toots and percussive noise on delay; Gregorian synth);
neck-hair straighteners (various atonic meanderings—Hitch-
cock by way of Casio); seat edgers (rattlesnake maracas and
that slow breathy triplet that signals Jason’s prowl in the
Friday the 13th movies). Sometimes a horny riff emerges
out of nowhere and smolders for a moment over no context.
Action scenes sound like the last level of any early Nintendo
game. All of which is vulgate, music-wise, in narco cinema.
But by now we should have been treated to an appearance by
Los Tucanes de Tijuana or Los Bohemios de Michoacán (or
36 Narco Cinema

if this were an earlier film, Los Tigres del Norte). Norteño

musical interludes can be the most popular feature in narco
films; the title of a corrido alone will sell a DVD and some
of the more famous films can be described as loose drama-
tizations of beloved songs. All this to say the absence here is
unusual, and that a frisky accordion solo might not be the
worst thing in the world right now.
But I digress. Short her trusted driver, Hilda demotes Sofi
to chief smuggler and sends her off to town with a Ford pickup
full of cocaine. This is a supremely dickish move on Hilda’s
part, considering that Sofi was raped by Barerro about 18
hours ago and that her psychological convalescence is hardly
underway (physically, though, what an improvement!). But
then Hilda, we’ll note, is a very dickish patrona, firmly in
narco cinema’s mold of the powerful woman: ruthless, manip-
ulative, self-centered, two-faced, altogether Lady MacBish;
masculine, I suppose, if your idea of “man” is fundamentally
“asshole.” Hilda’s cruelties run from mean (frothing orders
at her underlings) to psychotic (cracking their ribs under
her steer-strength cowboy boots). Even at the sartorial level,
the denim Western shirts and mom jeans (that style of dress
favored by certain American women who can line dance to
obscure Skynryd) make the lithe and splendid Golden gruffly
unsexy here, and this lends a cruel praying-mantis-like edge
to her hypersexuality. That’s right—I mustn’t forget to men-
tion that Hilda has a touch of the nymphomania, and that
any time she’s able to get Sofi out of the hacienda for an hour
is an opportunity to have off-camera sex with Eleazar. And
so as Sofi humphs off to town with her Fordful of cocaine,
and Hilda and Eleazar creep into the bedroom to enact a ter-
rible misogynist death fantasy, I hereby promise to get to the
bottom of these nasty gender politics two chapters on.
For now, though, let’s reassemble with Felix, Barrero and
their four-car police squad as they wait roadside for suspi-
cious cargo to wind through their afternoon shift. And
 Hecho de coca 37

aha!—here comes Sofi. The cops wave her onto the shoulder
and Barrero orders Felix to search the Ford, counting on Sofi
to start blasting once Felix begins to nose around her prolific
stash. It’s a setup that might have worked if Barerro, the imp-
ish sex offender, could have resisted taking eye contact with
Sofi as an opportunity to grab his package and flash her all
his teeth.
Emotionally inflamed by the too-recent memory of her
rape, Sofi takes one look at those teeth, that package, forgets
all about Felix, throws open the drivers’-side door and comes
out gunning for Barerro. Bang! Bang! Bang! In the melee,
several more cops go down, Barerro retreats, and Sofi takes a
bullet fatally close to her kidney. Unfazed, she continues fir-
ing until Felix pulls her into her truck and drives away. That
is, to be clear, the good police officer rescues the narco and
abets her getaway.
I have to admit that this narrative pivot crashes us into a
brick wall of nonsense and calls up many questions that will
never be answered. Why would Felix help a trafficker escape?
Is he instinctually chivalrous, to the detriment of his judicial
duty? Or is he afraid that Barerro, who appears to be shoot-
ing at anyone in sight, might kill a potential informant? We
never find out. Nor do we learn what conspired in the subse-
quent getaway so that in the next scene, the ungrateful Sofi is
prodding an unarmed Felix through a cactus field with butts
from her machine gun and promising worse to come.
(To mitigate the logical catastrophe of Felix rescuing Sofi,
the writers have Felix thank her for rescuing him from the
gunfight—i.e., they rescript her as the savior so that the
director won’t have to go back and reshoot the actual gun-
fight itself. This is just one of those narrative boners that we’ll
have to accept as good intention defeated by the cost of gun
caps and food coloring, the same way that we accept Maria’s
nonresponse to her beating as a void for some later voiceover
work that was never budgeted, or just forgotten about; or,
38 Narco Cinema

more glaringly, the matter of the title going from Hecho de

coca to Coca, Inc. somewhere between postproduction and
DVD pressing.)11
Luckily for Felix, once she deposits her prisoner at
Rebolledo HQ, Sofi is thrown into a career crisis when she
discovers Hilda and Eleazar making love in the indoor swim-
ming pool. Even more startling to Sofi than this evidence of
her lover’s infidelity is Hilda’s reaction to being caught: with
a slippery discard of Eleazar, Hilda reaches for her poolside
rifle and begins firing away at her protégée. Sofi shoots back
and makes for the door, pulling Felix with her. Hilda orders
Eleazar to pants up and “go get her and kill her!”
Poor Sofi, what a rough, confusing day this must have been
for her, is Felix’s sentiment back in the arroyo. His concern
leads to mutual grins, to more obvious flirtation, to Felix out
of his handcuffs, to a tent-building effort, to a barely visible
nightfall and an amorous romp among yucca, two mangy
silhouettes churning behind the tent canvass all night long.
But at dawn, things become grim once more when Eleazar
captures the new lovers and therein instigates an extended
climax that somehow feels both hurried and every second
its 14 minutes. Felix and Sofi are taken back to the haci-
enda. Felix is beaten. Hilda proposes that Felix kill Lucio to
save Sofi’s life, which gives Felix an idea to entrap Barrero,
which is too nonsensical to merit the requisite four pages of
theoretical spec. Hilda kneels at her private shrine to Jesús
Malaverde, patron saint of narcos. Felix returns to rescue
Sofi and becomes involved in a shoot-out-cum-mixed-mar-
tial-arts-battle-to-the-chokehold-of-death with Eleazar. Felix
wins. He releases Sofi (in slow motion) from the noose (?)
that binds her hands (alas, all but the makeup department
have forgotten about the gaping untreated bullet wound
in her stomach [possibly kidney]) and proceeds on foot to
apprehend Hilda, barely making it in time to leap aboard the
hot-air balloon she’s commandeered for her escape.
 Hecho de coca 39

Now we’ve reached the end and you can almost see the
justice simmering behind Felix’s smirk. “Can you fly?” he
asks Hilda, his eyebrows gesturing to their climbing altitude.
Hilda proposes a deal: she’ll pay Felix triple Barrero’s salary
if he agrees to act as her new police informant. “You’re talk-
ing to the wrong man,” says Felix. “Everyone has a price,”
she tries again. But when the balloon touches ground, only
Felix remains inside. And, given all we know about Felix,
we can presume that he’s avenged Maria’s death (and Sofi’s
near death) and fulfilled the governor’s promise to get rid
of Rebolledo and make life safe again for the good folks of
Ahuichila.
Or maybe we can’t. And here’s where the film gets interest-
ing. Denouement: Felix and Lucio meet at an outdoor café
(while Sofi waits subserviently out of earshot). Lucio congrat-
ulates Felix on his promotion to commandante. He knows
Felix will keep the force in order now that he himself will
be returning to Sinaloa. But before he leaves, Lucio has one
question: “What happened up there with Hilda Rebolledo?”
Felix grins and repeats Lucio’s epigram about using one’s
hands to clean shit off the floor, to which Lucio replies, with
wild laughter, “You’re a fast learner, kid!” And therein lies
our bamboozlement: Felix has sold out. He’s made the deal
with Rebolledo after all. The lone incorruptible cop has put
himself on the payroll of the cartel that murdered his wife.
What’s amazing about this ethical about-face is not that
Felix’s pristine code can be so casually soiled (forgive the
pun, what with the shit on the floor); that money could mean
more to him than the chance to put the florescent ghost of
Maria to rest. It’s not even that in this comic-bookishly moral
universe our hero can be corrupted without even the most
gently probing psychological turn (apparently all Hilda had
to do was repeat her offer). No, what puzzles and frustrates is
the following scene: Felix and Sofi on a lovers’ stroll through
the market—long smooches, cheek strokes, a cotton-candy
40 Narco Cinema

fight, a flamenco jangling melancholic in the background.

The couple takes a seat in the food court to discuss their
vacation plans when Felix begins to tear up. “You have every
right to remember your wife,” Sofi assures him. “Besides, it
looks like you loved her very much.” Felix explains at length
how Maria died and why he fears that Sofi might share her
fate . . . and would Sofi really want to become a commandan-
te’s wife, considering the risks? You bet she would. “Until
death do us part, no?” she ghoulishly quips, all things consid-
ered. Felix groans and goes in for a kiss. End scene.
How can the film get away with this? Switching out stock
happy endings at the last minute, revealing—and then revel-
ing in— the hero’s caprice as if it were his moral protoplasm?
All this ending does is make the earlier plot holes seem less
nonsense than canny foreshadow. And if this weren’t con-
fusing enough, the final scene takes us from sappy to all-
out bizarre. The governor is leaving his office for the day
and a reporter from the earlier scrum approaches to offer
her congratulations: “It seems that we beat drug traffick-
ing.” “That’s right, Miss,” he grins. The camera closes in on
his weathered face to leave us with a bit of Almada wisdom:
“There are no winners or losers here. The war against drugs
is like any other war. We lose something. A friend, our lives.
But our country, too.”
The first time I watched this, I was sure the line had been
flubbed. Pero también nuestra país. Surely he meant to say,
“We lose . . . [a] friend, our lives, but not our country.” The
grammar suggests the mistake. So do the soothing flamenco
riffs and the reporter’s grateful smile, which ends the film.
How do you “beat drug trafficking” and “lose a country?”
If the governor failed, why is he so pleased with himself,
and what’s with this mutual goodwill between him and the
reporter? It doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t just an ambigu-
ous ending. In fact it’s not ambiguous, that’s what makes it
so uncomfortable. It jars from the conventions of cinematic
 Hecho de coca 41

ambiguity to give us a happy ending in form with content

that resists it absolutely.
But if this is just bad storytelling, why is it so uncomfortable
to watch? Because it’s careless about the viewer? Or because
it refuses to speak to this viewer in the cinematic language in
which he happens to be fluent? To answer these questions, I
think we need to revisit this melodrama business. Not to watch
the film through the “narco mask,” as I’d suggested earlier,
but to examine the mask itself more carefully. “The last mask
of the banal,” Walter Benjamin called kitsch, “the one with
which we adorn ourselves, in dream and conversation, so as to
take in the energies of an outlived world of things.”12
What is there to say about the outlived world of Hecho
de coca? What energies does its visitor attempt to recuper-
ate? Obviously what we don’t find is the resolution formally
promised us. Instead of ultimate good triumphing over ulti-
mate evil, our catharsis turns out to be a comparatively mun-
dane domestic fantasy (i.e., behind every narco assassin like
Sofi is a doting housewife waiting for the right guy to remove
her Kevlar and dress her in bridal white). And though at first
this seems like a rip-off, a congruent strain of misogyny, it is
in fact more complicated, because for Felix to receive cathar-
sis, he has to do the opposite of what we expect. He can’t kill
the wicked witch, but must accept her bargain. Which is to
accept the bizarre physics that rule this outlived world: senti-
ment is energy, and violence, it turns out, is inertia.
On second thought, maybe this expired world is not so
distant after all. Maybe, through the film’s nostalgic lens, it
resembles Mexico ten years earlier, when the cartels weren’t
at such brutal war and narcos and state officials conspired to
guarantee public security. Perhaps this is something like the
world that Javier Sicilia, poet of the drug war, revisions when
he reminds narcos, “In days of old you had codes of honor.
You were not so cruel in your paybacks and you did not touch
the citizens nor their families.”13
42 Narco Cinema

The deal Felix makes grants him a wife for the one he lost
and while the substitutability of women for this role is indeed
troubling, what’s reassuring is the echo of Lucio’s epigram
in Felix’s decision. That decision—the film’s moral center-
piece—teaches us that when the world is corrupt, the ethical
imperative is not a wholesale self-actualizing crusade against
it (this would be something like the US model), rather it’s to
choose your own corruption and by default, your salvation.
The new commandante will be nothing like his predecessor,
the rapist Barrero: Felix will use his cartel funding to marry
Sofi and live happily ever after. And his reward for choosing
negotiation over violence, love over revenge, is the last five
minutes of the film: an outpouring of nostalgia that curdles
all logical progress. Kitsch: “a simple invitation to wallow in
sentiment . . . instantaneous emotional gratification without
intellectual effort.”14 But even the cheesiest forms of escap-
ism can also be kinds of survival.
And for audiences living in extreme circumstances—
migrants, campesinos, maquila workers—wouldn’t the
maudlin be a useful catharsis? To people constantly put into
situations that exploit the full value of their physical lives,
might not there be remedial value in an overinflation of the
sentimental? I’m not sure, and frankly I’m still not convinced
how subversive this is, or why it should be. But what I can
say that I’ve learned, as I refit my mask of the banal, the one
with the tragic grin and the tiny plastic tag that says Hecho
en Mexico, is that this outlived world is richer than I’d
originally thought.
And so if the analogy isn’t too corny, or maybe because it’s
just corny enough, I invite you to put your narco mask back
on and join me as we continue our study with a closer look at
the history of narco cinema.
 3
Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada

Figure 3.1 One harsh dose of catharsis

Forty years of narco culture in the Americas and all the

windows looking in are busted. Come see for yourself: four
decades of shattered glass, long hats, severed limbs, perfect
whiskers, rotten blood. Two foul score of outrageous fortune
and untimely ends.
44 Narco Cinema

Generation, in the social sense, is the wrong frequency, a

flawed measure for comparing the crumbling statues of local
barons with the new likenesses growing their shadows in the
plaza at sundown. The power that moves narcotics concen-
trates from something deeper than human, something deeply
discordant. It overwhelms the cycle of fathers and sons and
warps our fallacies to its own false ends, vanishing facts
under a swirl of rumors and drowning us with facts where
rumors alone might have pulled us through.
Economically we became more liberalized and we got
to be more of a world. “Transculture” replaced “multicul-
ture” in academese, Atlas Shrugged went from bad fiction
to economic policy, the market duly shrugged off more of
its regulatory restraints, and fences and factories rose along
the border: intermittent miles of barbed wire and smokestack
and chain link and metal plate wherever city faces city at the
southern edge of the American experiment.
The peso fell again and again, throwing migrants further
north with every plunge. THC levels surged in the Sierra
Madre. Incalculable masses of methamphetamine, cocaine,
heroin, and marijuana travelled north via jetliner, submarine,
semi-trailer, SUV, backpack, brassier, and rectum only to dis-
appear into bloodstreams under volleys of English swears.
Ex-soldiers from the United States and Guatemala took mer-
cenary work with the cartels.1 So did Wall Street bankers,
illiterate children, and Mexican technocrats. 2 Billions of
laundered dollars accumulated behind grin-and-grip photo-
graphs in the vaults of institutions deemed “too big to jail.”3
America’s “War on Drugs” became “Mexico’s Drug War.”
40 years in and the data are more accessible than ever.
Death tolls (120 thousand since 2006), munitions records
(252 thousand American firearms into Mexico per annum).4
Hit men post brooding selfies on Instagram. 5 Bloggers com-
ment on cartel snuff with meteorological nonchalance. World
leaders recycle bracing proverbs about culpability and action
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 45

every time tensions flare, the wrong man dies, or the right
men die at record number. But the problem is too sublime for
the sound bite. Just 140 characters won’t do. Click and click
and click all you like but the profile photo of President Peña
Nieto’s Facebook page yields only more profile photos.
To grasp what it means to be part of a narco culture, we
need a medium more attuned to the fact-rumor continuum.
A chronotope that can move from the speed of money to low-
gear stoned and build up heroes in the unlikeliest disjunctions.
A dependable narrative for the young, impoverished, and
migrant masses, for just about anyone with enough Spanish
who finds herself drawn to a more traditional tale—a begin-
ning, a middle, and an end—that describes how we’ve gotten
where we are.
In the 70s and 80s, these seekers gathered in borderland
grindhouses like the Bay Theater in San Diego.6 In the 80s
and 90s, in the videotiendas scattered throughout border
states and wherever migrants communed and were undocu-
mented together. Since the aughts, you’ll find them rooting
through bargain bins in big-box stores in the foul gun- and
porn-shop of the heartland, or rolling view-counters on
YouTube and leaving comments like, chingona esta peli!, or
mejor que scarface, cabrón! And of course, this whole time,
they’ve been watching in torture houses and private jets.
This isn’t to suggest that migrants, narcos, and teenagers
are of a maturity all compact. Rather it’s that higher pow-
ers of the age occasionally (and unwittingly) conspire to cast
disparate heroes into a singular mold. And, if I may direct
your attention to the screen, there are four heroes in the red
car—the gambler, the father, the dreamer, and the reveler—
inching toward US patrolmen at the Brownsville-Matamoros
border on a sunny afternoon in ’76 and coming that much
closer to delivering all us rebels one harsh dose of catharsis.
The film is La banda del carro rojo. The titular vehicle is
a red Pontiac sedan with a hundred kilos of uncut cocaine
46 Narco Cinema

packed into its chassis and several handfuls of mud smeared

across its body (to hide the bullet holes). One glance from
the Border Patrol and it’s waved into secondary inspection,
this Pontiac Lazarus from the auto graveyard shuttling four
weary Mexicans over to no good. This candy-apple behe-
moth that looks like it’s been slimed by a jungle, dredged
by a derby . . . “What happened to you?” the officers want to
know. “We fell into a ditch.”
That’s Lino Quintana (Mario Almada) in the driver’s seat:
aviator glasses, buckaroo scarf, moustache so triangular it
could be velcroed to his whittled face. It was Lino’s idea to
smuggle the merca to Chicago, this is his car, his crew—“the
red car gang”—and because Lino is clearly the suavest cus-
tomer straddling the Rio Grande right now, it’s his job to flirt
with Immigration. “Where are you coming from?” “We were
in Matamoros with some amigas.” he says, nodding.
The officers would like him to get out of the car.
Rodrigo (Fernando Almada) waits in the passenger seat.
You can tell he’s Lino’s brother by the twin stache and the
cool detachment, though if you look at his eyes closely, you’ll
see a flash of the fear he’s carried up there for years now, ever
since his daughter developed leukemia and made his single
parenthood financially untenable. Rodrigo knows that if he’s
caught today, he won’t be able to fund the medical treatment
in Houston that will prolong her short life just a few more
years, and that this will be one more failure on him, another
swipe of pocho karma for leaving home in search of a better
life in America that’s been anything but.
The scrawny fellow in the backseat with the flat cap and
itchy beard: that’s Pedro (Pedro Infante Jr., son of the gold-
en-age-cinema idol). Don’t be fooled by the hipster duds:
it’s been nothing but cops and robbers for this mojado non
grata since we met him 80 minutes ago, swimming across the
river during the opening credits. This coke deal is his chance
to rescue Juanita from poverty and make their Hollywood
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 47

dreams come true—he’s no criminal at heart, you see; all

he’s ever wanted to do is entertain. But Boom (Jorge Patiño)
beside him—there’s the real actor. Ah, Boom, you chubby
knucklehead, smiling groggily for la migra as if it were just
another hangover that’s troubling you and not the bullet you
took in the shoulder two scenes ago, when Cantu’s gunmen
tried to hijack the car.
Lino opens the trunk and watches the officers dig through
it. More than the others, it’s Lino, the gambler, who under-
stands the risks and stakes. That so much depends upon a red
Pontiac glazed with mud and packed with white powder. The
all-in on the last crappy hand. The final scratch line on the
lottery ticket called el norte, destiny just one cracked liberty
bell away.
Miraculously, after a few incontinent minutes, the car is
waved through customs and it’s back on the highway, the
American vein. From here it’s just a 1,500-mile cruise to
Chicago where the crew will trade the red car for a small
fortune and fall into step with polite society. Their dreams
may seem unique, but they’re really just variations on the
American genre that migrants have been translating for
generations. And their dreams might have been realized if
Cantu, the wicked casino proprietor, weren’t dialing 911 at
this moment to tip off authorities to the contraband innards
of a certain red sedan heading north on rural road 368. The
gang has barely a second to breathe relief before a convoy of
cruisers is wailing at their tail.
And we’re zooming through funky town. The red car
plunges across the plains, police cars in tow. A drum fill
grooves a wah-wah onto Sesame Street, a Hammond chirps
dirty on the one.
Ahead, four of Brownsville’s finest have swiveled their
cruiser into a makeshift roadblock and blast rifles at the red
car, which spots them and swerves east onto a dirt road: a
dead end.
48 Narco Cinema

Tires screech and peel earth, rifles boom in the distance, a

Rhodes chases the Hammond over an Amen break. The red
car circles and re-circles like a wounded animal, and freezes
when the cruisers arrive. The doors fly open and each man
dashes for an abandoned farmhouse, taking shelter behind a
pile of scrap wood. Rounds of police fire rip ferociously into
the carcass of the red car.
Surrounded, our heroes look at one another, knowing this
is it. That there’s only one way to go out. And that every shot
they’ll fire and every shot they’ll take, they’ll mean. That in a
moment, they’ll say “ay” and then nothing more. Ay: “There
is no translation for this word,” wrote Hemingway. “Perhaps
it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily,
feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.”7
And before you accuse me of machismo (kind of unfair,
though, given my subject), it needs be said that these men are
martyrs. For every migrant who’s been screwed over by the
gringos, for every Chicana exiled in her homeland—oh, what
the hell—for every recently confirmed humanities doctor
looking at life in adjunct limbo. Yes, the martyrdom of these
men transcends even the 50-state minefield of race in modern
America. (“Ready?” asks Lino.) Their standoff is a universal
gesture that says, “man is not made for defeat.”8 That says,
“Vamos!” as the gang of four storms the battleground with
guns raised and the afternoon stinging their eyes.
Pedro gets two shots off before a bullet catches his chest;
he spirals to the grass and another shot takes him from
behind. A triplet in the thorax sends Boom scrambling
for cover inside the red car, where he’ll bleed out over the
driver’s seat. Approximately ten-million rounds of machine-
gun fire bring Rodrigo to his knees and another half mil-
lion knock him on his face where his brother Lino has now
fallen beside him.
And just like that it’s over. The police hold their fire, the
music stops. Only the sound of a dying car horn, depressed
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 49

by Boom’s lifeless face, continues to score this carnage, an

alarm buzzing between falling octaves, until that, too, finally
ends.
The sheriff approaches Lino and raises him by the scarf.
“Who is your boss?”
The camera closes in on Lino’s face for his dying words,
the film’s last: “Yo no sé cantar.” He falls back to the earth.
Yo no sé cantar. “I don’t know how to sing,” as in, I’m
no snitch. Though a more licentious translation, taking into
account the steel in his eyes and the journey that’s brought
them here, might be something like, “A man can be destroyed
but not defeated.”9 But why keep soliciting Hemingway to
sell this film; wouldn’t it be enough to say it’s got Los Tigres
del Norte?
La banda del carro rojo (The Red Car Gang) is based
on the eponymous narcocorrido by the legendary Paulino
Vargas. The song, itself based loosely on the story of a South
American drug smuggler gunned down by highway patrol-
men in New Mexico,10 was an early hit for Los Tigres, the
norteño group that appears three times in the film to relieve
the bowchikawahwah soundtrack with their cheerful tejano
sound. You’ll find them in their youthful prime here: big
smiles and red leisure suits with gangly lapels, working a
smoky pool hall in the Brownsville barrio like it’s their Ed
Sullivan stage and setting a precedent for the banda inter-
ludes that mark narco cinema today.
Partly why the film has been fingered retrospectively as the
genre’s classical hit is because of such bellwether formulae:
the script lifted from a popular drug ballad; the automobile
as techno-equine protagonist; the sequels bundled into the
storyline (it seems Pedro, against medical logic, was neither
defeated nor destroyed by his gunshot wounds; he contin-
ued smuggling in the second of Carro rojo’s two follow-ups).
And, of course, there’s the brand of the Almadas, the action
stars nonpareil of Mexican b-cinema.
50 Narco Cinema

Exactly how many films Mario Almada has appeared in is

a matter of speculation. The actor himself once boasted a C.V.
of 300+ “big movies” (shot on 35mm film) and 1,000+ direct-
to-videos (shot on 16mm and digital video).11 Journalists
often credit him erroneously with a Guinness Record—“the
most prolific living actor”—and though Guinness denies the
win, his celebrity remains golden in narco culture.12 At age
93, Mario is our cinema’s best-known and best-paid actor,
commanding 55,000 pesos (about $4,200 USD) per film.13
Fernando’s career has been less prolific (his IMDB profile
lists only 150 films, still 113 more than Horacio, the Daniel
Baldwin of this grizzled fraternity), but lately he’s made a
comeback teaming up with Mario to defeat Chuck Norris in
a series of Internet memes (#25: “Chuck Norris is the law,
but the Almadas write the laws”; #50: “The Almadas once
visited the Island of Women. Now it’s known as the Island of
the Almadas’ Women).14
Originally from Huatabampo, Sonora, a tiny pretty agri-
cultural city off the Gulf of California, the Almadas entered
the film industry in the mid-60s, writing, producing, and
starring in traditional Western fare and sometimes receiving
critical nods for their efforts. In 1970, Mario won a presti-
gious Diosa de Plata for his performance in Todo por nada
(All for Nothing). The following year he won another for El
tunco Maclovio (One-Armed Maclovio). Both pictures are
late examples of the Mexican Western, the charro film of
the golden age, with its serenading cowboys and post-rev-
olutionary nostalgia. A cinema popularly (and officially)
beloved and usually typified by its ability to combine “the
macho ethos, and national ideals . . . to produce a male image
that came to stand for the nation’s,” according to film scholar
Charles Ramírez Berg.15
By the late 70s, however, drugs had begun to replace gold
and cattle as cinema’s loot of choice and working-class machos
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 51

like Lino and Rodrigo Quintana were relieving Pancho Villa

and Emiliano Zapata on the cultural battlefront, creating a
new subgenre that quickly rose to prominence. This was the
so-called cabrito Western, often filmed along the US border
and especially popular among migrant audiences.16 Unlike
their state-sponsored charro ancestors, the cabritos were
firmly in the churro mold of filmmaking: hastily and formu-
laically produced by private studios for maximum profit.17
The churro had been around since the late 40s and had
always appealed to a working-class fan base; serious direc-
tors and filmgoers stayed away.18 But during the presidential
term of José López Portillo (1976–1982), when federal fund-
ing for cinema was all but eliminated, established directors
turned to Televisa and other commercial studios and chur-
ros were often what they were asked to make.19 (Though,
and this according to Mario Almada himself, if the studios
weren’t interested, drug lords were often happy to act as
financiers.)20
The effective privatization of cinema, carried out by
Margarita López Portillo, director of Radio-Televison-
Cinema (and the president’s sister), 21 was one in a series of
questionable economic reforms that earned President Portillo
scorn from the intelligentsia (for crippling Mexican culture)
and later from the pueblo (for bankrupting the country). At
the end of his term, the peso had fallen from 22 to 150 on the
US dollar22 and the churro had been elevated from lumpen
crapola to a de facto national cinema.
It was from this uneasy, underfunded milieu that narco
cinema emerged, along with companionably violent melodra-
mas about migrant abuse, political scandal, the hard knocks
of barrio life. And let’s not forget the sexy-comedies, which
also thrived in these risky times, and also hadn’t escaped the
lure of cinematic violence (an eyebrow-raising number of
them revolve around lethal orgasms and suicidal impotence,
52 Narco Cinema

themes rather than mere plot points, which surely are in need
of larger synoptic treatment from the brave scholar willing to
fish a thesis out of Alfonso Zayas’s back hair).
Low budgets and commercial incentives made this a pro-
miscuous and proliferative era for Mexico’s private-sector
cinema and it wasn’t unusual for actors and producers to
swing between b-genres. By the 80s and 90s, sexy-comedies
would take on narco themes, narco action films would poach
actresses from the sexies and Hugo Stiglitz could be found
hobnobbing with cuckolds, cartel bosses, and giant sharks
all in a month’s honest work. Nor was it unusual to find drug
traffickers lounging around film sets, lobbying to get their
molls in the pictures and pitching their extreme biographies
to directors.23 Rubén Benavides, one of Carro Rojo’s screen-
writers, says that narcos would pay to see themselves por-
trayed heroically on film, stipulating only that their avatars
didn’t die in the end.24 Director José Luis Urquieta claims
that filmmakers could charge double for the chance to have
that avatar kill Mario Almada.25
Back to aesthetics for a moment: if the charro lent a his-
torical ideology—the “macho ethos” of regional loyalty and
outlaw valiance26 —narco cinema’s sensationalism comes
partly from the antidrug films of the 60s. Think Touch of
Evil meets Reefer Madness: noir gangsters, cackling pre-
Mansonian addicts. Sometimes lucha libre got involved and
El Santo would put aside his differences with vampires and
killer bees to give comeuppance to the drug lords. Mostly
these films are unofficial PSAs warning viewers against the
false promises of trafficking, the horrors of addiction, and,
later, the evil that hippies that do. (It needs be mentioned
that hippies can be a nasty subspecies of wookie in Mexican
cinema—rapists and killers with a Viking disregard for their
non-kith. In Juan Orol’s El fantástico mundo de los hippies
[The Fantastic World of Hippies, 1970], drug-dealing flower
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 53

children battle each other for market share with a brutality to

rival the cartels to come, on- or off-screen.)
We might have begun our history lesson with one of these
antidrug films or with an earlier cabrito. We could have
started with Pilotes de combate (Combat Pilots, 1970), a
film about three air force pilots infiltrating a cartel sub-
marine—perhaps the first narco film proper (directed by
Carro rojo’s Rubén Galindo). And though a few other narco
films appeared in the early 70s, 27 it feels treasonous to name
anything other than Carro rojo as the standard bearer. It’s
not only that the film captures the faulty promises of con-
temporary migration and trafficking just as poignantly as it
summons the spirits of earlier border outlaws like Pancho
Villa and Gregorio Cortez. 28 It’s also that the film kicks
tremendous ass. It’s snazzy and sweet and ragtag, buck-na-
ked and brokenhearted. An epic, though of a scale closer
to that of Waterfront than The Godfather. Let’s call it a
subjunctive epic: its greatness resides in capability rather
than fulfillment, or in the tragedy of an enormous capabil-
ity backfiring.
But I’m making an aesthetic call when I’m supposed to be
discussing history. In that case, I’ll point out that the film’s
release coincided with the implementation of Operation
Condor, the first major joint Mexican-US antidrug effort,
which eradicated most of Mexico’s marijuana and poppy
farms, fueled bad blood between the narcos and the DEA,
and culminated in this bit of synchronicity: two years after
the red car gang’s tragic end, on September 9, 1978, to be
precise, there was another smuggler gunned down by police
at a roadblock, also likely to have been set up by an under-
world rival. 29 More than a smuggler, he was Pedro Avilés
Pérez, Sinaloa’s original godfather, who oversaw the first
large-scale exportation of heroin, marijuana, and Colombian
cocaine. The original trafficker of the people, and second
54 Narco Cinema

only to Jesús Malaverde in the Sherwood plantations of the

narco imagination.
Avilés Pérez would receive biopic treatment in Jorge
Reynoso’s La Clave 7 (Code 7, 1999), a popular piece of his-
torical revisionism (cell phones and SUVS abound). But the
synchronicity here—that a matter of police slugs and foul
play could have sparked dual revolutions in narcotics and
film within just two years—if it seems overly superstitious
then it’s as good as any introduction to the helical twining
of fact and rumor that is popular narco cinema as we know
it today.
In the following pages, I’ll review some of the key events
of the drug war and consider how narco cinema has evolved
in response to them. While my movie list is far from exhaus-
tive—most films are out of print with copies languishing in
private collections—my hope is both that general readers will
find an entertaining historical context for narco culture and
that, over time, fans with ampler funding will be able to res-
cue some of the lost footage and add to (or reconstruct) this
humble foundation.
Without further adieu, I enjoin you to fill your narco
masks with popcorn and psyche yourselves sufficiently up,
for if they haven’t seemed so already, things are about to get
very weird.

The 80s: I Want My Narco TV

As the 70s boogied into the 80s, private studios kept pump-
ing out low-budget cinema and narcotic matter continued to
trickle into its b-repertoire. 1983 was a particularly hand-
some year for our genre: the red car gang starred in 13 films
(mostly separately), La banda de la sotana negra (The Black
Cassock Gang) also tried their hands at drug smuggling,
as did El Cafre (The Madman at the Wheel), but when the
father of Lola la trailera (Lola the Truck-Driving Woman)
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 55

was murdered for refusing to transport cocaine, Lola took

the wheel and Lola got even. Tangentially related: an undead
werewolf terrorized a small town in the western Sierra
Madre, Alfonso Zayas got into all kinds of sexy mischief,
and migrants continued to battle the KKK (border cinema’s
dependable figurehead for Anglo aggression).
Mexico’s drug lords, meanwhile, were busy expanding
their sphere of influence beyond rural Sinaloa. The death of
Avilés Pérez had left an international and dazzlingly remu-
nerative empire up for grabs and it wasn’t long before three of
his partners rose to divide the spoils: Ernesto Fonseca Carillo
(A.P.’s treasurer, a pioneer in cocaine smuggling whose
nephew would later run the Juárez Cartel), Miguel Angel
Félix Gallardo (a former state police officer and CIA coop-
erative) and Rafael Caro Quintero (the second-gen trafficker
from the mountains of Badiraguato who, in 1985, would
become poster boy for the whole racket).30
With Avilés Pérez out of the picture, and thanks to DEA-
funded military sweeps of drug farms in the Golden Triangle
(Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua), the three bosses not-
so-quietly moved their headquarters to Guadalajara and
from here—the glamorous urban center far from their small
hometowns (pop: kith and kin)—they began to professional-
ize their industry on an unprecedented scale. They expanded
production of heroin and marijuana, they struck loftier deals
with the Colombian coke cartels (who, beleaguered by con-
fiscations in Miami, were desperate for new shipping routes
to the United States) and they diversified their billion-dollar
portfolios by investing in hotels, nightclubs, and other luxu-
rious fronts.31
The systemic integration of narco dollars into the federal
economy also meant that, for the first time, the cartels were
able to broker influence in the highest government offices.32
And if the rumor is true, the Guadalajara Cartel didn’t have
to lobby very hard. Between 1982 and 1986, the peso fell to
56 Narco Cinema

925 on the dollar and national debt rose to $102 billion.33

President Miguel de la Madrid, desperate for economic sta-
bility, allegedly agreed that if the cartel kept its money in
the ruined Mexican banks, authorities would turn a blind
eye to trafficking and also, presumably, to the grotesque and
increasingly more public nature of cartel retaliation. 34
Pop culture wasn’t as forgiving. By the mid-80s, the bed-
fellowship of narcos and feds provided regular fodder for the
tabloids, and filmmakers, perhaps emboldened (and defi-
nitely soured) by state budget cuts, took to addressing the
conspiracy on equally lurid terms.35 Lo Negro del Negro
(The Black Side of Blackie, 1984) and Verdugo de traidores
(Executioner of Traitors, 1986), for example, showcased
police corruption, while Escuadrón de la muerte (Squadron
of Death, 1984) and El Narco—duele rojo (The Narco—Red
Duel, 1985) focused on political ties to the drug world.
Lo Negro is noteworthy for the scandal it caused in fabu-
lating the misdeeds of Arturo “Negro” Durazo, Mexico City
police chief and lifelong friend of president (and cinema-
defunder) López Portillo. Mexican-film scholar David Wilt
identifies the film as a key example of the “reality-based”
exploitation genre, a genre whose implied verisimilitude is
less to real events than to the sensationalist account the tab-
loids had given them (the film’s codirector was better known
as publisher of the scandal sheet Alarma!).36
But if Durazo’s crimes caused a scandal, it would be noth-
ing compared to what happened when a DEA agent ran afoul
of the Guadalajara Cartel. A murder case that sold more
videos in Mexico and raised the ire of more God-fearing
Americans than any drug event in the decade. A case with all
the gruff fatalism of a corrido: the ballad of Kiki and Caro.
And not only in Mexico could its maudlin chorus be heard.
It seems that around the start of every decade, a couple
Hollywood executives suddenly recall how close they are
to the border and how much of their industry is fueled by
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 57

cocaine and so decide to cook up another batch of that peren-

nial blockbuster formula: America vs. the cartels. A Times
bestseller is consulted, a liberal director approves a script, a
phone call to Benicio del Toro is placed and, voilà, Americans
get Traffic (2000) and Savages (2012) to thumb their way
through the labyrinth of the Mexican underworld and out
into the dawn of a new day. In 1989, that film was Drug
Wars: The Camarena Story, a three-part Movie of the Week
that recounts the murder of Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena
and then, for three more hours, the bureaucratic snafu to
apprehend his killers.
The film begins in Guadalajara, 1984, where Camarena
(Steven Bauer) is undercover and on the trail of the elusive
Rafael Caro Quintero (Benicio del Toro). For months now,
Kiki’s been working over his sources for tips about a giant
sensamilla plantation in the Chihuahuan desert (in real life,
Rancho Búfalo: 12 square kilometers toiled by thousands of
campesinos and guarded by Mexican DFS)37 while Caro’s
been living fat on transit fees from the Medellín Cartel and
brokering $48 million protection deals with the Mexican
feds. He’s also been partying like a former child star, fill-
ing nightclubs and mansions with his sordid entourage and,
every chance he gets, spitting radicalisms about US imperial-
ism (“I’m a fighter for the people against social injustice!”).
When the gallant Kiki leads an international bust on their
pot plantation, Caro et al. are outraged. Using their govern-
ment connections, they kidnap Kiki and torture him for days
before giving him a snitch’s burial. From here on in, it’s up to
Craig T. Nelson (ABC’s Coach!) and his crack team of agents
to locate the fugitive Caro and see that justice is served.
Drug Wars isn’t a terrible film. It’s a long film and an
Emmy winner (should this mean anything to you). At
moments it begins to question some of the unseemly exigen-
cies of Reaganomic policy—Wall Street’s proficiency at drug-
money laundering; the political ties between the CIA and the
58 Narco Cinema

Guadalajara Cartel, which supported America’s grudge match

against the Sandinistas (most of Kiki’s torturers had received
CIA training)38 —but only insofar that they stymie the good
DEAs from rounding up their men. Such big-ticket antino-
mies, veritable quicksand to a narrative of US innocence, are
most often left as asides, the better to argue that government
corruption in Mexico is endemic and in the United States it’s,
well, complicated. When Coach and co. kidnap a suspect in
Mexico for extradition (two suspects in real life: Humberto
Alvarez-Macháin, an obstetrician, and Rene Marin Verdugo,
a suspected smuggler, both implicated in Kiki’s murder) it
doesn’t play as a controversial breach of international law, it’s
the film’s heroic final act (in real life, the cases against both
men were dismissed; Macháin later sued the DEA and won
$25 thousand in damages). 39
And then there’s the matter of Caro’s philanthropy, which
was much touted in Mexico (this is the guy who offered to
pay off the national debt in exchange for his freedom), but in
Drug Wars is constituted by scenes of the young capo tossing
wads of pesos debaucherously outside a nightclub and, later,
wielding a fishbowl of car keys and offering scrambles keep-
sies to the club rats who groove in his limelight. His Robin
Hood gestures are wildly narcissistic and otherwise meaning-
less. His smile always keens to a bray. When he tells Nielsen
families that he wants “to steal a little bit of their souls” by
flooding the United States with cheap cocaine, what evidence
is there to doubt such mephistophelismo?
Of course, what he has taken is the life of a federal agent,
an unprecedented move in the drug war, and I won’t be so
cynical as to disrespect the grief this caused Camarena’s fam-
ily and colleagues, just as I wouldn’t disrespect the memory
of US Customs Agent Jaime Zapata, murdered in 2011 by
the Zeta Cartel, or that of Lesley A. Enriquez, the pregnant
consulate worker gunned down a year earlier outside the US
embassy in Ciudad Juárez40; or the memories of the countless
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 59

Mexican casualties from every social level, even if their mur-

ders receive comparatively trivial media coverage (and cer-
tainly no national scandal on par with Kiki’s). The narco
industry is a brutal one, and true humanism doesn’t grade
on a curve.
But in Drug Wars it most certainly does. Shades of grey
are smeared hurriedly toward black or white and this itself
disservices Kiki’s memory by turning him into an American
Santo. It really does appear this basic, even at the physi-
cal level. Watching Kiki and Caro square off is watching a
fixed fight between two versions of Latino masculinity. The
Mexican rep looks like Sid Vicious masking as Leisure Suit
Larry while the American is unmistakably the legitimate
son of Jose Canseco and the Statue of Liberty. One uses the
dance floor as rapist showroom; the other is a committed
family man who actually dreams about returning stateside
to mow his lawn. Both men come from below, both have
overcome their hardscrabble beginnings, but only Kiki can
move smoothly between the barrio and high office (just as we
can, by watching him); Caro is just an evil bumpkin at heart.
And while I have nothing but respect for del Toro’s thespian
skills, and am well aware of his power to vaporize 99 percent
of those who (or who would like to) sleep with men, it needs
be said that the producers left his Caro no room for charac-
ter development, which means that instead of a 32-year-old
billionaire at the head of an international empire, we get a
21-year-old skeezoid pipsqueak with no redeeming qualities,
no professional acumen, no remorse, indeed, no self-con-
sciousness at all. A “savage,” Kiki calls him.
And if while watching this film you find that your eyes have
narrowed into fine slits and your teeth are self-pestling and
you are very much partaking in some of Coach’s principled
rage, I’d like to offer you a few character resurrections from
the annals of narco cinema: a few films which, if they don’t
exactly sway your perception of Caro toward the pantheon,
60 Narco Cinema

will at least present you with an alternative story, if one just

as partisan as Drug Wars.
La Mafia Tiembla (The Mafia Trembles, 1987), and its
sequel (1989) are both fine Caro Quintero films, emeritus
lionizations of the man who used to feed live traitors to his
lions.41 Today we’ll consider Maten al fugitivo: La fuga de
Caro (Kill the Fugitive: The Escape of Caro, 1987), a prison-
break film about a popular drug lord violently confounding
the American paramilitary squad tasked with his apprehen-
sion. Lest anyone confuse Rafael Caro Quintero with the film’s
“Ramiro Cano Quintana” (played by the muscular, soft-faced
Rolando Fernández), the film opens with the standard “any
resemblance to real persons” disclaimer. However, given the
oddity of the film we are about to see, this disclaimer reads
less like liability insurance than a statement of artistic vision.
By the year of Maten’s release, media infatuation with
the Camarena case had made Caro a narco celebrity, second
internationally to Colombia’s Pablo Escobar. Much of the
sensationalism in the Mexican tabloids resided in his rela-
tionship with Sara Cosío Martínez, the 17-year-old niece of a
former state governor and PRI boss. It was alleged, especially
by the Cosío family, that Caro kidnapped her—twice (the
second time on his escape to Costa Rica)—though gossip had
it the affair was happily mutual.42 It was even commonplace,
if slightly insane, to blame Cosío for his downfall (see, for
ex., Los Tigres’ corrido “El R-Uno”).43
Like a good tabloid, the film leaps into this scandal at
once. We meet a sedate Cano, composed in suit and tie, sit-
ting beside his lawyer in the courthouse, waiting for the judge
to dismiss the paparazzi and call his trial to order. The lawyer
leans toward Cano to reiterate their defense strategy, “Deny
everything.” Cano nods solemnly, eyeing the floor.
But when the judge starts droning a list of charges against
him—“international drug trafficking”—Cano, the lover,
begins to stir in his seat—“arms possession”—because he
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 61

can’t help flashback to the last time with Diana—“falsifying

documents”—the leggy vision of her on the chaise longue,
her famished eyes and Bon Jovi coiffure—“kidnapping”—
one silk shoulder strap, two silk shoulder straps slipping
downward—“corrupting a minor”—her neck bending cyg-
neously to his nettled maw—“Do you plead guilty to these
charges, Sr. Ramiro Cano?”—a great speedy unsheathing
feeling, when—“Yes. Yes! Yes!!!” Cano cries out breathlessly
to a stunned courtroom. His lawyer rises. Flashbulbs expire
in the gallery. There’s nothing Cano can do now other than
wait quietly for the bailiffs to escort him from this carnal
memory to a holding cell.
Not only does this early conceit declare a dissenting verdict
on the amicability question (unlike her avatar in Drug Wars,
a manhandled love object whose only words in film—“Caro
Quintero”—identify her captor to the DEA, Quintana’s girl,
Diana [Diana Ferreti], is a randy participant in their sexual
escapades), it also alerts us that the film is prepared to stretch
the limits of reality-based filmmaking far into the gonzo zone
(and boy, oh boy, the places it will go).
Now that that girl part’s out of the way, the film is free
to drop the corsage and really get in touch with its inner
Destro. With the aid of some roughnecks, Cano breaks out of
a prisoner-transport bus and, via Benz and helicopter, beats
a high-speed retreat from the ensuing police. This is more
like it. Gunshots and revving cylinders and car bombs and
smithereens that fill the screen. Nine whole minutes of car-
nivorous velocity, body count: 41. And Cano’s barely cracked
the arsenal that is the film’s plot. Once the helicopter places
him at the edge of a jungle, he and a squad of American com-
mandos continue this cat-and-mouse along the muddy deltas
of Stallone County, Oaxaca, Cano goluptiously demonstrat-
ing his expertise with rocket launchers, grenades, semi-
automatics, fisticuffs, the speedboat (as weapon), and besting
the Americans at every turn.
62 Narco Cinema

At least I think they’re American—their leader, Col. Castro

(Frank Moro), resides in Miami and takes orders from a US
senator (I suspect the colonel is meant to evoke Caro’s famous
Latino nemesis from north of the border). What I am sure of
is that these commandos are a ruthless bunch, far worse than
Drug Wars’s cartel. In one scene, two of the soldiers stick
knives inside a small boy’s mouth to carve out information
on Cano’s whereabouts. In another, the colonel’s tracking
dogs, two cuddly li’l scrappers, are caught taking a rest and
then promptly machine-gunned for insubordination.
Not to undermine the obscenity of a forced glossectomy,
but because it’s always more sinking to see cinematic animals
give up the ghost than any from the human ensemble, no
viewer could by this point resist appointing Cano to honor
the memory of those poor dogs by using all the weapons at
hand to cut a clean path from our denial to vicarious ven-
geance. And off he goes: setting traps, blowing heads off,
thumbing his nose in retreat. He breaks the greatest of school-
yard taboos by making Castro drink his urine (symbolically,
that is: a scene in which Cano goes for a pee match-cuts to
Castro guzzling a tall stream from his canteen). Surely even
the most hateful minuteman could belly up a grunt or two
out of respect for a mission mercilessly accomplished.
In the final act, a wounded Cano stumbles into a medical
colony in the middle of the jungle. Here, over a brief con-
valesce, he manages to win the heart of the coy and lovely
Dr. Wendy (Rosa Gloria Chagoyán) and prove himself an
indispensible part of her pastoral community by offering her
patients intermediate lessons in mechanical engineering; by
assisting Wendy in major surgery (“You should be a doctor,”
she tells him, hers a jealous awe); and by encouraging the local
children to stay away from drugs. How could they have ever
gotten along without him? When Col. Castro finally arrives,
the villagers rally to Cano’s side with bows and arrows, but
to no avail. In the end, Cano is gunned down trying to rescue
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 63

one of the women he loves. The camera freezes on Dr. Wendy

clutching an infirm boy to her breast, both of them crying
out in grief for the death of a great man called Ramiro Cano
Quintana. End scene.
It’s fun to speculate if this vanity porn were funded by
Caro himself. Before his arrest, Caro had propositioned the
Almada brothers about opening a film studio together (the
brothers politely declined),44 so the chance of Caro acting
as silent donor is not unfounded (though, for the record, I
have no proof). But it does belie the point, as if DIY propa-
ganda were less authentic or resonant. The film’s popularity
suggests it hit a mark among a Latino public fed up with
the official narrative of American bravado. By way of piss-
ing contest, the film counters that Caro is the real hero/vic-
tim of this debacle, the Mexican underdog fighting against
an armed ganglia of American power. And even though the
film scans like a creative-writing assignment from juvie, its
message is essentially no different than that of Drug Wars:
sometimes one man, one great man, can make a world of dif-
ference. A man who is great with the resources of the DEA or
the Guadalajara Cartel at his disposal, but even craftier when
he has nothing. A friend to the commoner, a leader of his
peers, but depending on which theatre you’re in, that great
man is either all-American or all-Mexican and the spectator
has to choose sides.
The antipodes are just as proscribed in a spate of bizarrely
revisionist films featuring Kiki as central protagonist.
Camarena Vive! (Camarena Lives!, 1990) and La Venganza
de Camarena (The Vengeance of Camarena, 1992) played
to the popular conspiracy that Kiki was alive and working
as a drug smuggler in the United States (a theory put forth
by former Interpol-Mexico chief Miguel Aldana Ibarra and
reported widely by the state press).45 The other film, El secue-
stro de Camarena (The Kidnapping of Camarena, 1985),
produced just six months after Kiki’s disinterration,46 tells
64 Narco Cinema

the story of a “George” Camarena searching for the drug

lord who kidnapped his cousin (evidently it was based on a
telephone gameplay of the particulars). Each of these films
conscripts Kiki into a national project of sorts: the 90s films
continue to play up US hypocrisy (Kiki here is in cahoots
with Caro himself); and El secuestro tells the story of a native
son rediscovering his homeland (and rejecting his US roots,
symbolized by the Chicana wife who refuses to bear him
children or to attend the AA meetings from which she would
most certainly benefit).
While we could have hours of snarky fun watching any
of the above, I’d like to conclude instead by looking at a
third genre to tackle the Camarena affair: the campesino
film, examples of which include Operación Mariguana (duh,
1985) and Yerba Sangrieta! (Bloody Weed!, 1986). The for-
mer tells the story of Macario (Mario Almada), a recently
deported migrant searching for his 13-year-old son among
the farmworkers of a sensamilla plantation and battling the
pitiless cadre of narcos who control it. The plantation, a green
oasis in the yellow Chihuahuan desert, is based on Rancho
Búfalo, the most infamous of the Guadalajara Cartel’s grow-
ops. Before it was destroyed during a federal raid in 1984,
Búfalo measured 12 square kilometers (the size of three-
and-a-half Central Parks), and employed up to 12 thousand
laborers.47
Over a maudlin sunny harmonica-led score, Macario sets
off from his hometown on a bus full of agricultural laborers
and arrives at the ranch late one stormy night. The foreman,
a burly Sgt. Santa Claus in a rain-slicked leather poncho,
lines up the shivering arrivals and selects the firmest men for
his fields. The young and elderly and sick are cast out into the
rain-hammered darkness beyond the gate. At dawn, harvest
begins: the laborers chop and bundle marijuana stocks while
armed guards stand by, lending a draconian air to the camp’s
inhospitality. The heat scorches, the tortillas are Dickensianly
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 65

rationed, fights break out randomly among the semi-starved,

a snakebite puts a juvenile on his deathbed. If this weren’t bad
enough, working conditions take a turn for the unbearable
when the laborers learn they won’t be paid for their service.
“We’re used to be screwed over, but not like this . . . We’re
better off working in the States!” cries one of the bolder men.
But his field machete is no match for the guards’ AKs and the
workers have no choice but to sulk back to the field.
The US comparison is telling, if by now slightly over-
wrought. It comes across much more artfully in the film’s
opening scene, in which a group of exhausted peasants,
camped in a creosote flat, are roused by the spotlights of two
pickup trucks. Before the campesinos have time break out of
their sleeping bags, the truckers open fire. Cameras zoom in
on the youngest of the blood-webbed brown faces; every last
one dead.
For 80s moviegoers acquainted with our genre, the assump-
tion is that the killers are either Border Patrol or KKK (or
both). Once Macario arrives at the plantation, we recognize
that the men were really narcos killing their fugitive slaves,
but nevertheless the analogy persists: in the miserable living
conditions, the harsh indifference of the bosses, the eugenic
selection of the ablest men for the fields (the rest denied entry),
the sense of social as much as geographical estrangement
(the plantation is surrounded by 200 km of family-rending
desert)—we are in a world very similar to the one that exiled
Macario in his backstory.
I don’t mean to suggest the film is invincibly melancholy.
After Macario is caught poking around the foreman’s office,
he is roped to the hood of a truck and raced jouncily through
the arroyo toward his burial plot, whence a violent reversal of
fortune conscripts the remaining foremen into a long game of
Die Hard, Macario pouncing from camp to camp, collecting
leads on his son’s whereabouts, and Almadaesquely defeating
any narcos unlucky enough to interfere.
66 Narco Cinema

But action aside, the film’s heart is in the campfire scenes,

the moments when Macario breaks bread with fellow labor-
ers, and listening to tales of their woe, becomes momentarily
unburdened of his colossal solitude and vengeful needs. Here
the film summons that Steinbeckean tension between popu-
list hope and historical despair, and thus here it explicitly
condemns Mexico’s growing dependence on el norte and
narcotics, equally alienating economies that destroy fami-
lies and exploit laborers according to the logic of the free
market.
Needless to say, the film is virulently antidrug. The mania-
cal scene in which a local inebriate corrupts Macario’s son
with a puff of his funny cigarette belongs to the archives
of antidrug-film hysterodelia. And it’s no accident that the
father-and-son reunion occurs right after the army arrives
to free the slaves and firebomb the crops. Macario is given
the honor of torching a mound of the evil weed and through
the pursuant billows of black smoke, the son’s eyes meet the
father’s, the harmonica swells over strings.
I find myself wary of championing Operación Mariguana
because that feels too easy. Here are all the right ingredi-
ents for a four-star academic swoonfest: the ending that
eschews violent for emotional resolution; the narrative evolu-
tion from law of the father to bond of the family (“Let’s go
home to mom,” Macario tells his boy as they walk away from
the bonfire); and again, there’s that didactic foreground of
campesino exploitation and the tidy conflation of narcotics
and migration.
And yet, while the rebel in me wants to find something
bold to say about Maten al fugitivo—how Caro’s final Robin
Hood act was to entertain the masses on screen and how the
performance works like moonshine in bad blood and what’s
so wrong with that?—I also know that I’d be deluding myself
to say Operación isn’t the better picture. In the mid-80s,
when 40–50 percent of Mexicans lived outside the national
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 67

economy,48 to make the DEA or the Guadalajara Cartel the

noble underdog, to lionize a man of the people rather than
the people themselves seems questionable moral infrastruc-
ture. Operación does what the Kiki and Caro films do sepa-
rately: it checks both narco and American hubris and it does
so with a simple grace and an Almada brother—shouldn’t
this be enough?
Besides, I have a feeling that we might be seeing more of
Caro in the years to come. In August 2013, after serving
28 years of his 40-year sentence, Rafael Caro Quintero was
released from prison, inflaming the old tensions and evok-
ing the old martyr north of the border (“We are reminded
every day of the ultimate sacrifice paid by DEA Special Agent
Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena,” said a DEA spokesperson upon
Caro’s release, “and we will vigorously continue our efforts
to ensure Rafael Caro Quintero faces justice.”)49 Now, with a
$5 million bounty for information on his whereabouts (funds
payable by the US State Department), Caro may have another
movie in him yet.50 I know I’ll stay tuned.
In the decade to come, when the Guadalajara Cartel splin-
ters and new barons arise in the plaza, and on screen, to
overshadow Caro’s legend; when the drug war becomes more
brutal two decades on, and narco films devote more and more
of their budgets to showcasing the gory specifics, it’s nice to
remember the ending of Operación Mariguana: a montage of
newsreel footage of the real Búfalo bust that cuts to a scene
at a train station, where a TV reporter catches Macario on
the platform and folds a microphone into his resigned face.
“In light of this very unpleasant experience, is there anything
you’d like to say to the public?” A shaken Macario fumbles
his words, but gets them out. “We’ll go back to our homes,
and, well . . . never again sow that damned weed!” Gripping
his son’s shoulders, he leads a group of ragged children
aboard the homebound express and leaves us here in good
moral standing.
68 Narco Cinema

This is a nice scene. Its antidrug message comes more in

the spirit of César Chavez than Nancy Reagan and out of
the last decade in which drugs could be distinguished as a
Mexican export and an American vice. But before I pass out
the hankies, I should probably mention that the film’s direc-
tor, José Luis Urquieta, good-humoredly admits that his col-
laborator, Reyes Montemayor, paid for his films with narco
money. And that Montemayor, who produced several classic
narco films in the 70s and 80s, would end the decade behind
bars for trafficking cocaine. 51

The 90s: The Lord and the Ant

I want a hero. An uncommon want, I know. Heroes abound
these days in the cultural organs that still serve them. Lately it
seems that every month a new narco is tapped for his misdeeds
and appointed to churn gossip in the people’s cauldron. The
Mexican tabloid, Carlos Monsiváis once wrote, is known for
elevating lurid crimes to Olympian heights: “[transforming]
morality into legend . . . through a combination of ‘unforget-
table characters’ and anecdotes.”52 Sounds good to me—I’ll
take one of those, a character, a legend, or else this subchap-
ter will shrivel into a footnote faster than you can say, “light
up a stage and wax a chump like a candle”53 (as I was known
to say—to dare—to my puberty-pocked reflection many a
Friday night around the decade’s turn).
The problem is that we hit a dry spell after the Camarena
affair. Narco cinema would continue to rehash its old for-
mulae—the corrido interludes, the wheel-of-fortune motifs,
the Almada shootouts—and producers were happy to pro-
mote tales of Colombia’s fallen drug lords. But not until the
late 90s would a Mexican antihero emerge as notorious and
truly film-worthy as Caro. There was plenty of lore to work
with, and plenty of money available for directors willing to
gussy up a middling desperado. In 1991, for example, Carro
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 69

rojo-writer Rubén Benavides was commissioned by trafficker

Oliverio Chávez Araujo to direct Eslabón (Scorpion), a biopic
about Araujo’s late brother and smuggling partner. 54 But as a
rule, high-ranking narcos now eschewed the kind of publicity
given to their celebrity forbearer, and with good reason.
In the wake of his incarceration, Caro’s partners were
rounded up and convicted for their involvement in Camarena’s
murder (Ernesto Fonseca Carillo in 1985 and Miguel Angel
Félix Gallardo four years later). In 1989, the remaining gran-
dees of the Guadalajara Cartel gathered for a weeklong sum-
mit in Acapulco to modernize the jus in bello and divide
the republic according to the old blood.55 Félix Gallardo’s
nephews headed northwest to found the Tijuana Cartel
(and inspire a film trilogy in Los más buscados, [The Most
Wanted], 2004–2005).56 The 31-year-old Joaquin “El Chapo”
Guzmán placed his bid for Sinaloa (beginning a career that
would land him on such prestigious lists as the FBI’s most
wanted and Forbes’s most powerful). Longtime independent
Juan García Abrego brought his Gulf Cartel into the fold and
Fonseca Carillo’s nephew, Amado Carillo Fuentes, was sent
back to Chihuahua to continue his apprenticeship with vet-
eran smuggler Pablo Acosta, “the Ojinaga Fox,” and where,
within five years, he would turn his snatch of the empire into
the biggest cartel the world has ever known. When the capos
convened again in 1994, it was Carillo setting the agenda.57
Stay tuned.
By today’s standards, diplomacy among the cartels was
practically Augustan. Bosses collaborated on cocaine bro-
kerage with the now friable Colombians; they shared infor-
mants, police protectors, and hit men; they established tariffs
on narcotics moving through their turfs; all in all, they main-
tained a highly lucrative peace.58 Still, disputes occasionally
tested the alliance (and compelled media attention). When a
mini-war for shipping routes broke out between the Sinaloa
and Tijuana Cartels, what started as a quiet inter-narco
70 Narco Cinema

skirmish soon exploded into an international tragedy when

Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was accidentally gunned down
at the Guadalajara International Airport in 1993. 59 Narco
cinema responded months later with La Muerte de un carde-
nal (The Death of a Cardinal, 1993). Chapo Guzmán was
apprehended and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for
the murder (though in 2001, he made a harrowing getaway,
which can be seen in that year’s La Fuga del Chapo [Chapo’s
Escape]). But by and large, peace and quiet were the orders
of the day.60 We’ll have to wait until the decade’s end for fate
to give us a satisfying legend.
The American press, meanwhile, had chosen its own
Mexican for canonization: a 40-year-old diminutive light-
skinned fellow with an easy smile and a ring of lanugo
around his ample pate. A career politician from a family of
old politics and older money who had once migrated (legally)
to complete graduate studies at Harvard and who ran his
campaign for the 1988 presidential election on the promise
of bringing Mexico into the global economy.61 The prime
mover of NAFTA, a one-time contender for Time’s Man of
the Year, WTO darling, apple of Kissinger’s eye.62 In Mexico
he was known as la hormiga atónita, “the atomic ant.” Or
sometimes as just “the ant.” “That sobriquet reflects not
only the traditional Mexican irreverence toward authority,”
beamed The New York Times in 1987, “but also recognizes
the energy, drive and persistence that are the main compo-
nents of Mr. Salinas’s public image.”63
Hindsight, of course, is a son of a bitch: we know now that,
despite spawning 22 billionaires, Mexico’s GDP didn’t grow
at all during the Salinas presidency.64 A month after he left
office in 1994, the peso and minimum wage fell by more than
half, the country entered an extended fiscal crisis (requiring
a $50 billion bailout package from its new NAFTA partners),
and, thanks to Salinas’s discontinuation of agricultural sub-
sidy programs, drug cultivation would continue to expand
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 71

throughout the impoverished countryside, making narcotics

one of the last secure means of economic mobility for mil-
lions living in Mexico.65 Morality into legend and how.
Mexicans were shrewder in their vetting, however, which
is why they didn’t elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the first
place (it’s roundly accepted that a well-timed “computer
glitch” saved him and his long-ruling PRI Party from a cata-
strophic defeat, although who can say for sure? Salinas had
the ballots burned after he took office).66 Once in power,
Salinas wasted no time in implementing his neoliberal poli-
cies and rewarding his campaign supporters with generous
opportunities in the new technocracy. He privatized or bank-
rupted 85 percent of public infrastructure and 30 of his clos-
est allies walked away with extremely remunerative chunks
of the old establishment, one of which chunks happened to
include the state’s media holdings.67
This meant yet another blow to the national film indus-
try. Just when Mexico was undergoing a cinematic renais-
sance in the Nuevo Cine movement (Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos
Carrera, and Maria Novaro premiered their first features
during Salinas’s presidency) the government was striking off
the last of its cultural-protectionist measures. Soon, without
state subsidies, local theatres fell to the multiplex, making
movie-going too expensive for the working class,68 and quo-
tas on Mexican content in theatres were removed (according
to NAFTA protocol), ensuring that Hollywood dominated
the box office.69
However this hurt more conventional and auterish films,
narco cinema, now forced into the fertile grounds of home
video, thrived, and multiplied like a wet mogwai (around
200 new videohomes were released each year).70 In fact, pur-
ists will argue that our history begins here—that the 35mm
theatrical release we looked at earlier are not actually narco
films, but expensive precursors to the VHS cassettes that
started appearing in video stores in the late 80s. These were
72 Narco Cinema

cheap, risk-averse independent productions, most of them

shot on 16mm over the course of a few weeks on budgets
of $50,000 to $85,000; family members and familiar real
estate provided cast and setting, a trend that continues today;
and the producers’ fiscal sense always trumped the director’s
vision,71 which meant that when a scandal hit the tabloids,
the cinematic response tended to be kneejerk rather than
cerebral in order to get it on the shelves pronto.
Needless to say, many of the 90s videohomes are . . . just
awful. Some have production values on par with Martian
Fresh!: Beyond the Third Vector (1990), the indie sci-fi I shot
as a ten-year-old on an uncle’s camcorder. Many of the non-
narco videohomes (also much in the spirit of Martian Fresh!)
are shamelessly derivative of contemporary American block-
busters; others are uniquely depraved. There are psychopaths,
papacides, scamping vampires (“scampires”?), droopy boom
mics, narcoleptic background extras who engage the cam-
era in impromptu staring contests. There’s a three-foot E.T.
named Danik with weird spacy powers and the distinctly tel-
luric ability to transform me into a sobbing infant. There’s an
actress (not a character) called “Princesa Lea.”
I don’t mean to imply that only Mexican b-movies were so
appalling or expropriative (Turkish cinema is now infamous
for its campy knockoffs, thanks to the Internet). And if you
ever visited a North American video store in the 90s, you’ll
recall a host of US-produced straight-to-video garbáge lining
the shelves; every culture poops. My point is that if narco cin-
ema emerged as a subgenre of border cinema in the 70s and
80s, a cinema with very modest studio budgets and a charro
heritage, its aesthetic (and pecuniary) correlative in the 90s
became the ultracheap, sell-the-box-before-the-film video-
home: lewd, gory, and often utterly bananas. Now there were
narco satanists; mohawked narcos on motorbikes hightailing
it out of an approximate Thunderdome. All the processed
cheeses melted together. In 1991, Mario Almada was battling
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 73

a drug-running union boss in Muerte en Tijuana, but he was

also chasing fortune and glory in Tijuana Jones.
That such a shift (let’s go ahead and call it a decline) occurred
during the Salinas sexenio is fitting, not only because the 90s
films, with their low-cost assembly and broad market appeal,
with their perennial moral of cunning individuals thwarting
the state, are saturated in the free-market logic that drove his
economic policy; it’s also fitting because, like the videohome
itself, the Salinas family had a considerable investment in the
labor of narcos.
Early in his term, Carlos Salinas waved a few red flags
by accepting campaign donations from known drug traffick-
ers and by appointing one of Kiki Camarena’s alleged tor-
turers as his secretary of education.72 Nevertheless, it was
Raúl Salinas, Carlos’s older brother, who turned out to be
the black sheep. In 1995, when Swiss police began follow-
ing the $85 million in his bank account, they were led to an
additional 288 bank accounts around the globe, raising his
unexplainable income to a total of $500 million. Most of
the money, the police concluded, had come from drug bribes:
“When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President . . . in
1988, Raúl . . . assumed control over practically all drug ship-
ments through Mexico.”73
One rumor had it that the bribes he received from the
Juárez Cartel went through the federal police to the deputy
attorney general, a Salinas relation by marriage.74 Though
another rumor had it that the leader of that cartel, now by
far the most powerful cartel in Mexico, would meet with the
president directly in his office at Los Pinos.75 That leader was
a Sinaloan transplant in his early forties, the son of impover-
ished farmers, and the nephew of a Guadalajaran capo. His
net worth was now $25 billion USD and, more than any-
thing, he valued privacy.76
Few pictures of him exist. He prohibited publicity under
penalty of death. (His domestic servants say he resembled “the
74 Narco Cinema

heroes in old Mexican movies . . . with a big moustache.)”77

But if we fast-forward to the summer of ’97, when he’s dying
on an operating table in a Mexico City maternity hospital,
there’s nothing he can do to prevent the cameras from steal-
ing in.78 And I think by now he’s ready for a couple close-
ups.
The Lord of the Skies is a dapper lord. Tall and swarthy;
lean, but solid. His face is one of those so-handsome-it’s-
almost-ugly faces that line the walls of Italian barbershops,
complete with requisite cop moustache and a single dark wave
of digit-drowning hair. About his musky décolletage dangles
a gold letter “A” á la Carrie Bradshaw. “A” for “Antonio
Fontes Canseco,” narco cinema’s premier Amado Carillo
Fuentes, in El Señor de los cielos (The Lord of the Skies,
1997). In the film’s opening scene, we meet Canseco (Miguel
Ángel Rodríguez) entering the hospital for facial reconstruc-
tive surgery. That anyone this good-looking would be forced
to pursue a disguise is the greatest injustice this film and its
two sequels permit.
The Lord of the Air, on the other hand, is played by Jorge
Reynoso. Which isn’t to say necessarily that Jorge Reynoso—
whose dimensions suggest a modest duplex and whose eye-
brows are furrier than President Salinas’s whole body (one
surmises)—isn’t handsome. Let’s say instead that Reynoso’s
looks are of a rougher genre. He has a giant’s affability. He’s
even sort of cuddly, which, though it doesn’t go far in interpel-
lating his bruiser persona when the time comes that a cabrón
needs stitches, makes him seem the bruiser you’d feel least
intimidated by when he noogies your head a little roughly
in friendship. He seems big-souled. He could also hold his
own against any Almada at a fan convention, but that doesn’t
mean he cuts a dashing Carillo in El Capo de capos (The
Boss of Bosses, 1997) and it’s best we get his portrayal out
of the way first.
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 75

Whereas El Señor offers a career-spanning narco roman,

El Capo takes place between 1993 and 1997—Carillo’s final
years and the height of his power. By this point, the stakes
of his legacy had been planted. He’d buried his enemies and
protégés. He’d moved his throne to Ciudad Juárez, the bor-
der city and NAFTA-factory showroom, and ruled it with an
almost feudal license (between 1991 and 1995, hundreds of
narcos were murdered in Juárez and a grand total of zero sus-
pects were arrested; his bribery budget ran $500 million per
annum).79 He’d taken primary ownership of the “Mexican
trampoline,” bouncing Colombian cocaine into the United
States at a rate of 30 tons per week; and driven down the
value of raw cocaine by establishing wholesale markets in
Peru and Bolivia.80 He’d purchased international airlines, fac-
tories, hospitals, nightclubs, hotels, Mexican and American
banks.81 He’d fixed it so there was no longer any doubt: this
onetime peasant was the most glorious of Sinaloa’s bandit
sons—though you’d be damned even to whisper as much in
public (silence, to him, was indeed golden).82 And when one
of his Boeing 727s got confiscated in a perfunctory raid, the
loss was worth less to him than a spilled ice-cream scoop is
to you and me.83
Still, as the opening scene of El Capo makes clear, it’s not
easy being the boss of bosses. Untouchable is just an 11-letter
word. And when the most powerful narco in the land risks
something so innocuous as a meal in a public restaurant, he
flashes a chink in the organization’s armor and—Action!—
draws his enemies in for a stab at infamy. In this case, it’s
four gunmen, lazily charging the family restaurant, scaring
up a gaggle of screams, collapsing tables, scattering cutlery,
and turning a quiet brunch into a mini Waterloo. Through
the pandemonium, “Leonidas Carríon” is whisked from his
date and bottle of cognac and raced back to his mansion to
catch his breath . . . and plot his revenge. (This scene is based
76 Narco Cinema

on an actual assault, during which Carillo’s wife had been

wounded, as Hellenic a catalyst as any for the war to come,
though for some reason, she didn’t make the script).84
Back at badass HQ, a shaken Carríon dispatches the guards
to murder his fellow leaders in the Juárez Cartel (a trifecta of
assassinations reminiscent of the final act of Godfather I). It’s
only after his partners are dead that Carríon realizes it was
the Castellanos brothers behind the hit (the Arellano-Félix
brothers, aka, the Tijuana Cartel) and that the real job of get-
ting even has just begun. Thus commences a convoluted tale
of betrayal, revenge, corruption, temptation, paternity, more
revenge, elective surgery, kidnapping, and, finally, revenge,
only tangents of which connect to the actual biography. In
the end, Carríon survives the operating table (where the real
Carillo died) and with a new identity, sets out to take down
the police officers who’d been pursuing his case.
I’m less than romanced. Unlike El Señor, which disclaims
itself “based on real facts,” El Capo makes no bones about
its fan fiction, which is okay in principle, but there’s a limit to
how far you should stray into make-believe when your sub-
ject happens to be one of the most interesting people of the
decade. If the plot is disjointed, its hero is practically atom-
ized. To explain his development is to broadcast a psycholog-
ical hopscotch: one jump and he’s shedding shotgun casings
in a massacre at the disco; jump again and he’s a Salinas-
era technocrat, walking us through a computer lab with the
pride of middle management. Here he’s crying boozy tears
over the death of an occasional lover; there he’s wincing at
the stubbed toe of his brother’s fatal heart attack. At his haci-
enda he’s a narco rock star; at a Puerto Vallarta nightclub,
he’s that star’s teetotaling manager before he trips on the safe
square and face-plants into some tried apocrypha (the narco
as mystico-romantic: “Ay, mi vida . . . I have constant premo-
nitions . . . of death”). He’s merciful and gross, chilly, chival-
rous, and elsewhere. He is a man with too many qualities.
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 77

In consequence, we’re forced to seek other founts of melo-

drama (and find them, begrudgingly, in the romantic trials
of his police antagonists). Perhaps this is the film’s prevail-
ing meditation on the pathology of leadership: you have to
be all the stereotypes at once. And though this would make
his facial reconstruction surgery a happily found metaphor,
there’s been too much love lost in excavation to say anything
more about it.
Let’s turn then to the more interesting biography of El
Señor de los cielos. This film is structured as a series of death-
bed flashbacks that traces the highs and lows of Carillo’s $25
billion career: the Charles Foster Kane treatment. The action
begins 12 years premortem, in 1985, when a joint US-Mexican
task force erupts on the hacienda of Epifanio Fontes (Emilio
Franco) to arrest him for Camarena’s murder (Fontes is based
on Ernesto Fonseca Carillo, one of the three Guadalajaran
capos). A shootout ensues, Canseco escapes, but uncle Fontes
is dragged off to jail where his lawyer breaks the news that
because of US pressure, Fontes won’t be able buy his freedom
this time, though, if he cooperates, he can insure safe passage
for his precocious nephew. Fontes agrees: he wants Canseco
to uphold the family legacy and so arranges for him to train
under Francisco Acosta, a rocky first-gen trafficker from the
border town of Ojinaga, Chihuahua (a fictional Pablo Acosta
Villareal, played by Oscar Osornio).
Arriving in Ojinaga, Canseco learns quickly how much
denser and wilder the narcosphere is in northern Mexico
when his new mentor, a skinny ponytail in a blazer-over-T-
shirt ensemble with a floozy on his lap and a hitler of cocaine
in his van dyke—quite obviously the fugitive member of
some new-jack-swing group living far too long on the psy-
chotic edge of fame—orders Canseco to prove his gumption
by shooting two of his (Acosta’s own) bodyguards. Canseco
doesn’t hesitate and—kapow! kapow!—after Acosta has
cackled sufficiently over his friends’ corpses, he formally
78 Narco Cinema

appoints Canseco his new right-hand. The mentorship proves

short-lived, however: exactly five minutes later, the insane
Acosta dares police to shoot him in a drug bust. They com-
ply. The police chief then offers Canseco a deal: if he can sup-
ply him with some primo Colombian cocaine, Canseco is free
to claim Acosta’s turf. It’s a win-win for Canseco, though it
instills in our young arriviste an abiding cynicism about the
vicissitudes of power.
(I’m not sure if this police chief has a real-life equivalent,
but Carrillo had several high-ranking feds on his payroll,
including Commandante Calderoni, the national director
for drug interdiction, and General Rebollo, Mexico’s drug
czar.85 For Calderoni’s story, check out Por mujeres como tú
[For Women Like You, 2004].)
The film progresses quickly from here. Fate clears a
landing strip, an empire arrives one Cessna at a time. The
Colombians descend with suitcases of white powder and the
Americans circle overhead with duffle bags of greenbacks.
Soon Canseco is buying out airplane dealerships, trading his
light Cessnas for 727s. Soon his man in the feds proves too
greedy and gets replaced (read: murdered) for “El General”
(based on Rebollo). By the time he’s preparing to enter the
hospital for plastic surgery, police say Canseco is moving 30
tons of cocaine and earning more than $200 million a week.
He’s outdone even his uncle and become the most powerful
capo in Latin America. (There is no mention of his rivalry
with the Tijuana Cartel, nor any hint of the bloody catas-
trophe Juárez became under his watch. His only judicial
antagonists are a pair of unbribeable cops—one American,
the other Mexican, as in El Capo). Still, something’s wrong.
If fortune has given him such excellent oral sex, why does he
look so unhappy?
Working his way to the top, the real challenge has always
been maintaining the good grace of Laura, his mercurial
sweetheart (Lina Santos). Years ago, in the early days of
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 79

their courtship, he used to worry that her job as a boutique

clerk made her too classy for a narco like him. And even
after they married, his sense of inferiority and the tenuous
nature of her affection remained primary forces behind his
professional drive, as if success in trafficking could bend his
romantic destiny to the same golden end. On his wedding
day, he informs his uncle (out on prison visit) that he plans to
take over the Juárez Cartel. Oh, what a glorious afternoon!
Laura, in expired cream-colored finery lists to his hunched
shoulders, guests dote and coo, French reds decant in plastic
cups on plastic tables, and the hired corridista sings about a
love so strong it makes him want to open his veins. The next
morning, Laura locks herself in the bathroom to protest her
groom’s work schedule and in that instant, Canseco develops
a mysterious heart condition that will send him hobbling to
the medicine cabinet whenever his wife’s hand recoils from
his grip.
At the peak of his career, Laura files for divorce. Everything
is falling apart. Canseco has become a high-functioning
melancholic: throwing himself into his crimes by day, self-
medicating at night with tumblers of whiskey and hand-
fuls of nondescript heart medicine. His police informant, El
General, has been arrested, the authorities have discovered
his smuggling routes. And then one morning we find Canseco
hungover and half-naked in a cheap hotel room, a forgot-
ten one-night stand passed out beside him. As dawn prods
through the curtains, Canseco flops to the bedside, slaps his
face, and staggers toward the mirror like a collapsible Jim
Morrison. He picks up an empty beer bottle from the table
below and, taking a long draw on his gloomy reflection, back-
hands the bottle into the shattering glass. Time stops. Time
returns in back-up slow motion. His huffs and screams echo
from vacant octaves. He clutches his arm, weathering another
heart attack (or whatever this is) while a sort of Muzak cover
of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” plays in the background.
80 Narco Cinema

Say what you will about prog rock, this climax is mar-
velously scored. Even without the Ayn Rand–inspired anti-
government lyrics, the instrumental delivers all the spacey,
kitschy weirdness and baroque gynophobia of the original.
It’s an ideal song for this Kane’s reckoning, which has been
brought on by the twin evils of female and judicial oppres-
sion. And it carries us to the final scene, in which Canseco
lies on the operating table, the memory of lost love once again
activating his heart condition. One of his aides recognizes the
boss’s writhe and administers a shot; moments later, the EKG
slows to a flatline. The surgical anesthetic and the painkill-
ers have counteracted lethally and the most powerful narco
in the world has died of a broken heart. A tragic ending for
one who had been materially, but never spirituality, allowed
to jump caste.
I think I know what kind of hero this is. The Wikipedia
profile matches to a tee: “cunning” (check), “moody” (check),
“having a troubled past” (sic; check), “treated as an out-
law” (check), “capable of deep and strong affection” (check),
“socially and sexually dominant” (check and check).86 Why,
it’s the old Byronic model: the Gothic softy, the saturnine
swashbuckler. The hero who, according to Camus, is “capa-
ble only of an impossible love” and thus doomed to “suffer
endlessly.”87 The larger-than-life antihero who “knew him-
self a villain, but . . . deem’d / The rest no better than the thing
he seem’d; / And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid /
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.”88 (Compare these
lines from Corsair with Amado Carillo’s taunt to the Salinas
brothers: “The people who steal money from Mexico and
take it out of the country to Switzerland are more of a dis-
grace than I am.”)89
How did a serial murderer and freebase enthusiast wind
up masking, competently, as Childe Harold? And why might
audiences prefer a sexy brooder to another prizefighter like
Caro’s avatar in Maten el fugitvo? The simple answer is that
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 81

Carillo’s contradictions were spectacular. They ran far beyond

the Robin Hood and Genghis Khan poles set by his predeces-
sors. His openly criminal deeds and mastery of international
finance made him a kind of Salinas doppelgänger and yet he
stayed camouflaged in rumor for most of his life (everyone
knew his name and knew enough not to speak it aloud). He
was a Sinaloan peasant with a Gatsbyean hold on destiny
who died in his mid-forties undergoing low-risk surgery. The
polarities inherent in his character—those he cultivated and
those fated to him—kindled a fascination with the Carillo
legend which El Señor was right to set in mood lighting with
a quarter-naked Ángel at center stage.
More to the point, in all his reincarnations, the Byronic
hero’s duty is to inspire a search for order while simultane-
ously denying the possibility of finding comfort or agency
within that order (be it lyrical, moral, existential).90 Byron
scholar Jerome McGann explains, “Our sympathy for such
a man is the melancholy sign of human ineffectuality . . . [he]
instills in [us] a dislocated and melancholy intelligence . . . he
threatens to expose to the observer his own hidden heart.”91
Could we extrapolate McGann’s reading into a bold
statement about national cynicism and ineffectuality in the
NAFTA 90s, to diagnose the melancholy heart of the pueblo
in the technocratic age? Remember that the original Byronic
hero was the son of regency England: he came of age under—
and spent his life sneering at—a parliamentary monarchy
headed respectively by an insane man and an asshole; an
empire engaged in noble war with the French and merciless
war with the colonies. He saw firsthand the rise of a new
economy in which low-wage, low-skilled factory jobs were
beginning to replace traditional labor—all for glory of the
old regime and the wealthy mercantilists who supported it.
That he was a beneficiary and scapegoat of such a regime
made him a celebrity. That he could bond his celebrity to the
history of his nation made him a legend.
82 Narco Cinema

This is why El Señor’s two sequels fail: not only do they

take an unrepentant turn to the fictional (the last is a jail-
break film), but with the loss of an interesting personage in
Fontes Canseco (and a strong lead actor in Ángel Rodríguez),
the franchise is rudderless and uses violence gratuitously to
simulate momentum. We’re back in typical 90s videohome
territory and longing for a romantic fix.
We might comb the archives for other Byronic Carillos—
like Caro, he was a cinema darling in the years after his
fall92 —but I don’t think we’ll find one up to El Señor’s cali-
ber. Instead, let’s end the decade by looking briefly at a much
different film: Masacre en Ensenada (Massacre in Ensenada,
1998). This videohome is based on the death of Fermin
Castro, a suspected marijuana dealer gunned down by the
Tijuana Cartel at his ranch in Baja California along with 18
members of his family (seven of them children and one just
a baby). The massacre shocked Mexico. Even veteran law
enforcement agents who’d built careers tracking the cartels
were speechless at such a horrific breach of the narco code,
which forbade harming civilians.93
There isn’t much to say about this film and I mention it
mainly in transition. In the following decade, massacres like
this one, which The New York Times compared in “feroc-
ity” to the Mexican army’s attack on the Zapatistas,94 would
become the rule in inter-cartel warfare. In the film, the mas-
sacre itself is only a lead-in to an unrelated story about a
corridista (El Puma de Sinaloa) caught, against his will or
deed, between rival cartels, and struggling to save his family
from collateral vengeance. In the end, he’ll manage to out-
smart and outgun both sides, and the narco responsible for
the opening massacre is allowed to redeem himself by sav-
ing a child from a grenade attack. The premise goes from
misleading to standard and the resolution is perfectly happy.
A simple tale about the dangers and small conciliations that
come with maintaining the frail infrastructure that bridges
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 83

the ant’s world and the Lord’s and that calls for faith where
direction is long gone. Only narco cinema could shroud 18
bystanders in cowboy manga.
As for our heroes, at the end of his term, Carlos Salinas
exiled himself to a Dublin mansion across the street from
Bono.95 His occasional visits to Mexico have the uncanny
ability to cause earthquakes (“[Even] the earth doesn’t
like him,” declared a Mexico City housewife on the third
instance).96 Carlos’s brother Raul was eventually incarcerated
(not for embezzlement or racketeering—but for murder!) and
was released after serving a decade of his 27-year sentence.97
The only Salinas now courting the public eye is Carlos’s son,
who gives TED Talks about why Mexicans should stop blam-
ing their misfortune on the government and instead confront
their penchant for self-victimization.98
Amado Carillo Fuentes continues to remain dead, though
conspiracy revives him from time to time (as Telemundo did
in 2013 for the 75-episode first season in a novela about
his life; former-model Rafael Amaya stars). Ciudad Juárez,
capital of his kingdom and the city touted by the Salinas
administration as the model of NAFTA success, has become
synonymous with its feminicide—the indiscriminate rape
and murder of thousands of women, many of whom worked
at the maquiladoras. In 2009, Juárez earned the distinction
of being the most violent city in the world, with a murder rate
of over 3,000 victims a year.99 At the time of writing, a hit
costs $85, factory workers earn 61¢ an hour and 500 street
gangs prowl the ruins of Carillo’s empire.100
While gangs, police, army and cartels have been accused
of perpetrating the Juárez murders, videohomes have blamed
them variously on: a serial killer (16 en la lista [16 on the
List], 1998); and a serial killer (Las muertas de Juárez [The
Dead Women of Juárez], 2002).
That’s showbiz for you.
84 Narco Cinema

The 00s: 00s: 00s: 00s: 00s: 00s: 00s

It’s easy to sound off nihilistically from afar; this is usually
what drug policy does best. Nevertheless, I stand by the
heading. Zeroes. Nada y nada y nada y nada y nada y nada
y nada. I wouldn’t know where else to begin, though I’m not
sure where to take it from here.
I suppose I could share some of my false starts: my purple
lyrics about Mars-red skies and a rusty tang to the wind and
blood crawling iambically across cobblestone plazas I’ve never
visited. Where the late-night arrangements of severed limbs,
next to shotgun casings and cigarette butts, have achieved
the semantic capability of a primitive alphabet. In perpetu-
ally open cities where narcos war for corners, and municipal,
state, and federal police battle each other under rival cartel
banners,101 cities I’ve seen only on film.
I could sing you something ghoulish from the alterado
songbook. One of the new hardcore narcocorridos that make
the 70s hits sound folkloric and Raffiesque: “With an AK-47
and bazooka at the neck / heads flying off anyone who dares,
/ we’re blood-thirsty madmen, we like to kill.”102
Or I could fan out some truly nauseous statistics and ask
you to guess: there have been 60 thousand narco-related
homicides in Mexico since President Calderón declared war
on drugs in 2006,103 or 120 thousand, or 150 thousand.104
The cartels earn $19 or $29 billion a year.105 Either 70 or
90 percent of their weaponry comes from the United States.106
The percentage of investigated crime in Mexico is 4.5 or 6.107
Approximately 45 percent of victims are under age 30.108
Kidnapping rates tripled last year, though only 1 percent of
the kidnappings were reported to police, and 30 percent of
victims were killed.109
The truth is that any overview of the contemporary drug
war will fail to capture the situation on the ground, and only
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 85

the most politic and lunatic voices will find moral absolutes
in this catastrophe. Context itself gleams over the violence
with zirconic fraudulence, and so better to leave it at this:
at the century’s turn, the narco pax crumbled, racing fis-
sures through the cartels that supported it. A flux of unstable
alliances and rivalries advanced further across the country,
pulling virtually every violent tendency into its excitement.
Gangbangers now fight cops who fight special forces who
fight rogue nephews who fight AWOL privates who fight cult
leaders who fight child soldiers who fight the unknown narco
who, on New Year’s Eve, 2010, sewed a man’s face onto a
soccer ball and left it in a plastic bag near city hall in Los
Mochis, Sinaloa.110
Some more Byron, perhaps? Hemingway? A country can
be destroyed but not defeated? Better I roll it back to zero
and get on with the show.
The Tijuana Cartel has its films, as does the Gulf. The
Sinaloans, their hit squads and splinters. I’ve watched La
Familia Michoacána wipe out whole genealogies and the
Knights Templar preach the Book of Revelation one tiny
apocalypse after another. But if we’re going out of fear—and
I mean excruciating terror—and because as goes the fear in
the pueblo, so goes the action on screen, let’s call it right now:
in the millennium of narco culture, the zeroes belong to Los
Zetas.
Born on the cusp of 2000 when the Gulf Cartel corrupted
the local garrison into soldiers of fortune. Came of age 2003–
2005 fending off the Sinaloan siege of the greater northeast.
2010 unleashed the Oedipal monster and the Zetas mutinied
against their Gulf leaders to become an independent cartel.
Now, 15 years on, in the full grotesquerie of adolescence, with
more black flags planted than even the Sinaloans, their closest
rivals,111 the Zetas have become Mexico’s most fearsome car-
tel. And like their Guadalajaran and Juarense predecessors,
86 Narco Cinema

in quaking below the official narrative of Mexican moder-

nity, they pull the history of their nation into the catacombs.
Let’s return once more to the beginning.
Year 00, Early Zeta Era. The former head of Coca Cola
Mexico is elected president of the country and “life tastes
good” at last. His victory ends almost a century of one-
party rule and signals the possibility that genuine democracy
has finally betided poor Mexico. As if moved by the esprit
républicain in the air, the Gulf Cartel, a syndicate active for
generations in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, adopts
a new system of merit-based recruitment under the leader-
ship of Osiel Cardenás (aka, El Mata Amigos, “The Friend
Killer”). Cardenás rejects the nepotism and regionalism that
encumber the old system—he wants killers with experience
and talent; cousinship counts for less. 38 ex-soldiers from the
Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (Mexico’s Green
Berets) have already signed on as his guard. These are men
who’ve had advanced training in counterinsurgency at Fort
Bragg and months of field experience mutilating Zapatista
rebels in Chiapas.112 Cardenás admires the new formation
and sends word to the barracks: the Gulf pays much better
than the republic.
Year 05, EZE. Seven hundred federal soldiers arrive in
Nuevo Laredo, border city and coveted smuggling route, to end
the war between the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels.113 The Zetas
arm themselves with grenade launchers and flak jackets and
hang banners in the plaza inviting soldiers to defect.114 They
promise life insurance policies, houses, model-year trucks.115
Soon their ranks swell to four thousand and include former
Kaibiles, special-op commandos from the Guatemalan mili-
tary, notorious for their Spartan training and civilian massa-
cres (their motto, “If I retreat, kill me,” will be adopted by the
Zetas); and municipal police officers who, flouting the tradi-
tional exchange of dirty money for judicial blindness, now
actively kidnap and murder on the cartel’s orders.116 Like an
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 87

occupying army, the Gulf and the Zetas take control of the
press in Tamaulipas and provide community service—even
hosting children’s parties—to smooth their reputation and
entrench their civil power.117 Two years later, the Sinaloans
agree to a ceasefire.118
Year 10, EZE. Leadership rivalries and tactical disputes
polarize the Zetas and the Gulf, prompting the old guard to
declare publicly a split: “In our ranks we do not want kid-
nappers, terrorists, bank robbers, rapists, child-killers and
traitors.”119 Civil war erupts in the northeast and spreads
across the country as the cartels line up on either side: Sinaloa
and La Familia back the Gulf; Tijuana, Juárez and the Beltrán
Leyvas (former Sinaloans) support the Zetas, whose numbers
now exceed ten thousand.120
Year 15, EZE. Despite waging a perpetual two-front war
with the military and half the underworld, a war that has
cost the Zetas most of their founding members, the syndi-
cate continues to expand internationally, offering the “Zeta”
brand for a licensing fee and awarding franchises through-
out Mexico and Central America—two-month guerilla-
training programs optional (La Familia Michoacána were
proud alumni until declaring independence in year 06).121
Extortion, kidnapping, racketeering, industrial sabotage,
human trafficking, and piracy now fill chapters in their
portfolio, of which drugs constitute only 20 percent.122
They’ve forged transport routes into West Africa and struck
distribution deals with Italian mobs.123 They’ve “liberated”
hundreds of Zeta prisoners in jails throughout their terri-
tory, and several times have closed down the American bor-
der solely as a show force.124 The US State Department calls
them “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and
dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.”125 Hydra metaphors
swamp the literature: no matter how many Zetas die, several
fresh heads hiss forth.126 Z42 leads the troops 12 years after
the death of Z1.
88 Narco Cinema

These are the DEA bullet points. Sketch a few together

randomly and maybe you’ll form a picture like the one we
get in Los Zetas (2007), a videohome that somehow watches
less like a movie than a synopsis of one. Here is that synopsis:
for 90 minutes, the gang roams the city in black T-shirts and
baseball caps, extorting money from locals, murdering stingy
families, visiting strip clubs, decapitating police wives, and
encouraging children to take advantage of the lucrative drug
market at primary school. There’s not much more to it than
that. Finally, an incorruptible commandante and the son of a
murdered businessman have enough and decide to wipe out
the entire gang—problem solved.
Sleepy narrative aside, the problem with the film is its
action: this is Zeta-light. It doesn’t come close to capturing
the Gallic ferocity of the cartel that naturalized beheading
as an intimidation tactic.127 The Arellano-Félix brothers of
Tijuana may have been first to murder women and children
on a newsworthy scale (as you’ll remember from Masacre en
Ensenada),128 but the Zetas have so salaciously capitalized
on an image of criminal amorality that the old-school cartels
have come to view them as “psychotically antisocial,” even
as they’ve adopted some of the nastier PSYOPs from the Zeta
field manual.129
However much on a tactical level the distinction is becom-
ing erroneous, narco culture at large still holds a degree of
professional comportment and noblesse oblige to the older
cartels, and grants mayhem to the Zetas and street gangs.
The distinction is underscored in El cartel de los “Z”: La
Realidad de Mexico (The “Z” Cartel: The Reality of Mexico,
2011), a movie intent on finger-painting the Zeta story into
an approximate Bosch or Brueghel.
The film opens on a breezy afternoon somewhere in the
borderlands where a dozen migrants, tots to grandmas, are
crossing on foot to the United States: sloshing across marsh-
land and rustling through shrubby inclines under a cloudless
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 89

blue sky. Complaints of hunger and thirst occasionally stall

their progress, but the coyote’s entreaty to hurry is respected;
everyone wants to get through this fast as possible. But when
a clearing appears a few steep yards ahead and a gunshot
echoes from its height, the migrants freeze in their tracks. Atop
the hill, two rows of armed men are eyeing them through the
sights of their AK-47s. The coyote raises his arms and calls
for calm. A mother and daughter make a run for it and four
expert shots curdle them into the tall grass.
Zetas out! A sinewy V huts downhill and swallows the
migrants in a cilia of machine guns and pistols, which then
propels the captives aboard a flatbed truck. Three hyper-
ventilating women are knocked to the ground and executed.
The handheld camera judders and zooms arbitrarily over the
actors, who look like real migrants (maybe they are) and like
real narcos (no comment). If not for credits flashing waist
level and some atonal noodling from the Casio philharmonic,
you might wonder if this were bona fide Zeta snuff.
In a few minutes, the kidnapped will arrive at an aban-
doned warehouse, where they’ll be locked in windowless
rooms until their ransoms are wired. The women whose
families are unable to pay up will be sent abroad to work as
prostitutes; the men will be trained as future Zetas (later still,
we’ll glimpse the famous counterinsurgency classes).
But before the flatbed departs for base, the Zetas hit a
snag. Two white trucks have just pulled into the near dis-
tance and the six men coming into focus, decked out in a
companionable armory, are training their guns on the Zetas
and demanding they hand over the pollos. Taunts fire back
and forth, parallels edge off to 50 paces: the interlopers in old
blue jeans, white shirts, and cowboy hats; the Zetas in black
Kevlar and fatigues. The old guard facing the new. The new
shoots first.
When the smoke clears, the lead Zeta saunters over to the
lead trespasser, who is on his back in the dry grass with four
90 Narco Cinema

shots in his chest, his blood goatee chomping at brave words.

The Zeta kneels down and knocks away the narco’s cowboy
hat with the butt of his gun. Then he lifts him up by the bling,
and shoots him in the face. A subtitle flashes: La Realidad de
Mexico (just so we know what we’ve gotten into).
The leader of these Zetas, a behemoth named Ursulo, is
played by Flavio Peniche. Not-so-fun fact: in 2003, Peniche
was incarcerated for shooting—and killing—an extra on the
set of the narco film Juana la alacrana (Juana the Scorpion).
Apparently the homicide was a prop mix-up and Peniche was
later exonerated, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am
very afraid of this man. Not out of hyperbole but purely as a
matter of record do I admit that he’s had lead roles in several
blockbuster nightmares of mine, nasty life-impeding dreams
that have extracted from the depths of my 35-year-old uncon-
scious heretofore untroublesome phobias (the fear of clowns,
for one—especially those creepy old-world Pierrot and Punch
varieties—this owing to Peniche’s uncanny resemblance to
a hairless Boy George). And in these nightmares, Peniche is
usually doing something expressly pollutive, as Ursulo is now,
back at the warehouse, whispering lecherously with a hand-
gun to the temple of a seven-year-old boy, kissing him, telling
him he’ll make a great Zeta, while the boy’s mother wails a
few feet away within the shackling arms of burly dead-eyed
men. Or, as Ursulo is moments later, raping the boy’s mother
(Angela, our heroine, played by Marisol Guillen) in a scene
no less disturbing for its tenebrous lighting or modern office
decor or for the two remaining fully clothed, particularly in
those moments when Ursulo grins at the camera and moans
cogently, it seems, at me.
This rape scene continues for a very long time before flash-
wiping to more of the same. Just passed the two-minute
mark, and so in concord with the pornographic rule of three,
Ursulo yanks Angela around and directs her downward, dig-
ging the barrel of his handgun into her scalp. He unzips,
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 91

throws his head back, rosy cheeks aglow. He makes soft, but
malefic locomotive noise and, tunneling further into the plea-
sure of his assault, tosses his gun aside to rest his hands on
his waist.
Aha! Angela, emboldened by Ursulo’s disarmament,
clamps down—all the way until her teeth meet—and, duck-
ing Ursulo’s keel, rushes out the room, manages to escape the
compound, and winds up on a deserted city street, scream-
ing through her blood-cached mouth about the perils of her
“endless nightmare.”
Maybe this is typical slasher fare, no good reason to take
offense. Maybe my discomfort runs psychically deeper, and
there are wounded Ursulos howling from the pit of every
man (note to query Jung’s Red Book for “bald eunuchs”). But
what makes the scenes I’ve described (a third of the film) so
irredeemably hideous in their historical context is that they’re
meant to evoke the San Fernando Massacre, one of the worst
atrocities in the drug war to date.
San Fernando is a small city in Tamaulipas, about a two-
hour drive from Brownsville, Texas. A generation ago, bird-
ers would have endorsed its quiet infinitude of coppery-tailed
trogons and crimson-collared grosbeaks; Américo Paredes
recommended the dried beef.130 On August 20, 2010, three
US-bound panel trucks carrying 75 migrants from South and
Central America were stopped on a rural road outside San
Fernando limits. A squadron of Zetas, including 16 of their
police affiliates, escorted the trucks to a private ranch where
they offered the migrants a choice: work for us as hit men and
domestic servants, or else. One woman accepted the offer
and another, an 18-year-old man from Ecuador, managed to
escape. The rest were executed one by one with single shots
to the head (other reports say the cartel used a sledgehammer
to conserve ammunition).131
Ambassadors up and down the hemispheres rose from
their desks and Mexico’s parliament rushed legislation to
92 Narco Cinema

safeguard migrant transit routes, while promising to target

kidnapping organizations more aggressively in its war against
the narcos.132 This sort of tragedy, all were assured, would
never be allowed to happen again. Then, six months later, it
happened again. Only this time there were almost 200 bodies
discovered in over 40 mass graves.133 Rumors began circulat-
ing online that the male victims had been armed with sledge-
hammers and forced into gladiator matches in which the
last man standing would be awarded cartel membership; the
women had been raped and killed and the children dissolved
in tanks of acid. (The Houston Chronicle and Borderland
Beat repeated these far-fetched details with shrugging cave-
ats; a retired FBI Agent hedged, “I don’t see it as . . . a success-
ful way to recruit people . . . It would be more for amusement.”
He also offered, “The stuff you would not think possible a
few years ago is now commonplace.”).134
El cartel de los “Z” channels the same spirit of over-the-
top sadism to elaborate its anti-Zeta message. It spares noth-
ing in gore to pay back gore. For much of the film, the cartel
tortures and slaughters with paramilitary detachment while
its leader Ursulo goes about his masterminding in a kind of
venereal rapture. In the end, Angela and a farmworker named
Joaquin (Agustin Navarro) undertake a first-person-shooter-
like infiltration of the camp, mowing down nine Zetas and
running a tenth over a table saw. Having already emascu-
lated Ursolo in the medieval sense, Angela finishes the job by
delivering the tiro de gracia135 that explodes his cranium and
summons the film’s credits.
I can cheer this ending, somewhat. Watching Ursulo
destroyed feels at first like a tousling from the angels. But
the part of my brain that doesn’t believe in angels can’t stop
wondering if this is appropriate catharsis. Does the world
need a death-metal version of “Hattie Carroll”? Must Zeta
massacre begat anti-Zeta splatter film to call attention to
the dangers that migrants face crossing the Zeta-controlled
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 93

northeast corridor, or to preserve the San Fernando Massacre

in popular memory? On the other hand, if the Zetas trade
on legends of their inhumanity, isn’t the film really just play-
ing to their propaganda? What does it say, after all, that I’m
watching this movie on a YouTube channel filled with pro-
Zeta corridos?
Against what I know to be sounder judgment, I decide to
pursue these questions in a third film uploaded to that chan-
nel. It’s getting late and I want nothing more than for this
movie to end before it even starts. I want to erase my brows-
ing history, cobble a thesis together, and get on with my life.
What I do instead is steep tea and fret. I think, maybe a little
meditation to cleanse the somatic palette, but by the time I
select a mantra on Wikipedia, the full stream of Me dicen el
Z: el alterado (Tell me of the Z: The Disturbed, 2012) has
finished loading, and my partner is making worrisome com-
ments about turning the lights off when I come to bed.
My tea tastes like headache from over-steepage.
Something is off with this film. In the opening scene, there
are no gun rattles or bone snaps, none of Ursulo’s lascivious
reverb. The only sound emitted by my laptop, dimmed to
the faintest stress of its tintinnabulary icon, is the neutral
strum of a flamenco over some male banter, two men good-
heartedly discussing . . . corn. The lattice of fingers over my
eyes slides apart as a gentle voice inside me prompts, pee wee:
a rainbow.
A voice reassuring as the tableau on my screen, in which
two generations of chunky rancher, dressed in matching
plaid, are standing by the side of a rural road and surveying
a cornfield under a huge blue sky crayoned white. The sec-
ond-gen, a fun Bruno Kirby sort, I recognize as actor Jorge
Aldama, miscast as a capo in Los Zetas and a much better
fit here as Jacinto Jr., the farmboy. He’s encouraging dad to
nix his retirement plans—there’s another harvest in those old
muscles yet (“You’re stronger than an oak!”). Dad grins and
94 Narco Cinema

Jacinto tosses a hoe into the bed of the GMC truck that cen-
ters the shot. The cornstalks sway like hippies in the late-af-
ternoon breeze. In fades a credit for “Sky Duran Cervantes”
and though I don’t know the actor, I sure do like that name.
Back home, a startling MacMansion—no tin roof for these
field hands—mom’s griddling tortillas on the induction stove
and Mr. Sunshine’s straining through the venetian blinds to
whiff a guess at her secret ingredient (lavender?). The dinner
table is set, the family convenes, Jacinto’s parents commence
the teasing: when is that playboy son of theirs going to settle
down and get married? Jacinto, the rascal, has a pretty good
idea when, but his lips are sealed. Mom and dad will have to
ice the Moët a little longer. Just when they’re tucking into a
second round of tortillas is about the time I start conjuring
imaginary data on happiness indexes in war-torn countries,
spinning precepts about the hard-won joy of simply living
through daily tragedy, all that carpe diem dance-like-no-
one-is-watching hoopla—and find myself warming to it.
Maybe living in constant fear of extortion, kidnapping, and
rape plumps the smaller things with replenishing goodness.
Maybe deep in the heart of Zeta country there are people
who can love so simply, so unboundedly.
It’s early evening now and Jacinto and his girlfriend are
inside the Herradura Restaurant (and fine-dancing empo-
rium), snuggled into a corner table, clinking piña coladas and
frosty cervezas and pecking at each other between ballads.
A scene later, they’re standing together on her porch where
Jacinto announces the time has come: finally he’s been able
to put enough money aside and within three months, he’ll be
able to afford a proper wedding, that is if she’s . . . well . . . what
does she think? I say it with her under my chamomile breath:
Ay, m[“I do!”]i amor, que rico! (close enough). He lifts her
and wheels her in the air, nuzzling her neck. She squeals in
delight, but reminds him they’ll have to wait until the wed-
ding night to take these nuzzling matters further. Jacinto
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 95

groans shucksingly. (That these starry virgins appear to be in

their mid-forties is unusual, I admit, but I’m prepared to leave
it at that. Their happiness is now my happiness and through
it I’ve almost forgotten what kind of movie this is supposed
to be.) The girlfriend rushes inside to tell her father the good
news and it’s home and off to bed for Jacinto. Tomorrow, he
and dad have a busy day of installing wheel-chair ramps on
the local Narnia portals.
Then night falls. On the exterior of the family mansion.
From the darkness beyond the driveway creeps a weary bas-
soon. Followed by six men. Six armed men. A thicket of men
with vertical uzis, front and center of which is—oh, sweet
Jesus Marion Joseph—it’s Flavio Peniche.
This time leading the Zetas as Potro (“Colt”). Anemic
under a black Stetson, wearing a stubble goatee and a sport
coat over some Ed Hardy, he resembles nothing so much as a
metrosexual Heisenberg. That clown smile is there, though,
like a ribald tattoo on my frightened inner child, and I wince
at the hidden extent of his imperative when he says “Pay
up or die!” because in Peniche-land, death is a laborious
departure.
Things devolve quickly here. All the nice people we’ve met
are gunned down for refusing to pay protection. So is every
other spotless soul in a 50-mile radius. One nice lady gets
her throat slit in front of her preschooler. A pregnant woman
is stabbed repeatedly in the womb, whereupon the offend-
ing Zeta removes his combat knife and licks it clean with
a saucier’s approving nod. Following the exchange of vows
at a barnyard wedding, a pew of Zetas rises like insurgent
whack-a-moles to haul the young newlyweds off for an old-
fashioned charivari with an alterado twist (Potro rapes her
while his henchmen disembowel the groom).
This is pretty much the entire film: carnage with ad hoc
context. I see no point in analyzing the miracle of Jacinto’s
recovery (49 gunshot wounds, by my count) or his proficiency
96 Narco Cinema

with the chainsaw in exacting revenge. Deconstructing the

slapped-on happily ever after will be of no scholastic or info-
tational service to anybody, anywhere, in any language, in
the foreseeable chunk of our common era. Only in its lack
of closure does the film achieve verisimilitude. Only in the
confusion of its morally simplistic anti-Zeta message with
the hairiest of Zeta propaganda do we take away a sense
of the insanity underlying the contemporary drug war, and
I’m afraid I won’t be able to stomach another bloodbath this
chapter.
So is this where our history ends, with the Zetas’ plot-
less depravity? Have the murder and torture videos streaming
online become the latest media correlative of narco cinema,
replacing the borderland grindhouse and videohomes of
decades past?
Happily, the answer is no. Although today we studied a
few black snakes, the number of professional fireworks in the
cache is increasing each year. Recent narco films are shot in
HD, the productions looks slicker, the cinematography has
largely achieved a soap-opera-level radiance, and the cost
to filmmakers is more reasonable than ever (actor-director
Fernando Sáenz estimates that a three-minute shot, which
used to cost $120, now sets him back a whopping 30¢),136
which means producers can splurge on things like special
effects and guerilla-grade props. And though the current
odds still favor misses to hits, there’s a new generation of
actors and directors who’ve demonstrated an obvious passion
for their craft and this, compounded with an expanding fan
base (and sadly, no end to the drug war) might mean a renais-
sance is around the corner.
Not that this would fundamentally disfigure the genre.
What the best films from the new crop do so fondly is handle
their debts: they reassemble the archetypes into forms that
speak to the crises of today’s drug war. Take, for example,
two of the recent John Solís “blockbusters” (Solís is sort of
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 97

the García Bernal of the current narco cinema): El Muletas al

100 (Crutches to One-Hundred, 2009) turns kidnapper and
prolific hit man Raydel López Uriarte into another gothic
outcast racked by girl and police trouble, much like El Señor
de los cielos in the late 90s; El Pozolero (The Stew Maker,
2009), based on the life of Santiago Meza López, freelance
narco clean-up man, infamous for having dissolved 300
corpses in a signature brew of lye and hydrochloric acid,137
is the tale of a country mouse driven mad by the narco life-
style: his out-of-control binges and final repentance form a
chastening lesson about addiction that recalls the ending of
Operación Mariguana.
I could go on cross-referencing the new heroes with the
old, but I think I’ve made my point. For some viewers, the
history of narco cinema will remain a repulsive criminology.
For others, kitsch will render the hagiography worthless, the
way the pink bubblegum spoils the all-star cards. But here’s
the thing we shouldn’t ignore—we see it over and over again
in anti-heroes like El Muletas and El Pozolero, in the red car
gang and Childe Carillo; we see it even in the Rafael Quintero
figurine from Maten al fugitivo, wronged by the government
and fighting to the death alongside the peasants who cham-
pion the singular cause of himself—what narco cinema does
best is plumb the tragedy of individuality to a level at which
the burden of self becomes vaguely, but still obviously, analo-
gous to the burdens of a nation in perpetual crisis. A nation
whose greatest chance at fiscal solvency has become export-
ing contraband (along with a huge chunk of its citizenry) but
that officially gives no more than dismissive address to how
this economy warps the culture. I say “vaguely” because I
don’t mean to suggest a neat allegory and by “officially”
I’m making a distinction between the pueblo and the state.
Though he’s as corrupt as the politicians, because he owns
his crimes and because his nationalism is sincere, the narco
in the cinema always represents the people.
98 Narco Cinema

It’s no accident that, despite critical guffaws and outright

prohibition, narco cinema has become Mexico’s popular cin-
ema in the same way that pornography is now America’s popu-
lar cinema. Both industries are probably much more lucrative
than their mainstream counterparts, and both understand
that their shadowy position in the culture affords them a spe-
cial insight into that culture’s secreting machinations, which
insight they capitalize on to keep the inner beasts tantalized.
In narco cinema’s case, what we get are national antihe-
roes whom we simultaneously admire and despise. Maybe
it really doesn’t matter that much if the portrayals can seem
ridiculous. Sometimes we do want to laugh at them. We want
them to fail just as much as we need them to succeed. I don’t
think the films pardon the crimes any more than they resolve
the tensions that drive the criminal: his sentimentalism and
stoicism, his passion and resignation, his saintliness and sin-
fulness. Because these inner contradictions are unresolvable
is fundamentally what makes the tormented narco such an
intriguing character and, even in his grossest, most artless
iterations, a timely reflection of his culture. (And maybe this
goes much deeper than I’m qualified to speculate. See Octavio
Paz: “The Mexican . . . uses analysis rather than synthesis: the
hero becomes a problem.”)138
Of course, this isn’t true of every hero. I can think of one
recent protagonist who is brazenly unproblematic. Who,
unlike the damaged Pozolero, he of trucker hats and ravaged
principles, a man who’s literally terrorized by the ghosts of
his victims—this one’s an iceberg. No primal scenes inspired
his criminal turn and there are no cartel bosses whose ire
can’t be shrugged off with a modest smile. A young tejano
of means, he traffics, he murders, he says, “because I like
the adrenalin rush. It’s fun.” And when women, those peren-
nial instigators of narco downfalls, flutter in to ruin him, he
simply murders them or charms them to his side. The badass
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 99

in the police shootout at the film’s start is the same badass

racing babes around in sports cars at the film’s end. He was
always the winner, he’d solved the puzzle of self long ago, and
then put it aside and grabbed his machinegun.
Cronicas de un narco (Chronicles of a Narco, date
unknown) is based on the life of Edgar “la Barbie” Valdez
Villareal, the light-skinned, blonde-stubbled leader of Los
Negros, an enforcement squad for the Sinaloa Cartel. The
film dutifully, if not so dramatically, chronicles Villareal’s
rise as he overcomes the Gulf Cartel (and its Zeta army), the
Nuevo Laredo police force and the American DEA.
While the notion of pant-loading terror has been thrown
around generously in this chapter, Cronicas, it must be said,
gives me a serious case of the Oompa Loompas, and not
for the reasons you’d expect. Flavio Peniche isn’t involved.
In fact, none of the actors who appear in Cronicas work in
narco cinema; most come from the middling orders of the
mainstream (Valdivia is played by model and could-be Tom
Cruise impersonator Diego Dreyfus). The film credits no stu-
dio, director, or production team. Also unusual is that the
characters switch arbitrarily between English and Spanish—
why on earth would the Nuevo Laredo police force break
into English in the middle of a debriefing?
And why would the film crew want to distance themselves
from this project? Well, for starters, this happens to be the
only movie in our history guaranteed to have been financed
by its subject. After his arrest in 2010, Villareal confessed
to spending $200 thousand USD on a film about his life (a
film filled with dialogue on the order of “He’s handsome,
he’s rich, he’s very charismatic. All woman just die for him”).
When Cronicas premiered on YouTube months later, no one
believed the film was anything other than the lost footage.139
One sharp commentator noted that the blonde hit man in the
film’s conclusion looks remarkably like the subject himself.
100 Narco Cinema

Other commentators were less kind (in Simpsons terms, few

were saying Boo-urns). There’s no harsher leveler today than
the comments section.
Flawless characters are about as attractive as gangrene,
but why this film has accumulated pages of mean commen-
tary and snarky anthropomorphic punctuation is because of
the exclusionary foundation of its éclat: this is not the rock
star in cruciform, but the rock star in coitus. Psychological
conflict is alien to him. He speaks for nobody but himself.
Perhaps a studio like JC Films would have given Villareal
the full romantic treatment, or at least a few psychological
tweaks: he certainly has the biography for it, and that stu-
dio’s head, Juan Manuel Romero, has expressed interest in
filming Barbie’s story (he’s also voiced concerns about his
own safety if he were to do so).140
This brings us to the last point I’d like to address before
ending our history, one that’s been bothering me for a while.
Earlier I argued that it shouldn’t matter whether the films are
funded by narcos as long as consumers draw on their com-
forts. After all, it’s not like Hollywood has ever sought fund-
ing from questionable sources, right? Romero, currently one
of the industry’s top producers, insists that he’s never met any
narcos nor accepted their money.141 If his films are as profit-
able as he says, there’s no reason to doubt him. I’ve come to
suspect that the practice was more common in decades past,
and have no evidence that it is currently so widespread as
some suggest. The atypical casting and lack of credits distin-
guish Cronicas from any narco film I’ve seen.
Still, being confronted with a bona fide vanity project
creeps me out. It raises a much more sinister question about
spectatorship. I’ve talked a little about what these films might
mean to a general audience, but what do the narcos think?
Do the films check hubris or exploit it? Can they teach drug
dealers and hit men a lesson about their humanity or do they
intend to humanize the criminals to us, to justify the ways of
 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada 101

narco to the culture? Furthermore, if filmmakers and corri-

distas are now the unacknowledged legislators of the narco-
sphere, do they have a responsibility to remind narcos of their
code, as poet-activist Javier Sicilia suggests?
Some industry names have gone even further. In 2011,
Mario Almada himself publicly advised the narcos “to retire,
to do something good; you already have lots of money, put it
to good use, because what starts badly ends badly.”142 A few
chapters back, I mentioned that Mario Hernández, who’d
been making narco cinema since the 80s, recently gave a
chastening retirement speech to his fellow directors: “Given
the current situation, no responsible person would make films
which encourage admiration for the narcos.”143
But then, according to Juan Manuel Romero, it’s retail-
ers like Walmart who keep asking the studios for narco
DVDs. “[If] I were to make a sexy-comedy,” says Romero,
“it wouldn’t sell, although I would like to [make one].”144
Walmart. Now there’s an entirely different portion of the
one percent. And even if he convinced every last Zeta to
hang up his balaclava and follow the Eightfold Path, we all
know that not even Mario Almada could get through to the
buchones at Walmart.
 4
Narcas y Narcos

Figure 4.1 La Mariposa Traicionera

“So yeah, what chapter does Slut Commando fall into?”

—My nosy conscience1

His name is Bernabé Melendrez. His eyes are brown, his

beard is neat, his cheekbones, I’m pretty sure, are crabapples.
104 Narco Cinema

His nickname is El Gatillero (“The Gunman”) and even his

happiness seems to partake of the larger weariness that name
connotes. He is the man you picture when I ask you to envi-
sion a man on a cold Sunday morning in front of a tackle
shop with a weight on his mind. More specific? Sometimes
I think he resembles a corpulent Thom Yorke, though other
times, when “Knives Out” cycles onto my playlist, I think
of Yorke as an emaciated Melendrez, grievously in need of
a home-cooked meal, an ice bucket of Tecate and the clem-
ency of a real friend. Few things achieved between the sticky
aisles could please me more than finding 16 foot-lamberts
of him glowing in my neighborhood multiplex, hearing his
reedy voice in Dolby Surround, watching him give the look to
Brad Pitt, the one that would have earned him this walk-on
as Tarantino’s latest obscurity. Whereas Mario Almada is
stoicism itself, and Jorge Reynoso jives between chummy
and batshit, Melendrez’s signature look is a portrait of angst
so masterful it’s shocking how malleable it can be, infusing
scene three’s establishing shot with apocalyptic portend, and
the aftermath of scene seven’s triple homicide with gunner’s
remorse. It’s more than angst. It’s a look many of us will see
only three or four times in real life, that of a man falling
murderously in love.
And yet moments ago I watched this sensitive philosopher
mud-wrestle a guy to death inside an operational pigsty.2 I
guess it’s time to ask: Is this cinema only for men?
So we come down to it. Women and men. That old fiasco.
The planetary misalignment. The pageantry, the pomp and
the encrustation. The sighing, the thrusting, the sweat-
ing, the weeping, and the clink of studded belts and the
compound stank of love and love. And, of course, the aca-
demic conceit that it’s all a shoddy performance, never more
essential or revelatory than when it takes place on stage or
screen.
 Narcas y Narcos 105

I admit that I’ve been reluctant to consider this subject since

the moment I not so forgivably ducked it in the introduction by
turning a warning about machismo into a history of Sinaloa.
But now that we’re already 399 words into its very own chapter,
I can’t continue dodging it much longer. And so, after walking
you lovingly through these here barracks and coughing over
the flatulence; after genuflecting to a series of loincloths filled
out by Mexico’s most wanted; after trimming off choice cuts
of Byron, Hemingway, and Vanilla Ice and throwing them
right at your face—and calling all this “the history of narco
cinema”; after beginning a chapter on gender politics with an
ode to Bernabé Melendrez, I finally say no more: it’s time we
confront this ugly business of all the sexy women.
The problem is that this chapter is bound to be a deal
breaker for some readers, and that it probably already has
been for more still. What narco celebrity is to the govern-
ment detractor, patriarchal authority is to the prudent scho-
liast, and many smart viewers with enviable principles will
agree that the women of narco cinema are just moving pieces
in a fantasy conjured straight from the phallus’s vermicular
brain. And because I believe this thesis is valid, and because
I also happen to know that there are enough strong and com-
plex female characters to trouble it headily, and because the
last thing I want to do is insert these characters into another
treatise on the politics of ambiguity—I want them to remain
comprehensible and I want you to enjoy yourselves—I’m at
rhetorical pains on how to proceed with minimal offense.
On how to pick out the curved bones and butterflies in the
PC-charged game of Operation that is humanities scholarship
today and offer you something politically apt and quasi-en-
tertaining about the narca experience in this narco’s world.
Actually, this Operation analogy works sort of . . . unhorribly.
And structuralism’s due for a comeback any day now.
I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t like board games.
106 Narco Cinema

How about this: let’s put on our narco masks, I’ll grab a
pair of tweezers and together we’ll try to fish out the female
archetypes that occupy what we could call “the repressive
phallic body of narco cinema” (or, if you prefer, just “the
body of narco cinema”). We’ll consider the good women and
the bad girls—machismo’s enablers and resisters—each of
them correspondent with fun little Milton Bradley–TM pic-
tographs. Though I can’t guarantee that the figures I’ll end
up championing will satisfy every ideological persuasion, I
enjoin you please to keep in mind that broaching gender poli-
tics with even the most innocent entendre can constitute a
banishable offense for the untenured academic, and so maybe
also to remember that old Ice-T adage about hating the game
rather than the player (while ignoring that adage’s concupis-
cent subtext, as I assure you I am).
(Is this responsible scholarship? I don’t know. But my
tweezers are clenched and my commitment to this analogy is
already too sentimental for me to back out now.)
Let’s begin with some easy points: the offending arche-
types. And from this category none is more roundly objec-
tionable than the slice of bread. The Bimbo. Warm, sugary,
and insubstantial, an affront to mother’s tortillas: suffer, poor
narcos, the romantic diabetes of her. The Bimbo can be one
of the narco’s truest enemies, though he’s often too bug-eyed
to recognize it. Her main narrative duty is to pick him up
and tire him out and make him sniff furtively after one more
thin slice—into lush subtropical backyards where she lounges
poolside in bikini-floss and Lolita sunglasses, crisping to
radioactive doses of male gaze; into travertine bedrooms,
where she’s tucked under a snarl of leopard-print bed sheets
while her caveman is out starting fire but ready to widen that
snarl to make room for any new brute if the gold gleams right
off his rings and chokers. Pampered, tiaraed, a moll with a
baby’s voice and breasts made by and for the hands of men,
 Narcas y Narcos 107

you’ve seen her, you know her, nothing redeeming here, eye
candy between shootouts, let’s move on to:
The broken heart, aka, the wailing mother (or sister,
cousin, aunt, niece, neighbor). Unlike her nemesis the bread
slice, the broken heart is thoroughly uncarnal—eight parts
spirit to two parts flesh (the pleading eyes and imploring
hands) and favors the kind of wardrobe that would leave her
ready at a phone call’s notice to attend mortuary services.
A symbol more than an agent of the hearth, her primary
role is to raise and lower chins by saying things like, “Take
care, mijo” or “Do your family proud,” or “My God, look
what they’ve done!” Sometimes her murder or rape (usually
at start or climax of a film) will provoke the hero’s quest for
the kind of self-understanding that comes only with violent
revenge.
Okay, Catholic fetishes aside, let’s go for some real points:
the butterfly, la mariposa traicionera, narco cinema’s answer
to the femme fatale. Here’s a specimen worthy of closer
study. More refined (and often older) than the bread slice, the
butterfly possesses a beauty both graceful and bewitching:
a complex pattern of sneering, caressing, shedding, frisking,
slapping, and other kinky flexion attends her allurement. But
she’s more than just beautiful: I submit she is also the crafti-
est figure in narco cinema. Whereas the broken heart is the
center of moral wisdom, the butterfly enjoys boundless and
supple intelligence. She’s smarter than the hero by danger-
ous degrees and often more dubious in her ambition. In her
worst incarnations, we feel scorned by her self-loving trickery
and side with the hero when he turns against her (if the spell
breaks), though at her best, when she woos us from him by
promising that we have what he lacks, viz., the cerebral dex-
terity to spar with her in love and war, we also end up fools
for her love and thus she has her way with men on both sides
of the screen.
108 Narco Cinema

Michoacán a poco madre (Badass Michoacán, 2002)3 con-

tains a specimen of the former, less artful genus in the seduc-
tive Margarita (Irene Arcila), shrewdest and most dangerous
of the three antagonists making life difficult for capo Alberto
Quintanar, “The Michoacán Dog” (Agustín Bernal). And just
a glance at “The Michoacán Dog,” the film’s hero, will tell
you this isn’t the kind of narco to suffer antagonists peace-
ably. Even his lips are muscular. His clothes are 50–90 percent
leather in any given scene. His voice thunders and envelopes
like a basso profundo at odds with the bartender who’s cut
him off. His physique has the rough chewed-on quality of
an old WWF action figure, something wicked from the heel
squad. He makes Schwarzenegger look like Baryshnikov. I
would walk the Trans-Canada highway in my underwear to
avoid an altercation with him. Etc.
Not only does he look the part, the Dog is a staunch
defender of the narco code, which code he is fond of decreeing
self-referentially, as in, “The Dog never forgives . . . treason!”
(a luckless entrepreneur is informed); or “Whoever wants to
surprise the Michoacán Dog will die!” (a would-be assassin
learns too well when he pops up from the tree line). The Dog
is cunning but unselfconscious, methodical, and remorse-
less. His libido could offend a Roman orgy. He is paternally
loyal to Antonio (Manuel Benitez), the BFF who smuggles
Dog’s contraband into Texas; to the farmers who grow his
marijuana and line dance woozily at his harvest bacchanalia
(cervezas and norteña bandas courtesy of the Dog). In short,
he is the ideal narco hero: successful, honorable and unapolo-
getically macho. But soon to meet his match.
Margarita is a Real-Housewives looker, say late 30s, with
hoop earrings, loud eyes, and a gym membership. Her knot-
ted shirts rise to wink her navel when she waves her finger in
the face of her stubbornly parochial husband, Antonio. Why
she’s stuck in Michoacán with this dink is unclear. This is a
woman who’s owed more, who demands more, who needs
 Narcas y Narcos 109

more and right now. When Antonio dismisses her advice

to turn over the Dog for a million-peso reward, she decides
enough is enough and hatches a plan. Dog himself is fond
of stratagems. In the opening scene, he stacks two traitor-
ous farmers against a tree so that when the bottom traitor
can no longer support his brother’s weight, the top will be
left dangling from the noose around his neck. But these
demented Boy Scout antics match poorly with the designs of
the Michoacán Bitch (the film’s terminological implication,
just interpreting here).
Step one: with minimum coyness, offer herself up to Dog’s
brute charms. Step two: convince the cuckolded Antonio
that the only way to regain his honor is to turn Dog over to
Comandante Ruvalcaba (Roberto “Flaco” Guzman) (and to
collect the bounty, up from a million pesos to a million dol-
lars since Dog’s latest murder spree). Step three: now that
Dog has escaped prison with the help of his loyal campesi-
nos, let him kill Antonio and get that old softy out of her life
once and for all. Step four: lead Dog directly to Comandante
Ruvalcaba, who by now thinks, to hell with jurisprudence,
I’m just going to blast the bastard to death. Step Five: pay
Ruvalcaba five million dollars for permission to annex Dog’s
old fiefdom. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you conquer
the narcosphere. The Michoacán Dog is dead, long live the
Michoacán Bitch (again, merely interpreting).
On an intellectual level, her ability to con the menfolk into
killing one another demonstrates a true capo’s savvy. But the
conventions of narco cinema make her actions dishonorable.
Dog was loyal to his people and spread his wealth; Margarita
arranged her husband’s murder because he couldn’t bring her
the luxury she craved. Dog could gun down a dozen foes
with less anguish than it takes for me to say goodbye to old
shoes; Margarita manipulates others to kill on her behalf.
This makes her a cowardly villain, just a long con in a short
skirt, and thus, too, the recipient of narco cinema’s rampant
110 Narco Cinema

old-fashioned eve teasing: beware the treacherous butterfly—

she is too sexy and too clever and she will destroy honest
men.
We find a different specimen aflutter in El Chrysler 300
(2008), a hugely popular narco film oft-recommended as an
introduction to the genre. El Chrysler is the story of Chuy
(Oscar Lopez) and Mauricio (John Solís), two young drug-
smuggling brothers-in-law with fast-rising stock in Sinaloa’s
black market. Their trafficking skills are so esteemed that
Oscar Solano (Jorge Luke), head of the enemy cartel, tries
to woo the duo to his side, but with no success. Battle after
battle with the Solano clan, the brothers prove fealty to their
old padrino until finally (and unwittingly), they must do so
with their lives.
This is excellent narco cinema. The film maintains a steady
pace along several narrative corkscrews and manages to shift
our pathetic allegiance back and forth between the two cartels
until the very end. Watching the film a second time, though,
what struck me most was a pointed theatrical difference to
the rivalry. It’s as though two films were mashed together,
each ensemble the proponent of its own acting school; two
directors committed to adverse modes of cinematic self-con-
sciousness. I don’t think this is accidental.
Chuy and Mauricio, the good guys, evoke the blinding sin-
cerity of boys’-adventure narratives: firmly in the tradition of
videohome acting. But their enemy, Oscar Solano, a narco
rock star partying away his golden years, slurs around his
MacHacienda in a Jack Sparrow daze, chewing his words
like a wad of tobacco, and exposing himself at every turn
as the jumpy vessel of Luke’s method acting. In the case of
Oscar’s daughter Sabrina (Claudia Casas), her theatricality
comes across in a kind of postmodern awareness of her role as
a stock bimbo, and through her ability to use that ditzy per-
formance to manipulate men. Like her wasp cousin Veronica
Lodge, Solano is always twirling her long dark hair, biting
 Narcas y Narcos 111

her lip, bugging out her doe eyes in mock surprise to extrapo-
late her subservience to male characters—and then getting
what she wants from them. Within such shapely chrysalis the
treacherous butterfly stirs and, indeed, Sabrina will prove to
be the keenest player in the tragedy which lies ahead.
Sabrina’s agency is both an ability to dissimulate and a
power to choose whom to dissimulate for. Her second line in
the film, “I’m a modern girl,” cues her first act: when police
barge into a cantina to arrest Chuy and Mauricio, she pretends
to be their hostage in order to help them flee (this endears
her to Chuy not because she defers to him, but because she’s
willing to perform deference for his benefit. It also makes
him seriously consider jumping ship for the Solano cartel,
which was her plan all along). When male characters prove
unworthy beneficiaries of her performance—as her father
does, constantly boozing and womanizing in her “mother’s
house”—she flips to the other team. The twists that make for
such seductive viewing are her handiwork and none of the
boys is able to see beyond the reflective pink lipstick.
The one person who is aware of her dissembling ways is
Lucia (Xochitl Monroy), Chuy’s sister and Mauricio’s wife:
the broken heart archetype uniting their blood. Until the end
of the film, we see her only at home: preparing meals, dis-
couraging the boys’ drinking, leading long sisterly talks with
Chuy about the dangers of fickle women like Sabrina (to gild
the symbol, Lucia’s pregnant). But Lucia proves no slouch
in the badassery department, as well: when two of Oscar’s
goons break into her house to rape her, she shoots both dead,
afterward to rush into Mauricio’s arms and sob.
Soon rogue waves of cartel violence clash up the chain of
command and Chuy and Mauricio’s padrino is killed. The
boys retaliate by storming Oscar’s hacienda and gunning
down him and his entire crew. In the final act, they outsmart
Oscar’s police informant with a nice trick of their own—
the duo pretend to die in a shootout with the corrupt police,
112 Narco Cinema

only to pop off their bullet proof vests and commandeer the
ambulance taking them away. Up ahead on the dirt road,
Sabrina waits for them in driver’s seat of the titular Chrysler
300.
Signifying both criminal stature and masculine mobility,
cars have played a long-standing symbolic role in narco cin-
ema, and when Chuy and Mauricio see the Chrysler ahead,
it reaffirms their victory and their masculinity. Sabrina gives
up her driver’s seat and races over to Chuy for a kiss and
fondle. The three get into the car to continue the getaway
in style, Sabrina in the backseat popping beers for the boys,
twirling her hair, squinching their shoulders. Then she pulls
out a handgun and plugs them both: two shots in her lover’s
chest, one smack in the middle of Mauricio’s forehead.
The boys, like most viewers, presumably, had underesti-
mated Sabrina’s loyalty to her father and failed to recognize
the death’s head in her cleavage. Her labored sashay away
from the Chrysler, a sack of money in one hand and a pistol
in the other, isn’t an argument between high heels and desert
terrain, it’s the shucking of bimbo pupa down fantastic legs,
and when Sabrina turns around to shoot Chuy twice more
for spite, we recognize the butterfly fully formed and under-
stand at once that her greater weapon has always been her
ability to charm and deceive us by playing to our stereotypes.
Her victory is that of female performance itself, over the
men who discredit her and over the generic conventions that
would make her treachery unsympathetic. Because, though
our allegiance shifts often in this film, there’s no question:
she’s the hero now. At least until the next and last scene, in
which Lucia and her little brother track Sabrina and a new
beau to a motel and sufficiently aerate her theatrical body to
reclaim the film in the name of Sincerity.
So much for that theory. But there’s something to be said
about Lucia’s transformation that bears out a feminist inter-
pretation of El Chrysler, as well. What began as a macho
 Narcas y Narcos 113

buddy pic has, by its end, been taken over by more formi-
dable female heroes. Compared to Sabrina and Lucia, Chuy
and Mauricio are uniform and static. Inversely they become
the stock characters whose passions and gunplay we’ve seen
a hundred times. The film knows this too, which is why it
ends by leaving the blood feud in the hands of its more com-
pelling women (though male characters gracelessly barge
in to take control of the sequels, a later spin-off, 4 Damas
en 300 [4 Ladies in 300, 2011] puts the women back in
charge).
What does it say about the genre’s explicit misogyny when
the strength of one of its all-time most popular films is an
ability to disrupt the narrative of male dominance? Beyond
the film itself, should we make something of the fact that,
in 2013, Casas won a congressional seat in Baja California,
partly, she admits, by parlaying her popular image as Sabrina
Solano?4 Google her and you’ll find campaign posters of her
twirling her hair for the voters of Tijuana’s District 16. Right
next to headshots of her in a cerulean halter top, aiming her
pistol at you.

The Texan and the Truck-Driver

The question gnaws: Are the heroines of El Chrysler 300 sub-
verting machismo through their wily and homicidal feats or
subsidizing it by reaching out to the male demographic that
enjoys watching sexy women fire assault rifles? We might
ask the same of their peers, and there are plenty of danger-
ous women lurking the canon. From avenging angels like La
Pistolera (The Gunwoman, 1979) and La Contrabandista
(The Lady Smuggler, 1983) to the stripper/assassin María
Navajas in her eponymous trilogy (2006–2008), female anti-
heroes have been weaponizing their sensuality to transform
the anxiety of a narco’s betrayal into the catharsis of narca
justice since the golden age of our cinema.
114 Narco Cinema

Which isn’t all that surprising when you consider that

narco culture, from its earliest days, has always depended
on major female contributions. Decades before Pedro Avilés
earned notoriety as Mexico’s first “godfather,” Ignacia “la
Nacha” Jasso had been successfully running the dominant
cartel in Ciudad Juárez for generations.5 Her contempo-
rary María Dolores Estévez (aka “Lola la Chata”) headed
a matriarchal smuggling outfit based in Mexico City, which
shipped heroin and marijuana as far as Canada (Harry
Anslinger, America’s original drug czar, called her a dan-
gerous “Negroid”; “her graciousness [underlies] her power,”
wrote William Burroughs, a devoted customer).6
Once narco cinema established itself as genre in the 80s,
stories of high-ranking female drug dealers, particularly of
their downfalls, began vying for screen time with the macho
legends. The popular trilogy El fiscal de hierro (The Iron
Prosecutor, 1988–1990) based its villain on Simona Reyes de
Pruneda, a mother of seven and head capo in Nuevo Laredo,
who was incarcerated in 1974 after fighting a three-year
standoff with federal police.7 More recently, La Reyna del
pacifico (Queen of the Pacific, 2009) and Cayo la reyna del
pacifico (Fall of the Queen of the Pacific, 2011) have capi-
talized on the story of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, a preeminent
west-coast trafficker with a steamy past in the Sinaloa Cartel
(she is a relative of both Caro Quintero and Félix Gallardo).
In 2009, when the incarcerated Beltrán spoke to Anderson
Cooper for a segment on 60 Minutes, audiences in the United
States were shocked that the new face of Mexico’s threat could
be so attractive and confident and . . . womanly. Perhaps it’s a
testament, if not quite to its egalitarianism, then to narco cul-
ture’s historical consciousness that, for many Latinas in the
know, Beltrán was less a shock than a sensation. As of 2011,
46 female cartel leaders have been apprehended by Mexican
police.8 Even the Zetas have an all-female cell in their
 Narcas y Narcos 115

organization (Las Panteras), though whether they inspired

Las Zetas (2012), a madcap narco sexy-comedy, is arguable.
Critical discourse on girls-with-guns cinema largely piv-
ots on the question of whether the genre demeans women to
patriarchal ends or liberates them via hegemony-busting fan-
tasy. At the moment, scholarly favor tips to the latter (though
not without due shout-outs to “paradox,” “undecidability,”
and the good old “interstitial”). The author of Super Bitches
and Action Babes claims that her position on Xena: Warrior
Princess “is pragmatic and postfeminist,”9 while the editors
of Reel Knockouts are clearer: “We like the threat that wom-
en’s movie violence presents to the . . . divide between women
and men. . . . We do not think that . . . being objectified ruins
the toughness of heroines.”10 Legendary feminist(-)upsetter
Camille Paglia declares, “I venerate the armed woman as a
transcendent symbol of independent female power”11 and revi-
sionist studies of Blaxploitation films have, more succinctly,
venerated the armed black woman as a symbol of African
American power, a symbol with mighty resonance along the
microwaves of American pop. Yvonne D. Sims, in Women
of Blaxploitation, argues that not only did the likes of Coffy
and Foxy Brown lend feminine form to the black power move-
ment, they uniquely inspired Hollywood to develop its own
action heroines in the 80s and 90s: “[Pam Grier and Tamara
Dobson] redefined the ways in which women in general were
represented in film by portraying . . . new character[s] who
held [their] own among men and women.”12 If not for Foxy
Brown, then no Ellen Ripley—the Aliens would have won—
goes her argument.13
I think there’s truth to this: these characters were cer-
tainly inspirational, but unique, original? Any otaku will tell
you that Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong and Toei and
Nikkatsu in Tokyo had been marketing comparable action
babes since the mid-60s. And you had to venture only a half-
116 Narco Cinema

click south of the border in the mid-70s to find a drug lord

from San Antonio who could hold her own against any back-
talking lawman or hustler. She was a middle-aged bombshell,
this Texan, red-headed, svelte, and tricksy, whose passion
once destroyed the boy she loved. “A female of heart,” as her
corrido goes, whom “one should take care not to cross.”14
The first time we see her, though, she doesn’t look like
a female of heart. She looks like senior waitstaff at some
middling Tex-Mex chain: a scowling beauty sealed in a tiny
pageant of pleats and buckles and knots and a big black som-
brero, leaving her rundown motel room in haste to make a
graveyard shift. That two armed men float behind her on the
veranda, pausing to scan for foes in the parking lot, seems
almost inconsequential (if they trouble the impression). When
danger arrives, it’s she who spots the enemy headlights. It’s
she who, seizing a guard’s M-16, plows down the interlop-
ers with an aim both reckless and successful. It’s she who
pulverizes the residual interloper when she flees the scene in
her Chevrolet Impala.15 Until the next morning, she alone is
our hero and villain, our intrigue and fury. Then she becomes
someone else.
A quiet dynast ferrying a sextet of grandchildren across
the US border in a pick-up truck. She wears a bowler hat, she
pets a toddler, smiling a rictus of matronly devotion for the
customs officials who kindly wave her through. But once at
the stash house, where she shoos away the little buggers and
gathers herself in the mirror, a close-up reveals that this is
indeed a gorgeous woman, volumes sexier than in the rapture
of her kill mode. The lid of her granny wig opens on a souf-
flé of red hair fluffing and spilling down to her shoulders,
prompting one enamored henchman to declare his intentions
on the spot, and crumble at her icy rebuff.
Who is she, you ask? Why, she’s much more still. When
police question her about a murder near the nightclub, she’s a
little chatterbox. When she’s behind the desk in that nightclub’s
 Narcas y Narcos 117

office, she’s sullen and half-amused. And when she moves on

the club’s stage in her carnival ensemble, part stoned major-
ette, part Salome, gyroscoping her silver wingspan as every
pupil in the crowd dilates to accommodate each kick and
twirl and round, each cheerful sway and pagan thrust; when
she strips down to her golden skivvies and spangles across
the stage, back-stroking and t-rex-paddling through the
smoke and house magenta; when her dance mate lies down in
expiration and she crouches beside him, spreading her hand
over his abs and grinning daggers between her fingers—it’s
now through the swelling applause and in the severity of her
amour propre that we recognize who she really is: the grande
dame of narco cinema herself, the original treacherous but-
terfly. Ladies and gentlemen, Camelia la texana.
Let’s be clear upfront: this isn’t the Camelia whose corrido
we waltz to in the cantina, a mere Bonnie to her boyfriend’s
Clyde. And if anyone in the audience should like to believe
as much: by all means. Like her cinematic godchild Sabrina
Solano, Camelia knows how dumb men can be when they’ve
figured women out. And while we’re on the subject of mas-
culine dumbness, let me add how fallacious it was of me to
signal the advent of narco cinema in 1976 with Carro Rojo
when, that same year, another film appeared, also inspired
by a Tigres del Norte corrido, that has proved just as founda-
tional and bodacious and with a lead more irresistible than
the sum of the red car’s passengers.
Contrabando y traición (Smuggling and Betrayal) tells
the story of Camelia (Ana Luisa Peluffo), cabaret dancer
and drug baroness, and Emilio Varela (Valentín Trujillo),
a barrio boy seeking a modest fortune in her organization.
Emilio needs just enough money to wed his sweetheart, the
goody María, and build the foundation for their simple life in
Cuernavaca, and then he’s out for good. But when a few small
jobs prove his loyalty and he finds himself climbing the chain
of command, trading his denim jacket for a maroon leisure
118 Narco Cinema

suit and tumbling naked with his boss under the cottonwood
of the Bravo riverbank, María Who and her Cuerna-what-
the-? unceremoniously retreat from his underworld nights.
It’s only after his uncle becomes a casualty of narco violence
that Emilio rediscovers his moral compass and announces his
retirement plans to Camelia, who promptly shoots him in the
back on his way out the door.
And so we return to El Chrysler’s dilemma. If your focal
allegiance is with Emilio, Camelia equals devil woman. She
takes advantage of his good-boy naiveté, uses him for sex and
commerce, but the moment he declares independence, she
draws blood. On the allegorical level, she incarnates the mer-
ciless and seductive narco lifestyle, which poisons Emilio’s
noble intentions and destroys him slowly, first by sundering
the bonds of family. Certainly a portion of the audience will
take this moral lesson and condemn her. The film invites us
to do no less.
At the same time, more thoughtful evidence tells us it’s
Emilio who’s the fickle one, unable to choose between María
and Camelia, pining for the former’s transcendence while
delighting in the latter’s vagina. Camelia knows exactly what
she wants from her partner and what she won’t abide. That
their romance falls into the May-December category under-
scores this disparity: Valentín Trujillo was 25 the year the
film was released; Ana Luisa Peluffo was 47. His character is
a gaggle of nerves in an ill-fitting frame; hers, a millionaire
who dances seminude in front of shaggy packs of men for
fun. When they first make love (at her instigation), Emilio
paws at her chest with the trembling urgency of a teenager
trying to reassemble a CPR mannequin in front of his peers.16
Camelia warns him, “Careful, Emilio. Don’t play with me.
I’m a very dangerous woman. Too dangerous.” In a rare
position of vulnerability (i.e., naked, with this rubus on top
of her), she reasserts her authority as boss and lover (while
subtly criticizing his sexual inadequacy). At the film’s end,
 Narcas y Narcos 119

when Emilio proposes for her what is the equally vulnerable

possibility of his desertion, she follows up on that promised
danger: kapow!
Should Emilio have expected any less from her? A slap or a
palm full of tears? Of course not, and neither should we. To
condemn her according to the ethics of narco cinema would
be to support the double standard by which narcos are pro-
fessionally justified in killing whenever they feel betrayed and
narcas who do the same are vixens scorned. In fact, what
detractors probably fear most (and what contemporary view-
ers steeped in gender theory will probably see as old hat) is
her deviant femininity: not content to stay home and repro-
duce little Camilios, she heads a successful business and prac-
tices guiltless love with partners of her choosing. Charming
men, duping men, killing men—her deviant actions challenge
patriarchal control while allowing her to thrive undetected
within patriarchal supervision. Or at least “detected” on her
own terms. Vulgar as this may sound, it needs be said that,
for a woman of any age, Peluffo is stupefyingly sexy. And at
47 specifically (and we’re talking 47 in 1976—smack dab in
the middle of the century’s ugliest decade, when gingivitis
was a form of ideology and nobody ate his vegetables) her
self-confidence is both a cause and effect of her sensuality,
and all the more reason for detractors to hiss.
In this regard, of Contrabando’s many sequels, spinoffs,
and remakes, perhaps none is more disappointing than
Emilio Varela vs. Camelia la texana (1979). This movie
begins where the original ends, with a much older Emilio
(Mario Almada at 58) and a much plainer Camelia (a singer
named Chelo, age unknown but appropriate) discussing the
terms of Emilio’s retirement, which, once more, involve the
exchange of gunfire and Camelia coming out on top. Left for
critters off some scrubby rural road, Emilio’s body is discov-
ered instead by the beautiful and (one hopes) post-pubescent
Beatriz (Silvia Manríquez) when her uncle’s car breaks down.
120 Narco Cinema

This Samaritan family collects the half-corpse, brings it home

to the guest room, observes it peeplessly, feeds it sandwiches,
and soon enough, it’s an Emilio once more, its power meter
recharged to flaming vitality—and primed for revenge.
One morning early into his convalescence, a few of Emilio’s
moustache clippings find their way into Beatriz’s coffee; by
afternoon, she has conceived his son (teasing!—they sleep
together, of course). Now that he’s finally poised to head the
family he’d wanted with goody María (where is she, by the
way?) Emilio hijacks a few of Camelia’s drug shipments to
fund his approaching paternity. Camelia retaliates by kid-
napping his girl, and though Emilio is able to gun his way
through the rest of the film’s uninspired purgatory to rescue
Beatriz and kill Camelia, in the end he is shot down again,
this time fatally.
The film’s great deficiency is sexual in nature, in that what
we’re watching is about as sexy as owl love. Every drop of
Camelia’s hard nectar has been leeched, watered down, and
then transfused to Lothario Almada. It’s Emilio who has the
(somehow unambiguous) relationship with the younger lover,
Emilio who has to swat away horny barflies when he’s tuck-
ing into a tequila and a think. Camelia, once the simpering
cabaret dancer, is now a schmaltzy lounge singer, crooning
ballads in formless gowns. It’s indicative of the film’s nar-
rative favor that Chelo is fourth-billed on the opening cred-
its; her screen time is meager and there is so little chemistry
between her and Almada as to suggest that an earlier relation-
ship might have been one of Emilio’s employment duties.
This sounds crass. I’m not suggesting that all successive
Camelias meet the Peluffo standard in middle-aged allure,
only that because this particular film trades on continuity
with the ’76 original, it’s not just disruptive, it’s downright
offensive that Camelia’s eroticism, a key power source, is
taken away in efforts to reduce her to categorical villainy. A
Camelia in an olive muumuu is a Camelia defanged. To quote
 Narcas y Narcos 121

Peluffo’s original, from a scene in which goody María comes

moping into the nightclub to win back her fiancé: “Emilio
is a very manly man [un hombre muy hombre]! He needs a
very womanly woman! [una mujer muy mujer]!” A wom-
anly woman is strong, smart, brassy, sexy and she knows
how to use her body for business and pleasure. If her critics
believe she’s nothing but a destroyer of good men, or a titil-
later of bad ones, and if my job is to argue carefully that’s
there’s power in such contention, confidence and hauteur and
something political and a whole lot more, then I fail on all
counts, because I, too, am smitten. Because I love—because
I cheer—without complication. Like María herself several
times into Camelia’s harangue, I find my eyebrows rising in
salute to that superb décolletage—and a clenched fist slowly
thereafter.
Long live la Camelia! For almost 40 years, the cult of
the Texana has been performing its mysteries on stage and
screen. Peluffo’s Camelia dies in the sequel, the spoilingly
titled Mataran a Camelia la Texana (They Killed Camelia
the Texan, 1976), but walks on to the set of Las Dos
Michoacanas (The Two Women from Michoacán, 2011) so
that her daughters may toast her—“The greatest mafiosa
who ever lived!”—before a chubby accordionist toots out the
opening notes of her corrido. A son avenges her in El hijo de
Camelia la Texana (The Son of Camelia the Texan, 1988),
11 years after a daughter did the same in La hija del con-
trabando (The Daughter of Contraband, 1977). In 2010 she
becomes the subject of an opera (“I conceived this as more
than an opera, but as a contemporary art piece” says libret-
tist Ruben Ortiz Torres)17 and Telemundo premiered the first
season of her new telenovela in February 2014.
If narco cinema has never reproduced a heroine quite up
to her caliber or renown, it’s come closest in Lolita Chagano,
aka, Lola la Trailera (Lola the Truck-Driving Woman) in a
trilogy of namesake films directed by Raúl Fernández, the
122 Narco Cinema

mind behind that piece of Caro Quintero agitprop, Maten al

fugitivo.18 The Lola films—which appeared in the 80s, and
which also share with Fugitivo its lead actors (husband and
wife Rolando Fernández and Rosa Gloria Chagoyán) and
its tone of cartoonish bedlam—well, they are very popular
films, and no credible study of narco cinema would be com-
plete without them. But I might as well warn you upfront that
the following pages are brought to you by a niggling sense
of archival responsibility rather than anything close to true
appreciation on behalf of this Camelia man.
Lola (Chagoyán) is a dreamy Emma Bovary–type whose
romance is the open road and whose gallant is the semi-
trailer. She’d love nothing more than to join her father on his
long hauls, but he chides her, “This is men’s work,” and time
and again leaves her sighing in a veil of diesel exhaust. But
when dad’s murdered by his crooked boss Leoncio Cárdenas
(Milton Rodríguez) for refusing to transport narcotics, Lola
agrees to complete his cross-border odyssey (unaware of the
contraband). For most of film one, it’s Lola on the open road,
hauling ass from coast to coast, ignoring the put-downs and
come-ons of her macho colleagues and attracting a misfit
convoy of prostitutes, mechanics, hobos, and her godfather,
gooniest of all, whose hobbies include wisecracking and strip
poker with 13-year-old boys (played by, padrino is, the come-
dian Borolas).
Last to join her orbit is Jorge (Fernández), a federal agent
building a case against Cárdenas while working undercover
as one of his truckers. Several chance meetings on the big-rig
circuit kindle a romance between Jorge and Lola, and when
Cárdenas captures him, she steps in to rescue her man. Both
sequels pit the couple against El Maestro (Frank Moro), a
mad-scientist arms dealer with an inexplicable hate-on for
fair Lola.
And fair she is—maidenly so. Save the action sequences
and the corny gags, the series’ appeal is Lola’s charisma. Like
 Narcas y Narcos 123

Salma Hayek, Chagoyán is in very desirable possession of

some exquisite bones encased by some haughty curves. Also
like Hayek, her mix of Middle Eastern and mestiza glamor
(Hayek is part Lebanese, Chagoyán part Armenian) have
been iconic of Mexican sexiness for Hollywood (in Hayek’s
case) and for the videohome industry (in Chagoyán’s).19 But
whereas Hayek is sometimes typecast as the hot-blooded
Latina spitfire, 20 Lola’s personality might best be described
as demure moxy. She can be feisty, oh yes, but she also seems
hardwired for male deference. Just look at her eyes: pallia-
tive, her smile: generous. Her voice sounds like the spoken-
word interlude in a lullaby. It’s easy to understand how her
default nonthreatening femininity might appeal to the macho
viewer seeking both a bad mama and a good one, and for
that reason I have trouble endorsing her.
Though maybe it’s just me. I did happen upon an academic
article very much in favor of the series and whose thesis
might be that Chagoyán’s “vernacular-modern gynocentric
politics” have helped “[reconstruct] . . . Mexican modernity
along the lines of social justice and ethical conduct” to the
benefit of “subaltern subjectivities.”21 Chagoyán herself is
described here as nothing less than “the modern Mexican
embodiment of the Aztec Coatlicue, a powerful feminine
archetype, who . . . predates the mother/whore dichotomy and
is ‘the creator and destroyer of all matter and form.’”22
Peddlers of Milton Bradley structuralism aren’t in any posi-
tion to throw stones. But I have some stones, they are heavy,
and I’m very confused (and not only because it’s been demons
on the old frontal lobes parsing clauses like “ . . . extensive fis-
suring, shaped by insidious politics of taste and social clout,
is to be found within commercial televisual discourse, but not
so exaggerated as to strain the limits of the timeworn popu-
list paradigm of representation . . . ”).23
Here’s the thing: Coatlicue has become a kind of house-
hold goddess for Chicana/o scholars since her resurrection in
124 Narco Cinema

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. And if you’ve

read Borderlands, you’re aware that Anzaldúa doesn’t evoke
the goddess lightly. Her chapter on Coatlicue is both the
spiritual avowal of mestiza culture at large and the worst
shamanic bummer on record since the Apostle cocooned at
Patmos. Powerful stuff on both counts. Lola’s films, on the
other hand, are action-comedies. And their jokes are as loud
and broad and mean-spirited as any you’d overhear from Rob
Ford at a fertility festival. If you don’t mind a little animal
cruelty (viz. cat tossing and dog punching) or a gag about
a homosexual E.T.; if you think you might get a rise out of
watching an elderly madam with a feather in her hair boogie
down to “Vamos a la Playa,” by all means, see these films.
But is it fair to appoint Lola “the creator and destroyer of all
matter and form”? I mean, can’t she just be Lola? (Film two,
30 min. in—see her purple T-shirt that reads “ME”).
The bigger problem, as far as gynocentrics are concerned,
is that two out of three times when trouble shows up, Lola is
damsel in distress and on the last occasion she’s B. A. Baracus.
It’s true that Lola does step up when Jorge is in trouble and
that, in doing so, she kills the series’ two head villains. Also
true: by the last film, she has overcome her reticence with
firearms (and, taking a lesson from la Texana, she’s learned
that flirting has its place in the arsenal). But no one can deny
that Jorge’s action scenes are the series’ musculature. He’s
the brave special agent going after criminal masterminds:
the shootouts, the punch-outs, the budget-eating explosions
are foremost in his domain. Lola’s action sequences take pre-
dominantly two forms: racing trucks and wrestling women.
She’s so proficient at the latter that in each film she’s pit-
ted against a new buxom contender and we all know what
that means, right? A bit of the soft-core roughhouse? How a
grapple heats a spank and a tug threshes a shriek? It’s been
a while since I’ve glimpsed any MLA proceedings, but I just
can’t see Lola’s “chick fight” as “a quasi-sexual fantasy that
 Narcas y Narcos 125

develops through performative and audiovisual style and syn-

tax, into an act of cultural affirmation and show of political
strength.”24 I see it as spring semester at the Chagoyán school
of arousal: flower bashfully in the shade of your strong man,
and then break just like a little grrrl.
Still, if I can’t I enjoy the films (or their scholarship), I
can appreciate their popularity. The first premiered in 1983,
months into the Peso Crisis and a year after the Reagan
administration passed the Bus Regulatory Reform Act, which
required that Mexican truckers, who had previously enjoyed
the freedom to travel anywhere in the United States, now had
to hand off their cargo to American truckers at the border. 25
This turned the truck driver, long venerated in Mexico as a
kind of macho folk hero, 26 into a canny symbol of migrant
laborers, whose mobility had been curtailed by US law for
much of the century. (The American feud is played up with
extra gusto in the third film.) That this trucker, unusually,
happened to be a woman, whose vulnerability is overstated
at every turn—well, sure, this probably resonated with some
audience members.
Might we take this further? Couldn’t we also argue that
maybe her deferential attitude is a strategy she adopts to get
ahead without ruffling feathers in a macho industry rather
than an essential character trait, and thus wouldn’t said
adoption ring true to female viewers in the mid-80s trying
to break into or rise within male-dominated workforces?
And couldn’t even a faithful Cameliate acknowledge that a
working-class heroine may be a more realistic role model for
young impressionable viewers, because surely not every girl
growing up in the borderlands will become a drug lord, and
maybe, just maybe, killing narcos sets a better moral example
than killing pious Emilios and that there’s indeed something
noble in Lola’s hesitancy to violence? And if I can’t see the
reason in such arguments—to the point where my once-
disinterested chronicle of the first queens of narco cinema
126 Narco Cinema

now reflects my own biases, to hell with the fandom’s—is

that because chasing pretty flutters through my erogenous
zones is a nearsighted little sun-starved lapidologist who’d
rather be spanked by a middle-aged Camelia than coddled by
the Lola next door and who makes a big political fuss about
the distinction, even when it’s become progressively more
hard-going for him to explain what precisely that distinction
is or why it matters at all?
The answer to the above questions is no. Let’s move one.

La Güera Mendoza
While our butterflies soak in a nice preservative bath, I think
we should finish our round of Operation by going for the
big points. I want a feminist narco film: a film directed by a
woman with a strong female lead and cogent takes on con-
temporary women’s issues. A film that even audiences intoler-
ant of splatter works, cleavage fests, and unironic moustaches
could rally behind. I think I know just the one: La Güera
Mendoza (2005), directed by Tina Teóyotl.
Yes, that’s a woman’s name. Despite careful inference,
over the years there have been several women behind the
cameras. Isabel Samperio, Verónica Ángeles, and Patricia F.
Sáenz have been scripting narco films since the dawn of vid-
eohome. Sáenz, most prolific of the three, with over one hun-
dred scripts to her name, has also directed five narco films. 27
Lourdes Álvarez has directed over 40 films and Aurora
Martínez, “at least 72” (according to her Wikipedia page,
which smells like an inside job and which grunts at IMDB for
its failure to archive “at least” half her oeuvre).28
I don’t know much about Tina Teóyotl. The director of
only three films, she lacks the credibility of Álvarez and
Martínez, at least where quantity is concerned. Lately she
seems to have returned to her day job as continuity advisor
for various telenovelas. But of the few narco films directed by
 Narcas y Narcos 127

women that I’ve seen (and I admit, there were few I’ve been
able to purchase or find online) this is easily the most reward-
ing and it might yield a new archetype with which to end this
chapter and maybe even salvage a genre. Let’s spend a little
time digging this one out.
Like many narco films, La Güera Mendoza is a family
tragedy, though the dynamics of its families and the courses
of their downfall suggest a closer kinship to the Andronicuses
or the Atreuses than, say, to the Solanos of El Chrysler 300.
This is some old cruelty in high-def. The classical tropes are
everywhere, from the framing device (the hero addresses her
audience in the opening and closing scenes) to the dialogue
(exposition regularly petrifies into aphorism: “Life collects its
toll and I paid a very high price”). Even the musical interludes
work to highlight the generational dissonance at the core of
the film’s tragedy: the sharp-dressed corridistas to whom
we’ve grown accustomed have been replaced by a cumbia
garage band, five boys in their early teens struggling with
acne, rhythm, and key, preening with all the hubris of male
adolescence.
Of course, the center of any tragedy is its hero, in this case
a middle-aged smuggler and mother of two, known as la
Güera Mendoza (“Mendoza, the blonde,” played by veteran
b-actress Alicia Encinas). When we meet her, in the opening
scene, she’s at a turning point in her career—idling the last
cart before the peak of Fortune’s wheel, if you will, which
cart happens to be a Ford pick-up, one of a pair she uses
to run drugs into the United States several times a day. La
Güera is parked on a sunny residential street and she’s pluck-
ing sample-size cocaine packets from the net of the blonde
wig she teases and sprays into a clandestine layer of her
own honey-blonde sprawl each time she crosses the border.
“They’ll never discover my secret,” she laughs mirthlessly
to herself. Her thick face carries an extra pound or two in
makeup. Her smile and cloudy blue eyes are Arquettishly coy.
128 Narco Cinema

A synthetic whistle rises in the background, like a steaming

kettle: a postproduction bit of atmosphere that is as annoying
as you’ll suppose, but la Güera sighs, unfazed. She doesn’t
hear a thing. She’ll break the fourth wall when she’s good
and ready.
What she also fails to hear, though, are the two cholos
creeping behind her truck. And when they pop into opposite
windows and stick her with handguns, demanding “what-
ever you have,” she fails to appreciate their threat. She snorts,
removes her black shades. Almost blind-blue, her eyes. “I have
children your age,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
The cholos don’t listen, and off they sprint down the
road with her briefcase. If they knew what her own children
know: la Güera isn’t one to let maternal feelings subtract
from her narca duties. But the thieves learn this only after the
Ford squeals into high gear and bowls them to the ground.
Smoothing a filigree of hair back into place, she steps out of
the truck and for the first time we see her in full, her black
heft and yellow tangles, her pantsuit furry and ensconcing.
Camelia la Texana is a middle-aged beauty, but la Güera is a
beauty in middle age.
The surviving thief, wriggling on the pavement, takes his
own cap-a-pie and settles his gaze on the pistol in her hand.
He begs her to spare him. “Show some balls, chamaco!” she
says and plugs him twice in the chest. Now she looks at the
camera: “In this business, if you forgive, you lose.” And with
these foreboding words, we cut away to our first dithyramb,
the cumbia kids crooning songs of experience in octaves just
a couple weeks old.
It’s an apt juxtaposition. The film is about parents who err
and children doomed to know better. Since she began smug-
gling cocaine, roughly a generation ago, after her husband
skipped town, la Güera had been outsourcing the duties of
single parenthood to her own mother (Alicia Cepero) with
negligible damage to her two sons, or so it seems at first.
 Narcas y Narcos 129

Grandma raised the boys, kept the hearth warm; she’d been
the sole recipient of the family’s unambiguous love and the
kindly sage who brokered la Güera’s steely logic with femi-
nine intuition whenever the narca brought business to the
dinner table. But now that la Güera has been tapped to
replace Aurelio (Mario Almada) as head of the northern car-
tel, this arrangement has run its course and her sons have
turned against her, provoking the oddest gender reversal I’ve
encountered in narco cinema.
From the moment we meet them, about 20 minutes in,
Demetrio (Fernando Sieber) and Alberto (Héctor Soberón),
both telenovela handsome, are determined to turn their
mother’s action flick into a melodramatic PSA. Demetrio is a
warmhearted father-to-be who wants his fiancé to quit wait-
ressing so they’ll have more time to eat ice cream together
(fact). He loves the idea of family, he likes to say the word
aloud. “Family.” He breaks into a dumb smile at the thought
of strong family ties, and despises his mother for sundering
her own via her criminal efforts. “People who are in that
business always have a bad ending and hurt their families,”
he warns her, especially aghast that she can’t see the damage
she’s caused his brother Alberto, who began using drugs years
ago to get her attention and has now graduated into a full-
fledged nostril-snuffing addict. Alberto blames his mother
for the death toll amongst his junky retinue: “What you earn
is blood money stained by kids like myself who want to do
something with their lives but can’t because they’re six feet
under!”
Let’s just never mind that the actor playing this kid is
41 years old and radiates the healthy sheen of a Timberland ad
(as in most narco films, there are congealing faux pas which,
for brevity more than encomium’s sake, we won’t catalogue
here). I’d like to focus instead on how la Güera’s paradox—
that trafficking drugs to support her sons has furnished
them with the moral high ground to disown her—informs
130 Narco Cinema

the filmmaker’s dilemma. Because what gives this film con-

temporary feminist cred, and makes it possibly unique in
narco cinema, is that Teóyotl won’t be content to bring us
just another Camelia; she wants to explore the personal and
familial consequences of maternity deferred without revert-
ing back to the old motherly archetype I’ve been calling the
broken heart.
The film is defensive about this task from the start. Early
scenes in which Aurelio, “the strongest man in the North,”
tries to justify his appointment of a female successor to the
all-male cartel seem to make an explicit case to the audience
about the value of 3D heroines—and of female directors: i.e.,
listen up, cabrones, Mario Almada is telling you that he’s
“interested in all people” (not only men) and that la Güera
“has talent and guts” and does “clean work.” But what kind
of cartel, and what kind of film, will la Güera lead? How
will the director deny her protagonist the fate of the treacher-
ous butterfly or the broken heart (to give us a female not of
heart, but soul) when the narrative seems caught between the
happy ending of motherhood regained and the tragic conclu-
sion that seems to befit every ambitious narca in the history
of narco cinema?
Teóyotl plays to form and choses the second path, pans her
camera to the bleak stars conspiring over the House Mendoza.
A faction of Aurelio’s men, those disgruntled by his decision
to bring a woman into their crew, kidnap and decapitate
Demetrio and Alberto (after gang-raping Demetrio’s pregnant
fiancé). The severed heads arrive at the Mendoza residence
in birthday wrapping and when la Güera unravels the blue
faces of her boys, she kicks fate into barbarous overdrive. If
it weren’t bad enough that her sons are dead, it quickly turns
out that grandma was in on their assassination. Abuelita,
who also felt abandoned by her daughter, sought solace in the
bed of one of Aurelio’s hit men, trading tabs on the Mendoza
sons for some dubious TLC (so much for an ideal maternity).
 Narcas y Narcos 131

Meanwhile the border police have wizened to la Güera smug-

gling technique and are closing in by the hour.
At this point La Güera understandably loses it. Long fits
of wailing ensue. The film’s climax and denouement are
composed almost entirely in tears. Parched legato screams
while la Güera tortures and murders her sons’ torturers and
murderers. Mascara-laced choke-ups as she castigates and
then abandons her mother—“I came to kill you, but I see
you’re not worth it. Because to me, you’re dead already!”
An unbearable two-and-a-half minutes of grandmother and
mother trading belts of vocal terrorism on opposite sides of
a wall, grandma screaming away with the animal intensity
and variety of a burning barn, la Güera crouching against
the wall, clutching her stomach and moaning (unnervingly
sexually), her face half-melted behind a smear of make-up,
until an off-screen gunshot ends grandma’s lament once and
for all. Such is the power of her Llorona Effect that even the
sawdust-veined Aurelio breaks down when he learns that his
son, who’d been involved in the plot to murder Demetrio and
Alberto, has been killed by la Güera: his eyes mist over and
he crackles us a bit of Lear: “The fair men pay for the sin-
ners . . . forgive me, son”:
The tears finally stop. In the final scene, la Güera is alone
at the family mausoleum. Her luxurious black furs are now
mourner’s garb, her makeup is sparse and her unruly hair has
been flocked into a braid and drained to its natural red.
For the next minute, she walks toward the cemetery gates,
staring at us. Pausing sometimes, her hands fumbling as if
she’s about to tremble an apology. Other times, she sneers,
her eyes narrow, she swaggers slightly on the path, ready to
hex us for refusing to leave her alone. Until she exits the cem-
etery and drives away in her Ford, she rarely breaks our gaze,
but never says a word. Then the screen goes dark.
This reminds me of the final scene in La Dolce Vita, where
the blonde girl calls out to Marcello on the shore and then,
132 Narco Cinema

chastened by his bluffer’s smile and shameful rebuke, turns

her despondent eyes on us. We, the audience, are implicated
in her question, whatever exactly it is. Of course, la Güera is
no symbol of innocence. Here she’s closer to Marcello in her
mute guilt, in the way that her downfall proves the reversal of
Blake’s maxim: sometimes wisdom leads to the road of excess
and when you go far enough down that road, whatever wis-
dom remains will help only to process your prodigality.
Countless narco films end in grief, but most would have
stopped a scene earlier, in the pity orgy. It’s her silence, and
our struggle with it, that takes us beyond the limits of melo-
drama, that unsettles us with the Aristotelian mix of fear
and pity that is supposed to serve our catharsis. Her silence is
both the stoic refusal to fall apart once more and the gravita-
tional humbling of fate.
Has the film then succeeded in generating a narca worthy
of unambiguous veneration by virtue of her character’s ambi-
guity? The notion that a woman’s “unnatural” ambition to
dominate a man’s game will ultimately ruin her family—this
moral holds little against the film’s overwhelming solipsism
because we know La Güera never had a choice: smuggling
was the only way that she could have supported her children
and in the end it was also what destroyed them. This is why
classical tragedy works so well as the film’s structure. The
downfall is preordained but within its constraints, the artist
can work the dynamics of character in a way that cannily
speaks to contemporary issue of maternal responsibility in
a global economy. Rather than espousing a tried moral les-
son, the film displays a moral sensitivity that male filmmak-
ers rarely, if ever, allow their female characters. As much as I
love Camelia la texana, the fact remains that—eihn eihn eihn
eihn eihn!
Oh . . . balls.
I’m afraid the inquest is over, folks. My turn has ended.
We’ve lost. You can tell by that obnoxious buzzing sound my
conscience is making that the patient is unresponsive.
 Narcas y Narcos 133

I see my mistake. In trying to retrieve the apple of empow-

ering self-consciousness, I’ve scraped a few vital nerves. A
grieving woman has been saddled with the additional burden
of redeeming a chauvinistic genre, and a lone female director
has been celebrated, her film essentialized, in what in hind-
sight looks to be a clear case of me forcing women to do the
resurrective work while letting the boys slack off. Bad medi-
cine, this; my cheeks are as red as the patient’s nose.
Before I begin drafting my defense to the House Unacademic
Activities Committee, I’d like to say that my respect for
this film is in no way by default. And if I went too easy on
Camelia la texana earlier, that’s because I have feelings, too,
you know, and love is a beautiful prejudice. If nothing else,
maybe this chapter has suggested that women play a more
complex and pivotal role in what looks on the surface like
an unflinchingly macho genre. Maybe soon we’ll see other
Güeras taking over for Almadas, and more Sabrina Solanos
in the drivers’ seats. And lastly, as I set my tweezers on the
gurney next to my narco mask: I hope that future scholars
will be able to track down other films by female directors,
and that these doctors will be more rigorous and sensitive
so as to avoid something so malpractical as an Operation
analogy in their evisceration of the “phallic body of narco
cinema,” or whatever we’d called it.
 5
. . . and Narco Gays?

Figure 5.1 ¿¡ ¿¡ ?!?!

For a while I used to think that whatever was to be said about

homosexuality in narco cinema could be scrawled overtop a
glory hole packing a shotgun. There are no Pride bumper stick-
ers on El Chrysler 300. No Omarcitos whistling through the
blighted alleys of Monterey. Mario Almada once boasted that
he’d played every kind of character except a homosexual—“If
136 Narco Cinema

I played that, it wouldn’t even be believable”1—and when

actor Sebastián Ligarde came out last year, it’d been a decade
since his last appearance in a narco film, and this chapter was
still only a footnote about the curious alliance of machismo
and melodrama, requiring no more than 20 seconds of your
critical attention.
Enter Christian González and his film Narco Gays (2002),
a bad-narco-worse-cop scheme that takes place in a bizzaro
Sinaloa, where most of the male characters, and all the main
ones, are homosexual, in various steps from the closet.
Here’s the English description on the back of the bilingual
DVD package released by DistriMax, Inc. (all sic): “They look
like a macho men, boots, jeans, hat, gun, but they are gays,
doing business in the narco world, if you want to know what
is a gay doing in a macho world? Don’t lose this movie.”2
Having advertently watched this movie three times, I still
don’t know what these gay men are doing in this macho
world. I’m not even sure this is the fundamental question
the film poses and have come to find it invidious copy, an
attempt to market an hour-and-a-half queer joke when it’s
much more than that, or might be more, or might indeed be
something much worse.
Synopsis: Max (Alan Ciangherotti) and Rony (Gibrán
González) are rising narco stars in the employ of don “Frankie”
Francisco (Fernando Somilleda), whose cartel is a veritable
Stonewall of sexy and homicidal twentysomethings—“Tender
mice for an old cat,” the don calls them. But Max, who’d
make a convincing body double for a Jump Street–era Depp,
is Frankie’s most ambitious lieutenant, even if “tender” would
most certainly go unticked on his sociopathic evaluation.
When Frankie bequests his empire to Max, the ungrateful
heir decides to hurry his succession by murdering the don,
a plot very much to the displeasure of Rony, Max’s dainty
partner, who’d prefer that the couple retire from the drug war
and open a boutique.
 . . . and Narco Gays? 137

A boutique? A boutique! Max is the sort who’d wound

small creatures to make an obscure point. He has no time for
“princess” Rony’s fantasies or “mother” Rony’s moralisms
when a kingly future is just a coup away. The other source
of the couple’s friction—as revealed in the opening squabble,
one of the film’s many—is that Rony doesn’t know “how
to be gay” according to Max’s standards. What gay man,
secure of his sexual preference, spends his free time doting
on a woman like Vicky (Zdenka Erceg), the gloomy Croatian
waitress with the constant pout of one for whom oxygen is
no more than a Precambrian fart? It won’t be until halfway
through the film—when Rony, on Max’s orders, shoots a
rival coke dealer in the penis—that Max accepts Rony’s fidel-
ity, but only for so long.
Meanwhile, Johnny (Jose Llaven), a bi-casual narco with
a West Beverly haircut and the smile of a shark-fin salesman,
has been making a nuisance for everyone here in Crazyville:
stealing cocaine from Max and flirting handsily with Rony
and Vicky. And Armando (Miguel Ángel Rodríguez), a clos-
eted bisexual cop in a mullet-over-denim ensemble (true to
the film’s hyperbole, Armando is “the most corrupt agent
in the country”) has been raping Johnny and extorting both
“money” and “ass” from Vicky, who, it turns out, is aka
Natasha Kusova, Ukrainian mafiosa extraordinaire, hiding
from Interpol in Sinaloa and whose secret Armando will
keep as long as said “money” and “ass” flow gratuitously
into his filthy hands.
The “narco gays” throw an all-night orgy for don Frankie: a
monster’s ball in the morning-after haze, when Max shoots the
don and seizes the throne. Max then arranges a meeting with
Armando to declare his ascension and renegotiate the cartel’s
protection fee. Twenty percent, the cop demands—throw in
the murder of the Ukrainian girl and we’ve got ourselves a deal
(why, oh why, Armando, must poor Victasha die, given the
“money” and “ass” graft? “Because [she’s] a whore”).
138 Narco Cinema

Which brings us to the showdown. Apropos of very little,

Johnny asks Vicky to marry him. She accepts. Max tracks the
fiancés to their apartment in what looks to be a bombed-out
quarter of Sarajevo. He leads them into the rubblework alley
and orders Rony to shoot Vicky, lest her mortality provoke
in Rony some sort of future heterosexual “regeneration.”
Fighting tears, Rony tells Vicky that he loves her and shoots
her in the forehead. Armando then strolls in to shoot Max
and plant a couple smooches on Rony and Johnny’s cheeks,
whereupon these two survivors, last of the “narco gays,”
embrace and stumble off screen. Up scroll the closing credits,
half of them incorrect (Rony is here called “Chupamirto”;
Vicky is simply “Croata”).
Plot twists to nowhere, penis shooting, last-minute name
revision: this is far too reasonable a synopsis and to be hon-
est, I can’t attest to its accuracy. The single review of the
film I found online describes it as “a series of supine happen-
ings . . . without logic or continuity . . . each sequence automat-
ically canceling the last.”3 Part of me is inclined to agree, and
take it further, because three viewings on, there’s still a lot
that doesn’t make sense. At one point the camera spontane-
ously freezes on Armando’s head, as if by its own accord. The
practice is never repeated and carries no symbolic or narrative
purpose that I’m able to infer. The soundtrack, which moves
boldly from early 90s hip hop to Goa lounge to neo-feudal
cantatas, tends to obscure the tenuous sanity of the scenes
it describes rather than guide us with some tonal cues. The
theme song, for instance—which is repeated several times,
including at the very end when Rony and Johnny reach for
each other, two broken men viscerally struggling with the
horror of their lovers’ deaths—is a Spanish version of “Louie
Louie.”
And then there’s the dialogue, much of it nonsense phrases
like, “my ass also has a heart” and “cha cha cha!” scattered
randomly to spice up the longeurs. In one scene, Armando
 . . . and Narco Gays? 139

tells Max, “I didn’t know you were so young,” prompting

Max to reply, by way of explanation, “Youth impresses me.”
Armando proceeds to tease Max about Rony’s apparent
laconism: “The one with the blue eyes . . . who is he? Stone
man? Or is he from a wax museum?” While I might guess that
“stone man” is a wonky verbum pro verbo where “statue”
would have sufficed, what I’m absolutely certain of —having
watched the following scene, a close-up—is that Rony’s eyes
are brown. All the film’s expletives have been censored in
postproduction.
The vanishing point in this dadaist contortion is the orgy
scene. Here the narcos amass by the swimming pool in back
of don Frankie’s hacienda. When dusk settles, they strip
down to their thongs, cue up some strobe- and black-lights,
and while the DJ oonce oonce oonces them away from the
sun, the aged don guzzles scotch and paws them salaciously
from his deckchair: his weekend reward for narco excellence.
This scene, which lasts exactly 7.5 minutes and contains very
little dialogue, alternates between fast and slow motion as
the camera careens through the throng of pumping bodies—
just like the nightclub scene in any film about young people
on chemical drugs. What makes it unique is the serious atten-
tion paid to a topless pimply morbidly obese hit man named
Husky, grooving viscously in the dayglo melee: his weight
billowing his height, his nipples perking to the circular palpa-
tion of his wetted fingers. Sometimes we go close-up on the
breasts or gut; other times it’s the full profile. The camera
will pan to his fellow “narco gays,” now slapping together
in a soft-core orgy, but rarely does it stray far from Husky,
licking his whole hand, masturbating his navel, his eyes
locked upward with the ecstasy of a dying saint. I have now
watched this scene for 24.5 minutes, which is the amount of
time Kundalini experts say is required for an image to nest in
your subconscious. (Though presumably they don’t measure
this cumulatively. And by “they,” I’m pretty sure I mean a
140 Narco Cinema

YouTube comment wobblingly glimpsed once upon a plank

pose [Husky’s moves never failing to chasten my pudge]).
Three great prohibitions have restricted my happiness
since I began writing this book and, I worry, will continue to
govern my life for much of the future:

(1) I will never successfully coax my partner into some Camelia la

Texana cosplay.
(2) Even if were successful, no establishment this side of Harajuku
would carry the wardrobe, accessories, and scents required to
illume such a fantasy.
(3) I will never understand Narco Gays. It is beyond my analytic and
ironic capabilities, ergo it tantalizes me silly. What the philoso-
pher Jacques Derrida called the khora—“that third thing (between
the intelligible and the sensible) that makes it possible to think
anything like the difference between pure being and pure noth-
ingness” and whose “singularity . . . is its very resistance to being
identified”—that’s sort of what Narco Gays is to me.4

Each prohibition has proved distinctly harrowing, and with

regard to the final, here’s why: either this film is masterfully
attuned to the zeitgeist of contemporary humanities studies
and has intentionally inflated its kitsch value to a level at
which plot, character, setting (devices of this sort) fall to the
empire of the absurd in order to teach us that camp is the
real basis of our sexual ontology and performance the true
vehicle of our desire; or the film is a wiener. It’s simple as
that. Just as, on a moral level, it can’t spread both gay pride
and homophobia, it must yield a yay or a nay from the avant-
garde. Great ideas come from the supreme divide. Narco Gays
does not. The promiscuity of high and low culture breeds the
most laudable icons in our modernist wings. Narco Gays has
no discernable ancestors, or even DNA. Waters and Warhol?
Rocky Horror and Priscilla? No. Despite how it sounds
above, tedium-abridged for the sake of its essential weird-
ness, it’s not even remotely funny. It’s not so bad it’s good.
But it may be very important. I think of it as the movie Judith
Butler would make with a grant from the Sinaloa Cartel.
 . . . and Narco Gays? 141

And lest this sound like some jokey attempt to prevari-

cate a horrible film whose sheer suckage I’ll wind up conced-
ing in the end, here are a few facts about director Christian
González that may reveal a sharper eye behind the camera.
At age 22, González entered Mexico’s Centro Universitario
de Estudios Cinematográficos to hone his technical skills
and bandy Cahiers du Cinéma with other aspirant directors,
including Alfonso Cuarón, who once solicited González’s edi-
torial advice on an early short film.5 A year before convoca-
tion, González began teaching film labs at the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, the country’s most presti-
gious institution, while continuing to find his cinematic voice.
His debut Thanatos (1985) won an Ariel award from the
Mexican Academy of Film and his sophomore feature, Polvo
de luz (Dust of Light, 1988), played the festival circuit from
Russia to Colombia and was lauded by film scholar Carl J.
Mora as “an impressive achievement . . . [a film with] scenes of
great beauty and . . . [a] haunting musical score.”6 These hon-
ors alone make him narco cinema’s most venerated director.
In 1990, when González left the art house for video-
home—what he called “putting Tarkovski in the drawer and
going to work”7—the course of accolades may have lagged,
but it never entirely ceased. His 1992 film, El Imperio de los
malditos (The Empire of the Damned), screened at Mexico’s
Sexual Diversity Film Festival and later received a full-chapter
analysis in Jorge Ayala Blanco’s Eficacia del Cine Mexicano
(Mexican Film Efficacy).8 In 1999 he won a lifetime achieve-
ment award from Anprovac (The Association of Home Video
Production and Distribution). Despite the stigma videohome
still holds among Mexico’s cineastes, his films continue to
screen at international festivals and González is regularly
invited to conduct workshops around the country. The more
bizarre offerings in his 90+ filmography (which isn’t limited
to narco cinema) have earned him a cult following and the
title “King of Mexploitation.”9
142 Narco Cinema

Given his education and prolificacy—and his outsider sta-

tus as a professional “insider” within the videohome com-
munity—I think it’s fair to assume that here’s a director who
has thought critically about how kitsch informs his medium
and how camp might be used to comment on the culture that
consumes that medium. Sometimes I wonder if videohome is
to González what the umbrella is to Christo, or the urinal to
Duchamp: a conventional object adopted for cultural reflec-
tion under the glow of an artist’s aura. That he’s written a
novel called Chichifo Kitsch (literally, Gay Prostitute Kitsch;
to date unpublished) makes me wonder whether kitsch in
Narco Gays is a vehicle for exploring homosexuality or if it’s
the other way around.10
I have wondered often since my first encounter with Narco
Gays. I stare into screens but remain benighted. I squander
psychological bandwidth wondering about kitsch vehicles.
González describes his turn to b-film as an aesthetic con-
version: “I realized that the prosaic is part of our values, the
naco that we are but don’t want to accept. I woke up want-
ing to explore this in cinema.”11 In interviews he digresses
on Kieślowski and Kubrick with the blithe air of an over-
looked peer,12 and curses merrily when discussing his métier,
proudly highlighting its lumpen appeal: “What I consider my
success as a filmmaker is my ability to interact with viewers
who are completely marginalized . . . prostitutes, drug addicts,
pickpockets, police, all of these people who speak the same
language.”13 “In Mexico,” he says, “we haven’t accepted the
carnival that we are.”14 Is this what a narco-auteur sounds
like? Is González the genius in the rough, the artiste-cum-
class-warrior? “If you pay attention to videohomes, I do stand
out,” he says. “Why?” Yeah, why? “Because [my videos] look
like cinema. . . . Because I respect my work.”15
All the same, like any great auteur, he can sound conflicted
about his craft. He’ll talk discouragingly about his experi-
ence at film school (“the bastion of a frustrated few who
 . . . and Narco Gays? 143

never want to leave it”)16 and then advise young filmmakers

to attend one (“but ignore the teachers, they don’t know what
they’re doing or saying”).17 He sees his oeuvre as cinema of
the oppressed but dismisses other videohomes as banalities
of the “don Mario Almada school.”18 He also admits to have
gotten “fed up with working with actors who aren’t actors.
This is a huge defect of the videohome.”19
Most baffling, in an early interview, González condemned
Mexican cinema for showcasing drugs and violence, taking
particular umbrage with sexist depictions of women: “If a
woman is not a prostitute, she’s being raped, or willing to
have sex on the spur of the moment . . . commercial producers
[should] return to family entertainment.”20 Three years later
he directed Por un salvaje amor (For a Savage Love, 1992), a
film that El Universal called “the most misogynistic movie in
the history of world cinema.”21
Misogyny may have stayed the course in González’s
throughput, since it’s the least ambiguous fault with which to
condemn Narco Gays, whose male characters compulsively
throw gang signs at the mere thought of women. Here’s Rony
explaining his sexual preference: “You know why I’m a fag?
Because women are bitches. They’re always dirty. They don’t
clean themselves.” In every one of her scenes, poor Vicky/
Natasha, the only female character, is forced to weather such
comments (and much worse) to the point where her heroin
deadpan could almost seem less like bad acting than an exo-
skeletal retreat if she weren’t enjoying the attention so much.
Romantic encounters between her and the bisexual characters
are about congruent with a decomposing monk’s perspective
on courtly love: she screams when Johnny jumps her—stran-
gles her—to coopt a kiss, but once their lips meet, she yelps
with delight; Armando leads her to the bedroom with his
arm around her waist and tells her he plans on loving her “by
force”; in the sweaty, saxophony aftermath, she snuggles up
to him and concedes, yes, that was a little fun.
144 Narco Cinema

While this is maximally offensive, it is also hopelessly

kitschy. An optimist might argue that the film’s over-the-top
misogyny does kamikaze work on the homophobic front.
If, in Narco Gays, sex with women is dull, traditional, just
plain no fun, sex with men is lively, exciting, dangerous. Gay
culture, in short, becomes an allegory of narco culture and
straight culture is just a series of outmoded and corrupt laws,
restricting love and commerce to the banal.
Armando, a married cop and the film’s categorical villain,
is the character who struggles most with his homosexuality.
In the opening scene, he catches Johnny in a cocaine deal
and forces the narco, at gunpoint, to perform oral sex. “I
want you to know I’m the law,” says Armando, declaring his
judicial and heterosexual authority as he unbuttons his jeans.
When he encounters Johnny several scenes on, he beats him
up and reminds him, “I’m not a fag.” To prove it to himself,
he rushes off to rape Vicky.
Max, the hero, is the character most secure in his homo-
sexuality and the one who challenges the law. At his meeting
with Armando, the cop asks him, “Are you a fag?” Max,
rubbing a wad of American dollars over his face, answers, “I
used to be. Now I’m gay.” His ascension to the narco throne
has awarded him the discursive power to define his sexual
identity in the face of an oppressive authority. In the final
scene, when Armando kills Max, he pronounces him an “ex-
gay . . . and a fag again.”
Could we take this further and suggest that the film is
making a kind of meta point about the homoerotic in narco
cinema? By using camp so extremely, is it interrogating the
macho conventions of videohome, exposing male-on-male
melodrama for what it really signals: not just a crack in the
veneer of manliness that encourages male bonding, 22 but a
secret desire to love one’s brother narco?
Furthermore, and to the obvious point, if the film were just a
poor attempt to cash out on cheap laughs by parading a series
 . . . and Narco Gays? 145

of homosexual caricatures, what sort of hater could sit through

an hour and a half of this without feeling duped? At what point
does watching attractive men make out stop being a gay joke?
When does self-consciousness set in to make this all confusing,
annoying, angering, interesting, arousing, big-time glandular?
But then I think of Husky dancing and feel freshly ashamed
for making a mystery out of what is patently a terrible joke.
And then I review a few scenes to confirm their bigotry
and find myself confronted with such devastatingly vortical
kitsch that my moral position is ripped inside it and I just
watch, mesmerized. I’m not even sure this is camp anymore.
The film appears both self-conscious of its badness and com-
pletely numb to it. It is a blind eye winking at a mirror. Then
I think: Does the film recognize that the self-knowing, black-
humorous engine of postmodernity has run its course—that
nothing spoils pure kitsch the way camp does? And if the
film appears so singularly naïve and humorless about itself,
is that part of an illusion to fool us into thinking that what
must be camp is really kitsch (when really it’s camp in dis-
guise, or, again, a wiener)? It’s nothing like a Lynch film:
the banal isn’t serving an existential crisis. Maybe here it’s
the existential attending to a crisis of the banal, or it’s the
existential’s sense of the banal that’s been thrown into crisis.
I don’t even know what these last two propositions mean.
Now I’m just shuffling words around to see if I can come up
with a sentence to throw light anywhere on this crazy-ass
fadoodle. See what this film’s done to me?
This where I’d arrived. A crisis of scholarship. And so one
week in fall 2013, while recovering from some post-Thanks-
giving bronchitis, I sorted through my DVD collection and
had me a González-thon. Fifteen films in six phlegmatic
nights. What I sought was context for genius. I needed an
essence, a discernable pneumatic scheme.
What I found instead was El Clon de Hitler (2002), a
decidedly non-sci-fi flick about Hitler’s clone replotting world
146 Narco Cinema

domination from the barrio. A film that goes from silly—

magic-marker stauches and raw-meat brunches and incest
fantasies—to downright repulsive by the last scene, in which
Holocaust footage is spliced with shots of gang members
grieving the clone’s death. Then I found Darketos (Goths,
2002), a sequel, a plotless rumination on how bad things had
gotten in the barrio since El Führer’s untimely demise, and
how much better they’ve become since the ghost of Hitler’s
clone arrived to offer some self-help bullet points and reunite
the gang under a new missive: Hitler is “god” of nacos, the
true leader of Mexico’s “cosmic race.”
A few brain cells, working in tandem, told me that these
films are no more a rehabilitation of Third Reich ideology
than I am a fancy mastodon. Let those brain cells continue
their fiery relay and they would doubtless suggest that Narco
Gays, which is just as trashy and tedious, is no extolment of
LGBT culture, its kitsch implosion no statement or reflection
on kitsch—it’s all just kitsch, albeit less refined. Camp slag.
I decided to give those brain cells a rest from their conspir-
acy and continue my marathon. I watched Por mujeres como
tú (For Women Like You, 2004) and La curva del olvido (The
Forgetting Curve, 2004), almost completely intelligible and
technically proficient political dramas such as you’d find any
afternoon on Lifetime. I watched the madcap giallo Mujeres
de media noche (Midnight Women, 1990) and the gore fest
24 cuadros de terror (24 Frames of Terror, 2008), both of
which, at their most graphic, seem a couple heartbeats away
from snuff. Though I couldn’t find a copy of Shibari (2002),
an erotic melodrama about Japanese-bondage enthusiasts
(González is particularly proud of this one),23 I did see Rojo
Orgasmico (Orgasmic Red, 2012), an erotic melodrama
about a director making a film about his Japanese-bondage
enthusiasm.
The more films I watched, the more tissues I gunked,
the more sleepless nights I accumulated, the more con-
vinced I became of an auteur’s handiwork. His penchant for
 . . . and Narco Gays? 147

repurposing old narratives through the “found” medium of

videohome—is this what’s going on and, if so, what could be
more postmodern than that? His best-known film, Ritmo,
traición y muerte: La cumbia asesina (Rhythm, Betrayal
and Death: The Cumbia Killer, 1991), is an S&M take on
Bizet’s Carmen, while Sí Honarás tu coca madre (Thou Shalt
Honor Your Junky Mother, 2005) is essentially My Fair Lady
from the Barrio: Eliza Dolittle kidnapped and gang-raped
by her fellow urchins as a just reward for abandoning them.
Sí Desearás la mujer de tu narco (Thou Shalt Covet Your
Dealer’s Woman, 2005) is ye old farmer’s daughter yarn, the
NC-17 version, the one that ends in castration, as told by
Zalman King. (This Thou Shalt series itself being an unfin-
ished homage to Kieślowski’s Decalogue).
The formulas and popular morals of narco cinema have no
place in González’s depth of field. Out go the corridistas and in
come the naked ladies (and a few gentlemen going full-dorsal
nude, as well [c.f. Hollywood mores]). Whether his narratives
are based on operas or fairytales or whether they’re whispered
directly from his own depraved muse, the results are always
unique. He’s right about himself: his work stands alone in the
narco cinema canon. If the narcotic correlative of most of our
films would be cocaine (the rises and falls of noisy egos), that
of González’s work must be some weird designer hallucinogen
that retails by the bitcoin and that makes the user feel less like
an active participant than a paralyzed witness to the hydro-
ponically surreal and artisanaly obscene frontiers of human
existence. I won’t mince words: this is the most original direc-
tor to have ever shot narco cinema.
My greatest surprise though, and a tantalizing one, was
that homoerotism isn’t anomalous to his filmography. In
Sí Matarás (Thou Shalt Kill, 2005), the wise don Salomón
employs two openly gay narcos at the top of his organization:
consummate pros who torture and murder with the best of
their hetero peers while shouldering the additional respon-
sibility of raping men who betray the cartel. One of these
148 Narco Cinema

enforcers is a bit of a gargoyle about the whole rape thing,

always simpering and ogling, permanently hunched as if to
latch on command, and pursuant to which latches he takes
wicked delight in describing his genitalia in euphemistic non
sequitors (e.g. “daddy” and “the crying bump”) to his bound
victims, all of whom are practically screaming through their
eyeballs by the time the gargoyle leans in for a face lick and
“the crying bump” comes that much closer to exploding its
“melon water with milk.” So there’s that guy. But his partner
is a chummy fellow with a handsome grin and a good head
of hair who, in his wool-knit turtlenecks, looks sort of like a
humanities TA: all around a convivial and attractive guy (by
TA standards) who just happens to moonlight as a same-sex
rapist for a drug cartel.
None of which probably bodes well for a gay-friendly read-
ing of Narco Gays.
But what to make of Nosotros los chemos (We, the Junkies,
2001)? This is the story of gas-huffing pillagers and rapists who
live in a garbage dump at the edge of town. Rolo, their leader,
is played by telenovela heartthrob Armando Zamarripa. Of
all the junkies, he and his abs comprise the most interest-
ing subject for the Quebecois filmmaker making a submer-
sion documentary on the trials of these NAFTA underdogs.
Jean Claude is played by Flavio Peniche. Remember Peniche?
That serial nerve molester from the Zeta films? He’s much
less menacing here, with a blonde brillo pad poking out his
toque and with the lip-smacking sniveling fuss he makes
whenever he zooms his camera toothsomely on Rolo’s big
brown muscles.
This doesn’t seem to fare more tolerantly at first. But what
begins as a gay joke (or a French joke; or the conflation of the
two in pan-American bad taste) evolves a degree of human
interest when Jean Claude rushes Rolo to the hospital and saves
his life after a vicious police raid on the dump. Near the end
of the film, at which point Rolo is the only gang member to
 . . . and Narco Gays? 149

survive another battle with the psychotic police, Jean Claude

saves him once more by bringing him to Montreal to share
his stake in the “developed world” (J. C.’s words). In the
final scene, a sartorially gentrified Rolo lords over the break-
fast nook and its spread of red wine, croissants, and cocaine
(what’s known up here as a “Moreal Monday”). “If you make
me happy, I’ll make you happy, too,” promises Jean Claude.
Rolo grins, reviewing footage of his old life on J. C.’s camera.
Is this a happy ending for Rolo? Or is he prostituting him-
self for the cocaine and heath care? Is the film suggesting a
joyful coupling, or has Rolo been forced to adapt his Mexican
manliness to the queer tastes of the “developed world” as a
matter of survival? His grin is no answer, because it’s the
same dumb oxygen trap he’s been sporting the whole film,
less an emotional gauge than a physical reminder of how a
lifetime of gasoline ingestion pollutes the nerves.
I was beginning to understand that zombie state myself.
Halfway into my marathon, my fever climbing like a spy,
my beggarly frame shivering into bed at 4 AM only to lay
awake for hours hacking up slimers and salty lougies, my
perspective on things was starting to slip. I’m a lousy sleeper
after the orangest days, but give me a few seasonal germs
and bedtime becomes a war of attrition between my divisions
of consciousness. Hours would drag by and I’d be compul-
sively revisiting the same dailies from my marathon. It was a
bargain out of insomnia: contextualize these scenes and you
shall be released—those cinematic moments when the cam-
era starts to jangle and zoom in on the inappropriate places,
when the screen goes grainy or the music breaks out in a sud-
den rash of dissonance. Those depictions of ordinary mad-
ness that slip into an otherwise lucid narrative and slip away
as if they were never there—the Gonzálisms—they were like
adrenalin shots administered to prolong the torture.
I replayed the scene from Sí Honarás in which the vil-
lain is called upon to imagine complete and total fear and
150 Narco Cinema

so envisions a cemetery where a woman tries to dress him in

a fuchsia scarf while a portly tenor in a gray suit stands by
singing “Una Furtiva Lagrima.”24 (I stumbled down the hall
to the bathroom and horked out another batch of Chernobyl
spunk). I rethought the opening credits of Sí Desearás: a
couple in lucha-libre masks hot-oil wrestling, ripping their
swimsuits off, smelling each other’s feet.25 (I reached over my
partner’s grinding molars to grab a tissue off the nightstand
and sink it with a chewy web of veined gunk). I pondered
the scene in Por mujeres in which two cops try to break an
unsnitchable narco by feeding him a forkful of green beans.
The narco shakes and moans, but won’t utter a word. He’s
terrified of those beans. And so the cops beat him and call
his family into the interrogation room, whereupon the lead
cop (the film’s hero) begins feeding those beans to the wife’s
breasts. And when even this WTF fails to loosen the nar-
co’s tongue, the cop smiles a friendly grin, kisses the narco’s
young daughter on the cheek, and shoots her shih tzu in the
face.26
Page after page of these moments fill my notebook, paren-
thesized by the requisite ¿¡ ¿¡ ?!?!. Replaying them through
a 100.7-degree shiver of pure exhaustion, though, that’s a
different confusion. I was losing it tediously, my perspective
vanishing into the consensual delusion of an idiot teleplay
that never ends but repeats and never ends but repeats. And
when there were no scenes to turn over and when my partner
had risen and dawn’s glow embroidered our bedroom cur-
tains, there was only one image left: a blind eye winking at an
all-seeing universe and a rattling arm span trying to bridge
the eternity in between.

* * *

Eff this. There’s a time and a place for the ambiguous. What
I wanted was Boolean. Is Narco Gays a bad joke or is it art?
I needed authorial intention.
 . . . and Narco Gays? 151

And so after having committed six days to my marathon

viewing, and over a year to maintaining an objective distance
from the movers and shakers of narco cinema, I decided to
get on the e-horn and contact raculfright_13, whose Blogo
Trasho often reviews Mexploitation films and whose Skype
interview with González, filled with responses like “the pro-
ducer . . . wanted to write this in the new screenplay because
he wanted to show why Dracula is ‘muy malo’” rekindled my
old suspicion about a genius stymied by the studio system. 27 I
asked racul to pass on my email and, two days later, I’d made
contact with the auteur himself.
Patricia Rojas, his wife and producer, acting liaison
between González and me, very graciously offers to send me
anything I’d like from her husband’s catalogue. The prospect
of pursuing my questions over another swath of the 73+ mov-
ies I’ve yet to see makes me cackle maniacally, but I limit
my requests. I’d like to see Shibari (maybe the film he’s most
proud of) and I delicately ask González if his work is divided
into commercial films and passion projects—essentially, does
he make a few stinkers to finance his dreams (I don’t say
“stinkers”).
He tells me “My work is very complicated.” When he has
complete freedom from the producer, as he did with films
like Shibari, the work is “more interesting and personal” and
has a “cleaner and more poetic cinematographic language.”28
But he also calls many of his studio films “interesting” as
well, 29 and says he tries to direct these pictures from the audi-
ence’s point of view so to “enjoy [the spectator’s] emotions
and black humor.”30
I tell him that his films seem to me ironic about their
kitschyness. I toss out “hyper-camp.” What role does kitsch
play in his aesthetic? González:

When one portrays Mexican society in all its social strata, kitsch
involuntarily accompanies even the learned and best-educated peo-
ple. I remember a videohome distributor using his finest gold Mont
Blanc pen to open a juice box.
152 Narco Cinema

What’s beautiful about this is the irony, in the sense that “having
bad taste is cathartic, and to a certain point, fun.”
Especially in my more vulgar and trashy videohomes, like Narco
Gays [!!!], Gordita la del barrio, I allow the situation to be kitsch
and give it a farcical tone, which I consider very healthy and very
close to reality in Mexico. 31

I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Cathartic” and

“reality” aren’t words I would use to describe any aspect
of Narco Gays and, by round two of our e-mail exchange,
my compulsion is so strong that I blurt out my remaining
questions with the grace and reserve of a pubescent crying
bump. Could he tell me everything about how Narco Gays
was conceived? His direction process? What did the actors
think? The producers? The audience? In my most diplomatic
language, with nods to Judith Butler and the aesthetic value
of camp, I suggest that the film somehow manages to mix gay
jokes with gay pride. Is this a valid reading? Or could it be
one or the other?
González:
In traditional Mexican videohomes, “macho” men (like the Almada
brothers, Jorge Reynoso, etc.) strongly reject looking or acting like
homosexuals. Therefore, Narco Gays had to be done with video-
home actors who are more open to free sexual orientation. There
was a certain strange code for the “macho” men in the film; some
actors agreed to film homosexual scenes provided they were always
in the dominant and active position.
During Narco Gays, a discussion arose between the actors and
the Director since I pointed out that being homosexual may not be
a permanent condition, which is to say that the menu of homosex-
ual pleasures is vast and diverse. The active homosexuals in Narco
Gays turned this into a controversy: let’s say that those who play
the male role and mount their partners are really machos, and that
even if there’s penetration, they will continue to be macho. Some of
the gay actors argued against this, defining their heterosexual part-
ners as “repressed homosexuals.” The young actors stopped seeing
their bisexual facet in a normal way, and interpreted the everyday
of homosexuals. 32

He answers my final question—“Yes, Narco Gays is

fully conscious of its kitsch and is even a pioneering film
 . . . and Narco Gays? 153

in this subject”33 —and waxes proudly on his achievement:

“Narco Gays was a true showcase of the diverse preferences
or nuances of homosexuality. Some of the [actors] played
‘locas’ (queers) and others felt more comfortable not being
dominant. Actually, the film had very strong scenes that
were cut because the producers said that the videohome audi-
ence wasn’t prepared to see such explicit sexual acts because
Mexican culture is so repressed by the morals [of institutions]
like the Church and machismo.”34
But then frustration sets in: “Ignacio Rinza’s script had
many limitations and [called for] a comedy in the style of
La Cage aux Folles, with [that film’s] clichés . . . [Narco Gays]
was pulled in two directions. It was very difficult to direct
because the tone was totally strange.”
And then his frustration and pride sort of collapse: “In
general, the videohome has been transformed into a very
low-budget production system . . . the scripts deteriorate and
[it’s difficult to] fix shortcomings in production. Narco Gays
was no exception, so the original script was transformed by
[these] circumstances. The actors agree to participate for very
low salaries. You carry out production in eight or ten days.
You use borrowed locations. The actors bring their own cos-
tumes. The film crew is limited to ten. All these circumstances
change the script during filming. In this case, the film’s cre-
ative ‘value’ is the Director, since not just anyone is able to
coordinate these shortcomings and make a film.”35
How was it received by the critics? “Badly.” By audiences?
“Some found it funny and clever. Others couldn’t understand
such caustic humor.” The producer? “He sold it successfully
and got more from it than anyone.” The actors? “It was
another movie on their CVs and it gave them enough money
to survive for a week.”36
And by the director? “It was a very strange movie because
the energy that went into its development was trying to
make it a comedy, but I had filmed more human things like
jealousy. Obviously, my interest was to see Gay people, not
154 Narco Cinema

gay caricatures. Gibrán González (actor), in Husky’s dance

sequence, had a violent reaction when the old gay [don
Frankie] touched him too much and we had to calm him
down. This really disturbed the energy on set. The actresses
felt relegated to the background, very annoying for them.
Personally speaking, it’s not a movie that satisfied me. They
didn’t know how to handle it; it wasn’t a lucky film. Obviously
the actors depended more on the film’s exterior than on the
interior lives of their characters, but for them it was a diffi-
cult experience.”37

* * *

I guess we’re about done here. Any attempt to deconstruct

the above-related perspective on love and cinema wouldn’t
yield a pulp or pixel of real insight or make you and me closer
friends. A scene-by-scene analysis of the polyphonic tension
between authorial and directorial voices engendering—
just . . . never mind.
Now that my bronchitis is gone and my spirit basically
repaired to good standing (no more songs of my sputum, I
promise; and sorry about that), it looks as though I’m back
where I started, only this time I see a little pink on the hori-
zon. Is Narco Gays good or bad, a gay joke or gay pride? I
have no idea, and that’s okay. Most viewers who aren’t alien-
ated by the homophobia will reject it as absurd, or ersatz
absurd, and even if a hopeful few happen to find it queered
and absurdist, it’s not my place to take sides. I’ve come to
terms with not understanding this one, and have realized
how silly it is to seek a high-theoretical explanation for con-
tent that demands that you just sit back and enjoy its crazy.
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes an obese hit man mastur-
bating his bellybutton on the dance floor is just an obese hit
man masturbating his bellybutton on the dance floor. Husky
stayed the same, it was my scholarship that got small.
 . . . and Narco Gays? 155

On that note, let’s leave the last word to González, remi-

niscing here on his life as a filmmaker: “What amuses me in
all of this is thinking whether the madness pursues me or I
pursue the madness. Who the fuck knows, but it’s been an
interesting career.”38
This.
Yes, that.
That about sums it up, doesn’t it?
Nothing more to add.
No sir.
For argument’s sake, though, if we were to go full scholarly on
this and break down what it means for the film to be “fully conscious
of its kitsch” according to the internal (and internally suspect) phallacy
of a bisexual ontological basis to homosexual desire (which, granted, some
may genuinely see “the menu of homosexual pleasures [as] vast and diverse” and
others may tactically partially substantiate such a claim in so far that it challenges
the hegemonic positionality of Church and state in becoming-Mexican as a micropolitical

tendency with carnivalesque interstiaility, as González himself implies variously where quoted

above) the first point we’d have to annihilate, and I’m talking smithereens, would be blah blah blah, Gayatri

Spivak blee-blah-bloh-bloaw—is this legible anymore? If you’re reading this in e-book form, can you woosh your

pointer and thumb far enough apart to enlarge and interpret this stream-of-consciousness drivel?

How about now? The Neville Brothers rock! Jesus stole all my turnips! But that’s okay because Point Break’s on TBS later tonight and

I’m going to eat me some KETCHUP CHIPS! I pity the poor fool who won’t accept a beautifully tossed frisbee! Uncle Einstein, where are you? There you are!

Peek-a-boo!

Okay, now we’re really done here.

!
 Postscript: From Culiacán to Cannes

Figure P.1 ¡Que viva narco cinema!

Quitting narco cinema has meant the most gorgeously pang-

free break with any of the addictions I’ve had to curtail along
my 15-year journey from eternal youth to premature grey.
On the obsessive-compulsive meter aligning my nervous sys-
tem, the films rank somewhere in the busy middle: just above
cinnamon nicotine gum, but still several notches below tutti
158 Narco Cinema

frutti nicotine gum. Three weeks clean, the cravings have

been manageable and particular, and the tricks of self-de-
lusion largely inoffensive. As for no longer having to write
about narco cinema, let me say how wonderful the release is
when every second page no longer brings a new moustache
to describe.
I should be categorically happy. Life is proceeding on a
fresher plane. I’m reading Carlos Fuentes again. I’ve already
planned to lose five pounds, and most of that through out-
door activity. Yet knowing that I won’t be watching regularly
anymore makes me sad in a way that breaking most other
addictions hasn’t. It feels like bidding farewell to a good
friend rather than snubbing a bad one. Even if the departure
is amicable and undertaken for good reason, it doesn’t stanch
the sentimental feeling that something important to me and
my experience of the world is receding day by day.
“Addiction” sounds here like a gimmicky entendre and
in a moment I’ll try to explain why I’m as serious about its
usage as I am about “friendship.” But before we get to that,
I’d like to offer a few words of acknowledgment—and just a
few—to my succession aides.
First there was Heli (2013), a film about a teenage factory
worker whose family is pulled into the roughest tides of narco
violence after his younger sister agrees to hide a package of
cocaine for her boyfriend, a federal soldier. Then came Miss
Bala (2011), about a beauty-pageant contestant who moves
through her three-day ordeal with fame a bit like a marble in
one of those tilting labyrinth games: her little world pitched
and sloped at every turn by the unfriendly forces of narcos,
police, DEA, and national media, before she’s unceremoni-
ously junked out their maze. Do the plots sound familiar?
How about the one about the repatriated migrant who finds
his hometown overrun by narcos and has no choice but to
grab the bloody pickaxe bequeathed him and start climbing
the cartel’s ranks (El Infierno [Hell, 2010])? Or the film about
 Postscript 159

the capo sneaking across the Iraqi border to rescue his brother,
an American soldier captured in combat and slated for execu-
tion (okay, Salvando al Soldado Pérez [Saving Private Pérez,
2011] is wacky even by videohome standards).
These films are not narco cinema, or not quite. Each has
earned major awards and paeans of the highest critical order.
Heli’s Amat Escalante won Best Director at Cannes in 2013
and El Infierno took home nine of Mexico’s Ariel Awards in
2011, including prizes for Best Picture, Director, and Actor.
Miss Bala picked up three awards at film festivals in the United
States and Europe, and Soldado Pérez, a silver Ariel. While
we can split these films into two stylistic camps—the social
realist and the black humorist—together they form a school
that film critic Sergio Ramos calls nuevo cine de narco: the
old videohome aesthetic imbued with art-house chic.1
Combining scenes of hyper-brutality and long passages of
unnerving quietude, Heli and Miss Bala constitute the social
realist division. They render personal tragedies of the drug
war with exquisite futility. The unforgettable scene in Heli
in which the narcos light a soldier’s genitals on fire while a
group of children watches quietly from the sofa, the noise
from an idling videogame underscoring the labored breaths
between screams—this about captures the aesthetic.
El Infierno and Soldado Pérez, on the other hand, are
wicked fun. Though they’ve been largely ignored by world-
cinema crowds, they’ve won over Mexican and Latina audi-
ences with their elaborate in-jokes about the kitsch and
barbarism of narco culture. In El Infierno, we share the
protagonist’s horrible bemusement as he encounters the gar-
ish haciendas and blood-thirsty oafs that have annexed his
childhood town. Soldado Pérez—with its giant marijuana-
leaf swimming pool and multi-touch trafficker-intel monitor
and “Godfather Theme” truck horn—is to narco kitsch what
a Clooney-Johansen sex tape would be to the Internet. Both
films feature narcocorridos (though no banda interludes),
160 Narco Cinema

excessive violence, the tight britches, and gilded Glocks.

Mario Almada makes a cameo in El Infierno and septua-
genarian b-actress Isela Vega appears in both. Beyond the
level of form, the films remind audiences of the virtue of fam-
ily solidarity, which we know has been a moral mainstay of
narco cinema since the beginning. But Raza Mex produc-
tions these aren’t.
It’s easy to see why journalists and academics investigating
the bizarre world of narco cinema tend to gravitate toward,
and then cling desperately to these four films. I was no excep-
tion. In the proposal for this book, I’d sketched an entire
chapter on nuevo cine de narco and its ambivalent place
in the canon. It was the guilty pleasure I’d saved for last, a
chance to watch real pro cinema again, and I relished the
opportunity to sharpen my critical skills against it. But my
satisfaction in actually watching these films was moot. And
trying to write about them made me feel guilty, as if it would
be wrong to say much more than I already have. There are
two reasons for this: these films are excellent; and they were
made for people like me.
Miguel Rodarte, star of Soldado Pérez, calls his film a
“spoof” of narco culture and, in the same breath, criticizes
traditional narco cinema for “[celebrating] that culture.”2
Though his film itself isn’t so mean-spirited, it’s no less ironic
in its “homage.” The same goes for El Infierno. As regards
the social realist branch: Heli is one of those extraordinary
films of which you could say that silence is its own psycho-
logically complex character who somehow manages to avoid
turning the movie into a film-school thesis (for this feat,
Escalante ranks beside Ki-duk Kim and Terrence Malik at
his soberest). But watching Heli feels sort of like seeing the
goriest images and videos from Narco News at a Whitney
exhibition: the irony bridging spectator and subject is vast
and brutal. Miss Bala is not half as grotesque and in fact,
conceptually it’s very much like a traditional narco film in
 Postscript 161

that its script interweaves two drug war scandals—the Caro

and Kiki affair and the arrest of Laura Zúñiga, a former Miss
Sinaloa whose ties to the Juárez Cartel cost her the crown—
and cherry-picks sensational details from each for a fiction
set in contemporary Tijuana.
The thing is, though, I’ve seen Caro and Kiki do battle
already. And Zúñiga has her own videohome in Miss Narca
(2010). It isn’t simply that I feel a sense of injustice in the fact
that these high-budget (contextually speaking) nuevo cine films
have been happily claimed by a national film industry that
mocks and condemns narco cinema; or that the line between
praise and prohibition in this case is an aesthetic one arbitrated
by the Mexican government; there’s also a part of me that pre-
fers the videohome version: its brutality just feels more sincere.
When I began researching this book under academic pre-
tensions, I was aghast at much of what I saw: the noncha-
lant misogyny, the kill sprees and maudlin aftermaths, the
amateur and kitschy everything. But through the course of
writing, something strange happened: at an uncertain point,
I started really to enjoy the films and to question my schol-
arly motives. I saw how easy it would be to subject narco
cinema to the standard operandi: to praise its anti-hegemonic
potential while calling out its pro-hegemonic tendencies, to
drag it across that moral spectrum on which artistic merit
is measured only as a capacity to liberate or further oppress
marginalized subjects. This is standard scholarly procedure,
and I still salute its motives, but in practice it now strikes me
as very unfriendly. Allowing little to the subject other than a
distant political admiration, today’s typical scholar encrypts
his findings in the theory de la mode, leaving out his own
impulses, inner conflicts, secret desires, so that the onus of
personality stays with the subject itself, and much of that
bent back to argument.
What I’m trying to say is that narco cinema has helped me
come to terms with this. All that’s good and bad in these films
162 Narco Cinema

has forced me to confront the insincerity in my own scholar-

ship. The films have challenged me to be unprofessional, to
hone my sentimentalism and my snark along the same red
line and in doing so, they’ve given me a means for staging
my own sneak attacks (probably too brattily at points) on
an institutional culture whose endemic confusion of novelty
with true agency is, I think, commensurate with “the corpo-
ratization of academia” that those in the scarcer positions of
power more strongly, if too casually, like to condemn.
Staring into the mirror for almost two years with my mask
on has given me greater perspective on narco culture, its his-
tory, and its aesthetic, but it’s also changed me personally.
This is what I mean by friendship, and this is why conclud-
ing with nueveo cine de narco would be as cold a betrayal
as grinding my favorite films through the latest academic
shibboleths.
I won’t pretend that mine is anything like real intimacy.
At the best of times I felt more like a war correspondent
embedded, with serious protection, on the furthest periph-
ery of narco culture. But even from my obstructed vantage,
one thing that I’ve learned—probably the greatest insight I
can offer you—is that these films aren’t just fantastic nar-
ratives; what they deliver is the fantasy of narrative itself.
They provide the hopeful illusion that somewhere in Mexico
the police are still incorruptible and that justice will prevail;
that a brave man can strive in a global economy as fixed as
ours and still come out with a new suit, tuition for his kids,
and maybe a second floor on his mausoleum in Sinaloa’s hal-
lowed grounds.
This is why I call narco cinema an addiction: when I’m not
following the drug war, I don’t need it; when I spend my days
researching cartel genealogies and collocating crime reports
on Narco News and Borderland Beat, I crave it absolutely. It
comforts me. I understand.
 Postscript 163

Narco cinema: a cinema of hyperbole, of snoring corpses,

alligator tears, and high-octane braggadocio. And yet for all
its extremity, it’s essentially less ironic than Heli or El Infierno.
Because it’s not about bearing witness on the world’s stage,
but giving myth to a tight and diffuse community, myth in
the sense both intimate and unreal. The films don’t require
the suspension of disbelief, that’s precisely their gift to view-
ers. They paint the real massacres in fake blood and allow us
to imagine, for too brief a time, that it’s all pretend and that
it matters.
Until the cartels are given a chance to go straight and the
reconciliation can begin; until the humanist rapture unsettles
us from the spell of global capitalism, I’ll still watch now and
then. And, since at this point there’s nothing left for me to
say, and because Wednesday has replaced Thursday as my
new Friday, I think I’ll watch one or two right now, and cheer
obnoxiously at the top of my lungs: ¡Que viva México! ¡Que
viva narco cinema!
But before I get started, I should admit one last thing: I was
wrong about the pangs. I miss this already.
 Notes

Oye, Lecteur
1. This sounds facetious, yes, and though I’m pretty sure I’ve got the ques-
tion’s gist about right, if footage of this event ever turns up on YouTube to
reveal that this loquacious young man is actually a scarfless old modifier
scrooge, please let this declaration of a hazy memory exonerate me mor-
ally and aesthetically in the court of public opinion (as well as legally in all
actual courts, everywhere in the world).
2. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove, 1961), 19,
23, 31.

1 What Is Narco Cinema?

1. Hereupon, for readability’s sake, I’ll drop the more scholarly feminine/
masculine Latina/o combo for Latina, Chicana, etc.
2. See, for example, Grace Morales, “SUDAMÉRICA SUDARIO:
Narcocine, Sicaresca y Meninos Da Rúa.” We Love Cinema (2010).
3. Álex Madrigal, “Millones de latinos compran narcopeliculas.” El
Universal (2010); Juan Pablo Proal, “Cine de narcos en México, pura
realidad.” Puebla On-line (2009); Valeria Perasso, “Reality Took Over
from the Imagination of the Film Maker.” BBC Radio World Service
(2008).
4. Pablo Proal.
5. Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola, “Narcotic Films for Illegal Fans.” Vice
(2009).
6. Sergio Ramos, “El Narco como entretenimiento,” 2. De Primera
Noticias.
7. Ramos.
8. Ramos.
9. Ramos; Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
10. Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
11. Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
12. Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
13. Ramos.
166 Notes

14. “De los narcocorridos a las narcopeliculas.” Semanario la Gaceta

(2011).
15. Though incomplete, the best list available is an appendix to David E.
Wilt’s The Mexican Filmography, 1916 through 2001 (Jefferson:
McFarland, 2003).
16. Gabriela Polit Dueñas, Narrating Narcos (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 8, 84.
17. John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Barabarization and Narcocultura:
Reading the Evolution of Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency.” Small Wars
Journal (2011): 3–6.
18. Fabiola Martínez, “Pacto de medias para limitar información sobre vio-
lencia.” La Jornada (2011).
19. Hernández qtd. in Perasso.
20. Hernández qtd. in Perasso.
21. Bernal qtd. in Francisco Gómez, “Villano del cine busca alcadía del
Parácuaro.” El Universal (2007).
22. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez also notes this debate about censorship and self-
censorship. See, “Narcocinema and the Politics of Drugsploitation.” In
Media Res (2012).
23. Almada and Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
24. Rafael Romo, “Narco Films Gain Popularity in Mexico.” CNN (2011).
25. “Mexico.” Committee to Protect Journalists (2014); Dave Gibson,
“Another ‘narco-corrido’ singer murdered.” The Examiner (2012).
26. “Getting Away with Murder.” Committee to Protect Journalists (2012).
27. Though the murder of actor Emilio Franco is rumored to have been a car-
tel hit. See, “Mexican Actor Emilio Franco Shot Dead during Burglary at
His LA home.” Mail Online (2010).
28. Cf. the Vice documentary. Though Vice has lately joined the vanguard
of submersion journalism, its 2010 “Narcotic Films for Illegal Fans,” the
first mainstream-US report on narco cinema, adheres to that check-it-
bro:-shit-is-whack-style reportage for which the company is notorious.
29. Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2011), 167.
30. Madrigal.
31. Elyssa Pachico, “Juarez Murder Rate Reaches 5-Year Low.” In Sight
Crime (2013).
32. Romo.
33. Sullivan and Elkus, 3.
34. Reynoso qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
35. Almada qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
36. Jorge Alan Sánchez Godoy, “La narcocultura en Sinaloa.” La Jornada
del Campo (2007).
37. Elijah Wald, Narcocorrido (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 56.
38. Luís Astorga, “Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment.”
UNESCO.
39. Secretaría de Seguridad Pública, “Jóvenes y Narcocultura.” (Mexico
City: Gobierno Federal, 2010), 4–5.
 Notes 167

40. Wald, 50.

41. Wald, 55.
42. Wald, 59.
43. Qtd. in Ramos.
44. Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 64.
45. Bowden, 4. In disclosure, I have used this Bowden quote and made a
similar call for “overcoming our collective amnesia” about drug culture,
though not with regard to narco cinema. See Ryan Rashotte, Biopolitical
Itineraries: Mexico in Contemporary Tourist Literature, Diss., University
of Guelph, 2011.
46. Paz, 29.

2 Hecho de coca: A Sentimental Education

1. “Statistics.” Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s.
2. Payan ctd. in Viridiana Rios, “Evaluating the Economic Impact of
Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Industry.” Graduate Students Political
Economy Workshop. Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 2008), 3.
3. Bowden, 3.
4. Ramos.
5. The film was shot in San Martín de las Pirámides, a small town in the
highlands northwest of Mexico City where hot-air balloon tours are a
popular attraction.
6. Of course the OED contains neither example, but I have very little money
right now and ponying up the legal fees for a battle with the good folks
at Oxford would require black-market organ donation on my part, hence
this obvious footnote.
7. Hugo Benavides’s Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-
Dramas in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008) sum-
marize this succinctly and is where my context for existent scholarship
primarily comes from (10–12). But see also Soap Operas and Telenovelas
in the Digital Age (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
8. Benavides, 10–12; 120.
9. Benavides, 10, summarizing Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las
mediaciones (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1987).
10. Benavides, 12.
11. Title switcheroos are quite common, actually: many recent narco films
have one title on the DVD box and another in the film credits. Is this an
attempt by studios to pad their filmographies, or does it betray a fickle
executive sensibility?
12. Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch.” Selected Writings. Vol. 2.1
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4.
13. Javier Sicilia, “Open Letter to Mexico’s Politicians and Criminals.”
Narco News (2011).
168 Notes

14. According to the definition offered by Winfried Menninghaus in “On the

‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste.’”
Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity. Ed. Andrew
Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 41.

3 Two Foul Score of the Brothers Almada

1. Deborah Hastings, “U.S. Soldiers Accepting Cash, Drugs for Mexican
Drug Cartel Contract Hits.” NY Daily News (2013).
2. Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood, “International Banks have Aided
Mexican Drug Gangs.” Los Angeles Times (1998).
3. Matt Taibbi, “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail.” Rolling Stone (2013).
4. Topher McDougal, Robert Muggah, David Shirk, and John Patterson,
“Made in the U.S.A.: The Role of American Guns in Mexican Violence.”
The Atlantic (2013).
5. Joseph Cox, “Mexico’s Drug Cartels Love Social Media.” Vice (2013).
6. Norma Iglesias, “Reconstructing the Border: Mexican Border Cinema
and Its Relationship to Its Audience.” Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of
Film and Filmmakers (Lanham: SR Books, 2005).
7. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner,
2002), 81.
8. Hemingway, 78.
9. Hemingway, 78.
10. Wald, 34–36.
11. Qtd. in Bernardo Loyola.
12. Sara Wilcox, PR & Marketing Executive, Guinness World Records
North America, Inc. “Record Confirmation.” Email to Ryan Rashotte.
September 13, 2013.
13. This is what JC Studios pays him. See Madrigal.
14. “Mario Almada vs. Chuck Norris.” Taringa!
15. Cinema of Solitude (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 99.
16. Maximilanio Maza, “El Cabrito Western.” Cine Mexicano (1996).
17. Adán Avalos, “The Naco in Mexican Film: Border Cinema and Migrant
Audiences.” Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 189.
18. Avalos, 189.
19. David R. Maciel, “Cinema and the State in Contemporary Mexico.”
Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Films and Filmmakers (Lanham: SR
Books, 2005), 210.
20. Qtd. in Iván Cadín, “Narcos metieron dinero al cine.” El Universal
(2011).
21. John Mraz, “Mexican Cinema: Of Churros and Charros.” Jump Cut. 29
(1984): 23–24.
22. Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1997), 760.
 Notes 169

23. Cadín; “Cine de narcos: capos en búsqueda de la inmortalidad.” Proceso

(2009).
24. Julio Alberto Rubio, “Cuenta el guionista Benavides como los narcotra-
ficantes pagan porque se les haga su pelicula.” Proceso. 932. (September
12, 1994): 72.
25. “Cine de Narcos.”
26. Berg, 99.
27. These early films include La Choca, a highbrow hat doffer (1973); Mexico
de noche (1974); Los Desarraigados (1975); and La Puerta falsa (1976).
Contrabando y traición (1976) is the closest rival to Carro rojo and we’ll
consider it at length in the following chapter.
28. In 1916, to replenish his military supplies, Pancho Villa, iconic general of
the Mexican Revolution, led a cross-border raid on a small town in New
Mexico, prompting the US government to send 5,000 troops into Mexico
to try (unsuccessfully) to capture him. Gregorio Cortez, a turn-of-the-
century Mexican-American farmer, was pursued across the borderlands
by 300 US authorities for having shot the sheriff who had mistakenly
killed Gregorio’s brother.
29. Elaine Shannon, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen and the
War America Can’t Win (New York: Viking, 1988), 69.
30. Shannon, 113–134; Bowden, 126.
31. Grillo, El Narco, 63, 65.
32. Bowden, 243.
33. Bowden, 145.
34. Shannon, 111; Bowden, 146.
35. David Wilt, “Based on a True Story: Reality-Based Exploitation Cinema
in Mexico.” Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 158–162.
36. Wilt, 158–160, 164.
37. Bowden, 149–50.
38. Bowden, 146–147, 153.
39. Ronald J. Rychlak, “Humberto Alvarez-Machain v. United States: The
Ninth Circuit Panel Decision of September 11.” The Federalist Society
for Law and Public Policy Studies (2005).
40. Marc Lacey and Ginger Thompson, “Two Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock
U.S. Consulate.” The New York Times (2010).
41. Bowden, 75.
42. Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards (New York: Verso, 1997),
160–161.
43. “Operación Cóndor favoreció la actividad de Rafael Caro Quintero.” El
Informador (2013); Monsiváis, 160–161.
44. “Cine de Narcos.”
45. Astorga.
46. Withheld by Mexican censors until 1991, it was something of a hit in US
border cinemas. See Wilt, 166.
47. Bowden, 149–150.
170 Notes

48. Bowden, 159.

49. “U.S. Furious over Freeing of Mexican Drugs Baron Rafael Caro
Quintero.” The Guardian (2013).
50. “5 Million Dollar Reward for Info. on Rafael Caro-Quintero.” Borderland
Beat (2013).
51. “Cine de Narcos.”
52. Monsiváis, 159.
53. Vanilla Ice, “Ice Ice Baby.” To the Extreme. SBK, 1990.
54. Though the project fell apart when the incarcerated Araujo was critically
injured in a two-week prison riot. See Rubio.
55. Grillo, El Narco, 78.
56. See also El fin de los Arellano (2003).
57. Ed Vulliamy, Amexica: War Along the Borderline (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010), 30; Bowden, 154, 286–287.
58. Grillo, El Narco, 78–79.
59. Grillo, El Narco, 79–80.
60. Bowden, 297.
61. Bowden, 235.
62. Bowden, 258.
63. Larry Rohter, “Man in the News; A Mexican on the Fast Track: Carlos
Salinas de Gortari.” The New York Times (1987).
64. Bowden, 253.
65. Bowden, 59–60, 215; Peter Andreas, “U.S.-Mexico: Open Markets,
Closed Border.” Foreign Policy. 103 (1996): 59.
66. Krauze, 770.
67. Bowden, 251; Krauze, 773.
68. Tania Molina Ramírez, “Sintetizan en libro la caída de la industria cin-
ematográfica nacional.” La Jornada (2008).
69. Ramos.
70. Cadín.
71. Alejandro Alemán, “Qué es el Videohome? (1).” El Salón Rojo, El
Universal (2012); Avalos, 194.
72. Bowden, 236–238.
73. Qtd. in Grillo, El Narco, 84; Bowden, 263.
74. Bowden, 246–247.
75. Bowden, 228, 243.
76. Bowden, 296.
77. Bowden, 43, 114, 294, 304.
78. Bowden, 295.
79. Bowden, 27, 214, 232.
80. Bowden, 214, 248–249.
81. Bowden, 183, 75, 183, 203, 286, 262, 271.
82. Bowden, 48.
83. Bowden, 214.
84. Tijuano, “The War for Tijuana, a 20+ Year Conflict. Part 1.” Borderland
Beat (2013).
85. Bowden, 165, 288, 291.
 Notes 171

86. “Byronic Hero.” Wikipedia.

87. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York:
Vintage, 1991), 49.
88. Lord Byron, “The Corsair.” The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3. 1900.
Project Gutenberg (2007): 265–268.
89. Qtd. in Bowden, 255.
90. Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 25.
91. McGann, 25–26.
92. Capo: jefe de jefes (1998); La Avioneta Clandestina (1998); and El
último narco del cartel de Juárez (1998) might be Carillo films, but I
haven’t been able to find copies of them. My guess is based on the title
and year.
93. Ken Ellingwood and Eric Lichtblau, “18 Slain Execution-Style at Farm
Near Ensenada.” Los Angeles Times (1998); Vulliamy, 27.
94. Sam Dillon, “Gunmen Kill 3 Families in Mexico Over Drugs.” New
York Times (1998).
95. Bowden, 264.
96. Bowden, 378.
97. Ian Bruce, “Mexico Frees Ex-Leader’s Brother.” BBC News (2005).
98. Well, at least one TED Talk: Emiliano Salinas, “A Civil Response to
Violence.” TEDTalks (2010).
99. “Death Toll in Ciudad Juarez Tops 3,100.” Borderland Beat (2010).
100. Grillo, El Narco, 165; Vulliamy, 30; “Business Environment.” Juarez
Invest.
101. Vulliamy, 23.
102. Qtd. in Kai Flanders, “The Deadly World of Mexican Narco-Ballads.”
Vice (2013).
103. “Mexico Drug War Fast Facts.” CNN (2014).
104. And this doesn’t cover 2013–2014. Mark Karlin, “Fueled by War on
Drugs, Mexican Death Toll Could Exceed 120,000 as Calderon Ends
Six-Year Reign.” TruthOut (2012).
105. “Mexico Drug War Fast Facts.”
106. Will Grant, “Do American Guns Kill Mexicans?” BBC News (2012).
107. Roberto A. Ferdman, “99% of Kidnappings in Mexico Went Unreported
Last Year.” Quartz (2013).
108. Melissa Dell, “Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War.”
Scholars at Harvard (2012): 5.
109. Marguerite Cawley, “Mexico Kidnappings Highest in 16 Years.” In
Sight Crime (2013); Ferdman.
110. Olga R. Rodriguez, “Hugo Hernandez: Mexico Cartel Stitches Rival’s
Face On Soccer Ball.” Huffington Post (2010).
111. Ioan Grillo, “Special Report: Mexico’s Zetas Rewrite Drug War in
Blood.” Reuters (2012).
112. Grillo, El Narco, 96, 98.
113. Grillo, El Narco, 102.
114. Grillo, El Narco, 94, 99, 106; Vulliamy, 243.
172 Notes

115. Grillo, El Narco, 105.

116. Grillo, El Narco, 103–105; Vulliamy, 33.
117. Vulliamy, 233, 283.
118. Grillo, El Narco, 115.
119. “Gulf Cartel Split with Zetas Public.” Borderland Beat (2010).
120. Grillo, El Narco, 128; “El cártel de los Zetas tiende acuerdos de ‘no
agresión y colaboración.’” Infobae (2011).
121. Grillo, El Narco, 105, 211; John Bailey, “‘Los Zetas’ y McDonalds.” El
Universal (2011).
122. Vulliamy, 291; Grillo, El Narco, 105, 269; Ioan Grillo, “Mexico’s Drug
War Leads to Kidnappings, Vigilante Violence.” Time (2014).
123. Julieta Pelcastre, “Zetas Trafficking Drugs to Europe Through West
Africa.” Borderland Beat (2013).
124. Vulliamy, 287.
125. Dwight Dyer and Daniel Sachs, “Los Zetas’ Spawn: The Long Afterlife
of Mexico’s Most Ruthless Drug Gang.” Foreign Affairs (2013).
126. Ryan Villarreal, “The Mexican Hydra: Kill a Drug Cartel Boss and
Another Emerges.” International Business Times (2012).
127. Grillo, El Narco, 106.
128. Vulliamy, 27.
129. Grillo, El Narco, 106, 115, 128.
130. Américo Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans (Houston: Arte Público
Press, 1994), 186; Dale A. Zimmerman, “Notes on Tamaulipas Birds.”
The Wilson Bulletin. 69.3 (1957) SORA.
131. US Consulate Matamoros, “Zetas Massacre 72 Migrants in Tamaulipas.”
Unclassified Cable (2010). The National Security Archive; Gary Moore,
“Ending the Zetas Killing Spree: An Invisible Success Story.” In Sight
Crime (2011).
132. US Embassy in Mexico, “Mexico Presents Migrant Protection Plan.”
Unclassified Cable (2010). The National Security Archive.
133. Moore.
134. Dane Schiller, “Mexican Crook: Gangsters Arrange Fights to Death for
Entertainment.” The Houston Chronicle (2011); “A Nightmare of the
Massacre in San Fernando.” Borderland Beat (2011).
135. In narco parlance, the final shot to the head.
136. Madrigal.
137. Vulliamy, 47.
138. Paz, 34.
139. Luciano Campos Garza, “Crónicas de un narco, la película de ‘La
Barbie’ filmada en Monterrey.” Proceso (2012).
140. Ángel Plascencia, “Alcalde actúa en videohome sobre ‘El Chapo.’”
Reporte Indigo (2014).
141. Madrigal.
142. Leticia Carillo, “‘Sólo espero el final pero que sea de trancazo’: Mario
Almada.” Corre Camara (2011).
143. Hernández qtd. in Perasso.
144. Madrigal.
 Notes 173

4 Narcas y Narcos
1. I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: Commando Zorras (yes, “Slut
Commando,” technically, unfortunately) was part of a box set I pur-
chased in order to collect narco films by female directors. And while the
particular film you’re referring to, Steven, was directed by a man, it hap-
pens to have been written by a woman. So that’s interesting. Anyway, I
haven’t even watched it.
2. In Las nieves de enero (The January Snow, 1995).
3. The bilingual copy of the DVD is subtitled The Michoacán Dog, but I
prefer my translation.
4. She told reporters that one day she’d like to be mayor of Tijuana “And
after that, why not, the first female president of Mexico.” See “Claudia
Casas pasó del cine sobre narcotráfico al Congreso de Baja California.”
El Telégrafo (2013).
5. George W. Grayson, Mexico: Narco Violence and a Failed State? (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 2011), 23.
6. Qtd. in Elaine Carey, “‘Selling is More of a Habit than Using’
Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930–
1960.” Journal of Women’s History. 21.2 (2009): 64, 70, 74.
7. Ezequiel Parra Altamirano, “Dimensión Política.” Periódico Express de
Nayarit (2013).
8. Pablo Perez, “Women on the Rise in Mexican Drug Cartels.” Agence
France-Presse (2011).
9. Rikke Schubart, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in
Popular Cinema, 1970—2006 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2007), 23.
10. Neal King and Martha McCaughey, “What’s a Mean Girl like You Doing
in a Movie like This?” Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in Film (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), 3–6.
11. Camille Paglia, “The Million Mom March: What a Crock!” Salon
(2000).
12. Yvonne D. Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film
Heroine Changed American Pop Culture (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006),
17.
13. Sims, 17.
14. Los Tigres del Norte, “Contradbando y Traicion.” Contradbando y
Traicion. Fama Records (1975).
15. An uneducated guess.
16. I admit this isn’t exactly an objective reading.
17. Qtd. in Daniel Hernandez, “Mexican Opera Tackles the Myth of ‘Camelia
la Tejana,’ Icon of Narcocorridos.” Los Angeles Times (2010).
18. The third in the series was directed by his son, Raúl Fernández Jr.
19. Catherine L. Benamou, “Con amor, tequila, y gasoline: Lola the Truck
Driver, and Screen Resistance in cine fronterizo.” Latsploitation,
Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America (New York: Routledge,
2009), 176.
174 Notes

20. William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of

the ‘Mexican’ in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011),
166–167.
21. Benamou, 173, 182.
22. Benamou, 176.
23. Benamou, 175.
24. Benamou, 181.
25. Klint W. Alexander and Bryan J. Soukup, “Obama’s First Trade War:
The US-Mexico Cross-Border Trucking Dispute and the Implications of
Strategic Cross-Sector Retaliation on U.S. Compliance under NAFTA.”
Berkeley Journal of International Law. 28 (2010): 313.
26. Robert R. Alvarez Jr., Mangos, Chiles and Truckers: The Business of
Transnationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005),
39.
27. Other female writes include Silvia Becerril, Gabriela Sanmiguel,
Karmelinda Valverde, and Carmen Buitron, who has also directed at
least one film.
28. And because the rest of the numbers in this and the following paragraph
come courtesy of IMDB, you may assume gross incompletion.

5 . . . and Narco Gays?

1. Qtd. in Loyola.
2. The Spanish synopsis is racier and translates: “Whoever saw them . . . Big
guys, big boots, big hats, big guns and very ‘gay’!!! They say that in this
life each chooses his cross, and the cross of these men isn’t exactly drugs,
but guns, and not exactly guns of iron, although with these they also
settle their scores.”
3. Alberto Acuña Navarijo, “El otro cine de diversidad sexual. Segunda
parte (y final): Narco gays.” Revista Cinefagia (2011).
4. This isn’t Derrida speaking, but one of his interpreters. Niall Lucy, A
Derrida Dictionary (Madlen: Blackwell, 2004), 68.
5. I don’t know that Cahiers itself was bandied—exercising a bit of license
here. Christian González, “Interview by Marco González Ambriz.”
Revista Cinefagia (2004): Part One.
6. Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896—1988 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 181–182.
7. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part One.
8. Unfortunately no copy of this book exists in a 100 km radius of Toronto.
The details in this paragraph come from González’s IMDB profile except
where noted below.
9. Vanesa Capitaine and Aaron Soto, “Mexploitation.” Vice (2013).
10. The Internet Movie Database.
11. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part One. “Naco” is sort of the Mexican-
Spanish equivalent of “hick.”
12. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Three.
 Notes 175

13. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.

14. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.
15. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Four.
16. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part One.
17. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.
18. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.
19. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.
20. Qtd. in Mora, 181–812. To be fair, González was condemning film vio-
lence officially here, that is, on behalf of the state department’s Dirección
de Cinematografía, for which he headed the censorship office in 1989.
21. Alejandro Alemán, “Top 10 de videohomes.” El Salón Rojo, El Universal
(2012).
22. Sympathy, kindness, and tenderness “open the macho’s defenses” and
“lessen his manliness,” to paraphrase Octavio Paz (30–31).
23. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Two.
24. To be clear, that woman died by his hands, so there’s a karmic spin to the
vision. Still, weird.
25. Admittedly, as a symbolist tableau for the 1.5 hours to come, this is just
about perfect.
26. Is there a cause here? Were those beans poisoned? My ancient VHS copy
makes portions of the dialogue sound submerged, so I can’t say for sure.
In any case, why the breasts, why the shih tzu?
27. Christian González, “Interview by Raculfright_13.” Raculfright_13’s
Blogo Trasho (2013).
28. Christian González, Personal Interviews. “Mi obra es muy complicada.
En algunas ocasiones tengo libertad total y se pueden hacer proyec-
tos interesantes y personales, ej. SHIBARI, DOBLE MUERTE, LA
PERVERSIÓN, CAFÉ ESTRÉS, MURIÓ EL AMOR. Eso se nota mucho
por la estética y el lenguaje cinematográfico más limpio y poético.”
29. “Las películas por encargo, como FEMDOM, que considero que es
una película menor, en todo caso EL DESTAZADOR, es más inte-
resante. . . . Con la RAZA MEX he realizado películas interesantes como
el Decálogo del Narco, una idea personal de la que sólo puede hacer 4
mandamientos.”
30. “Las películas más comerciales, procuro sentarme en la butaca del espe-
ctador y disfrutar de las misma emociones y humor negro, con películas
como LA CUMB IA ASESINA, POR UN SALVAJE AMOR, IMPERIO
DE LOS MALDITOS.”
31. “Cuando uno retrata la sociedad mexicana en todos sus estratos sociales,
el Kitsch involuntario, acompaña incluso a personas cultas y bien estu-
diadas. Recuerdo a un distribuidor de videohomes tratando de perforar
con la punta de su finísima pluma de oro Mont blanc, la tapa de un jugo
envasado.“Lo que da belleza al asunto es la ironía, en la cual “tener muy
mal gusto es catártico y hasta cierto punto divertido.“Sobretodo en mis
videohomes más vulgares y corrientes, como NARCO GAYS, GORDITA
LA DEL BARRIO, permito que la situación sea kitsch y le doy un tono de
farsa, que considero muy sano y muy cercano a la realidad mexicana.”
176 Notes

32. “En el videohome tradicional mexicano, los hombres ‘machos’ (como

los hermanos Almada, Jorge Reynoso, etc.) rechazan enérgicamente ser,
parecer o actuar como homosexuales. Por tal motivo el reparto de Narco
Gays, tuvo que ser con actores de videohome, pero que son más abiertos
a la libre orientación sexual.“En los hombres ‘machos’ que se dedican
a la actuación existe un cierto código extraño, algunos actores aceptan
filmar escenas homosexuales siempre y cuando tengan el lugar domi-
nante y activo.“En Narco Gays, surgió una discusión entre los actores y
el Director, ya que yo les señalaba que ser homosexual puede no ser una
condición permanente, es decir, que el menú de placeres homosexuales es
vasto y diverso. Los homosexuales activos en Narco Gays, hicieron una
polémica acerca de esto, digamos que los que hacen el papel del hombre y
montan a sus compañeros son realmente machos y que incluso que si hay
penetración, seguirán siendo machos, durante el rodaje la queja ante esta
postura es que algunos actores gay definían a sus compañeros hetero-
sexuales como ‘homosexuales reprimidos.’“Los actores jóvenes dejaron
ver de manera normal su faceta bisexual e interpretaron lo cotidiano del
homosexual.”
33. “Sí en Narco Gays se asume el kitsch con conocimiento de causa, incluso
es una película pionera en el tema.”
34. “La filmación de Narco Gays fue un verdadero escaparate de las diversas
preferencia s y/o matices del homosexualismo. Algunos de ellos jugaban a
ser ‘locas’ (queers) y los más de ellos se sentían más cómodos sin ser domi-
nantes. Realmente la película tuvo escenas muy fuertes que se cortaron
porque los productores decían que el público de videohome no estaba
preparado para ver actos sexuales tan explícitos para la cultura mexicana
acostumbrada a la represión tanto de la moral como de la Iglesia y del
mismo machismo.”
35. “El guión de Ignacio Rinza, tenía muchas limitaciones, entre ellas que
querían que la película fuera una comedia del estilo de ‘LA JAULA DE
LAS LOCAS’ (AU CAGE OU FOLLIES) con sus lugares comunes. Ya
filmada la película fue muy extraña porque tenía que jalar para un lado o
para otro. Fue muy difícil de dirigir porque el tono era totalmente extraño.
El videohome, en general, se ha transformado en un sistema de produc-
ción de bajísimo presupuesto, esto incluye el deterioro de sus guiones y el
‘solucionar’ en pleno rodaje las carencias de la producción.“Narco Gays
no escapó a esto, así que el guión original fue transformado por las cir-
cunstancias. Esto incluye, aceptar a los actores que acceden a participar
en los personajes con un sueldo muy bajo. Realizar la producción en 8
a 10 días. Utilizar locaciones prestadas. El vestuario lo llevan los mis-
mos actores. El personal de filmación (crew) no excede los 10 elementos.
Y durante el rodaje se va cambiando el guión de acuerdo a todas estas
circunstancias.“La parte creativa ‘valorada’ es en este caso el Director,
ya que no cualquiera puede conjuntar todas estas carencias y hacer una
película. Depués bien el Productor que consigue venderla al mejor precio
y seguramente gana mucho más que todos los que participaron en ella.”
 Notes 177

36. “Narco Gays, por la crítica fue mal recibida.“Para los actores, es una
más en su currículo y el dinero que ganaron les sirvió para sobrevivir
una semana.“Para el Productor, logró venderla seguramente bien y ganó
más que todos. Se estrenó en televisión por cable (CINELATINO) a altas
horas de la noche. Sin embargo no es la película que le ha dado más.“El
público reaccionó de distintas formas, a algunos se les hizo graciosa y
ocurrente. A otros no comprendieron el humor tan cáustico.”
37. “Como Director, fue una película extraña porque la energía que se armó
alrededor de toda la elaboración de ella buscaba ir a la comedia, pero yo
había filmado cosas más humanas como los celos. Obviamente mi interés
era ver personajes Gay no caricaturas de gay, incluso Gibrán González
(actor), en la secuencia del baile de Husky, tuvo una reacción violenta
cuando lo tocaba mucho el gay viejo y tuvimos que calmar los ánimos. Se
alteró mucho la energía en el set de filmación. Las actrices se sentían rele-
gadas, como en un segundo plano, muy molesto para ellas. En lo personal
no fue una película que me llenara en nada. No la supieron manejar, la
edición no fue afortunada. Obviamente que los actores estuvieron más
pendientes de lo exterior de la película que de lo interior de los person-
ajes, para ellos fue una experiencia difícil.”
38. González, Revista Cinefagia, Part Four.

Postscript: From Culiacán to Cannes

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Films Cited
“ENG” indicates that versions are available with English subtitles, and that I
have relied on these subtitles in my analyses.
4 Damas en 300 (4 Ladies in 300). Dir. Bernabé Melendrez. Flores Prods.,
2011.
16 en la lista (16 on the List). Dir. Rodolfo Rodobertti. Prods. Alarid, 1998.
24 cuadros de terror (24 Frames of Terror). Dir. Christian González. Frontera
Prods., 2008.
La Avioneta Clandestina (The Clandestine Light Plane). Dir. Jorge Manriquez.
Tex-Mex, 1997.
La banda del carro rojo (The Red Car Gang). Dir. Rubén Galindo. Filmadora
Chapultepec, 1976.
La banda de la sotana negra (The Black Cassock Gang). Dir. Pepe Loza.
Prods. Virgo—Cin. Grovas, 1983.
El Bazukazo. Dir. Alonso O. Lara. JS Films, 2010.
Bill Gritón vs. Mónica del Wisky. Dir. Alberto Rojas. La Raza Mex, 1999.
El Cafre (The Madman at the Wheel). Dir. Gilberto Gazcón. Gazcón Films—
Cin. Pelimex, 1983.
186 Works Cited

Camarena Vive! (Camarena Lives!). Dir. Roberto Schlosser. PRODA Films,

1990.
La camioneta gris (The Gray Truck). Dir. José Luis Urquieta. Cin.
Tamaulipas—Los Tigres del Norte, Inc., 1989.
El Capo de capos (The Boss of Bosses). Dir. Rafael Villaseñor Kuri. Prods.
Chicago Scorpion, 1997.
Capo: Jefe de jefes (Capo: the Boss of Bosses). Dir. Lourdes Alvarez? Tekila
Films, 1998?
El cartel de los “Z”: La Realidad de Mexico (The “Z” Cartel: The Reality of
Mexico). Dir. Manuel Ramirez. Diamante Films, 2011.
Cayo la reyna del pacifico (Fall of the Queen of the Pacific). Dir. Luis Estrada.
JS Films, 2011.
La Choca. Dir. Emilio Fernández. CONACINE—Estudios Churubusco,
1973.
El Chrysler 300: El corrido de Chuy y Mauricio. Dir. Enrique Murillo.
Imperial Films—Baja Films, 2008.
El Chrysler 300 2: La Venganza (The Chrysler 300 2: The Revenge). Dir.
Enrique Murillo. Baja Pictures, 2009.
El Chrysler 300 3: El Final. Dir. Enrique Murillo. Baja Pictures—Baja Films,
2009.
Chuy y Mauricio 4. Dir. Enrique Murillo. Baja Films—Baja Films, 2010.
La Clave 7 (Code 7). Dir. Jorge Reynoso. Baja Films, 1999. ENG.
El Clon de Hitler (Hitler’s Clone). Dir. Christian González. La Raza Mex,
2002. ENG.
Commando Zorras (Slut Commando). Dir. Miguel Bonilla. Cadereyta Films,
2004. ENG.
La Contrabandista (The Lady Smuggler). Dir. José Luis Urquieta. Pels.
Latinoamericanas—Prods. Díaz Londonoño, 1983.
Contrabando y traición (Smuggling and Betrayal). Dir. Arturo Martínez.
Prods. Potosí— Hermanos Benítez, 1976.
Cronicas de un narco (Chronicles of a Narco). Dir.? Studio? ENG.
Los Cuates de Sinaloa (The Guys from Sinaloa). Dir. Enrique Murillo. JC
Films, 2009.
La curva del olvido (The Forgetting Curve). Dir. Christian González. Laguna
Prods., 2004.
Danik, el viajero del tiempo (Danik, the Time Traveler). Dir. Alberto Mariscal.
Lo Nuestro en Video, 1996.
Darketos (Goths). Dir. Christian González. La Raza Mex, 2002. ENG.
Los Desarraigados (The Uprooted). Dir. Rubén Galindo. Filmadora
Chapultepec, 1975.
Las Dos Michoacanas (The Two Women from Michoacán). Dir. Alonso O.
Lara. Diamante Films—Castañeda Films, 2011.
Drug Wars: The Camarena Story. Dir. Brian Gibson. Hamdon Entertainment,
1989.
Emilio Varela vs. Camelia la texana. Dir. Rafael Portillo. CIPSA—Pels.
Nacionales e Internacionales de Guadalajara, 1979.
 Works Cited 187

Escuadrón de la muerte (Squadron of Death). Dir. Alfredo Gurrola.

Productora Metropolitana, 1984.
El fantástico mundo de los hippies (The Fantastic World of Hippies). Dir.
Juan Orol. Caribe Films, 1970.
El fin de los Arellano (The End of the Arellanos). Dir. ? Cin. Films
Entertainment, 2003.
El fiscal de hierro (The Iron Prosecutor). Dir. Damián Acosta. Filmadora
Morben—Cin. Hidalgo, 1988.
El fiscal de hierro 2: La venganza de Ramona (The Iron Prosecutor 2:
Ramona’s Revenge). Dir. Damián Acosta. Cin, Hidalgo. 1988.
El fiscal de hierro 3 (The Iron Prosecutor 3). Dir. Damián Acosta. Prods.
Panamericanas, 1990.
La Fuga del Chapo (Chapo’s Escape). Dir. Arturo Martinez. Venus Picture—
Mexicinema Corp., 2001.
La Güera Mendoza (The Blonde Mendoza). Dir. Tina Teóyotl. Felipe Perez
Arroyo, 2005. ENG.
Heli. Dir. Amat Escalante. Mantarraya Prods. et al., 2013. ENG.
Hecho de Coca (Made of Coke). Dir. Jorge Ortín. La Raza Mex, 2006.
ENG.
La hija del contrabando (The Daughter of Contraband). Dir. Fernando Osés.
José Castro-Miguel Ángel Barragán, 1977.
El hijo de Camelia la Texana (The Son of Camelia the Texan). Dir. Victor
Martínez. Prods. Martizan—Ramón Barba Loza, 1988.
El Imperio de los malditos (The Empire of the Damned). Dir. Christian
González. C. González—A. Cherem, 1992.
El Infierno (Hell). Dir. Luis Estrada. Bandidos Films—IMCINE, 2010.
Juana la alacrana (Juana the Scorpion). Dir. Eduardo Martínez. Madera
Cinevideo, 2004.
Lola la trailera (Lola the Truck-Driving Woman). Dir. Raúl Fernández. Scope
Films, 1983.
Lola la trailera 2: El secuestro de Lola (Lola the Truck-Driving Woman 2:
The Kidnapping of Lola). Dir. Raúl Fernández. Scope Films, 1985.
Lola la trailera 3: El gran rato (Lola the Truck-Driving Woman 3: The Great
Challenge). Dir. Raúl Fernández. Cine Fernández—Televicine, 1989.
La Mafia Tiembla (The Mafia Trembles). Dir. Gilberto de Anda.
Agrasánchez—DAL, 1987.
La Mafia Tiembla 2 (The Mafia Trembles 2). Dir. René Cardona III. Filmadora
DAL, 1989.
María Navajas. Dir. Emilio Ramon Vidal. La Raza Mex, 2006. ENG.
María Navajas 2. Dir. Jorge Ramírez Rivera. MCM Studios, 2008.
María Navajas 3. Dir. Jorge Ramírez Rivera, MCM Studios, 2008.
Martian Fresh!: Beyond the Third Vector. Dir. Ryan Rashotte. Havinaroeni
Prods., 1990.
Los más buscados (The Most Wanted). Dir. Javier Montaño. Imperial Films—
Baja Films, 2004.
Los más buscados 2 (The Most Wanted 2). Dir. Javier Montaño. Imperial
Films—Baja Films, 2004.
188 Works Cited

Los más buscados 3 (The Most Wanted 3). Dir. Javier Montaño. Imperial
Films—Baja Films, 2005.
Masacre en Ensenada (Massacre in Ensenada). Dir. Jorge Araujo. L.A. Fox
Entertainment, 1998.
Mataran a Camelia la Texana (They Killed Camelia the Texan). Dir. Arturo
Martínez. Prods. Potosí, 1976.
Maten al fugitivo: La fuga de Caro (Kill the Fugitive: The Escape of Caro).
Dir. Raúl Fernández. Puma Prouds., 1987.
Me dicen el Z: el alterado (Tell me of the Z: The Disturbed). Dir. Jorge
Aldama. Diamante Films—Estrella’s Prods., 2012.
México de noche (Mexico at Night). Dir. Arturo Martínez. Prods. Fílmicas
Agrasánchez—Estudios América, 1974.
Michoacán a poco madre (Badass Michoacán). Dir. Agustin Bernal. Felipe
Perez Arroyo, 2002. ENG.
Miss Bala. Dir, Gerardo Naranjo. Canana et al., 2011. ENG.
Miss Narca. Dir. Miguel Marte. Cine Video y Television—Miguel Angel
Martinez Prod., 2010.
Las muertas de Juárez (The Dead Women of Juárez), 2002.
La Muerte de un cardenal (The Death of a Cardinal, 1993). Dir. Christian
González. CIVIDISA, Prods., 1993.
Muerte en Tijuana (Death in Tijuana). Dir. Hernando Name. Cin. Oaxaca,
1991.
Mujeres de media noche (Midnight Women). Dir. Christian González.
Frontera Films, 1990.
El Muletas al 100 (Crutches to One-Hundred), Dir. Alonso O. Lara. JC
Films—Ola Studios, 2009.
El Narco—duele rojo (The Narco—Red Duel). Dir. Alfonso de Alva. Corp.
Cin. Astro, 1985.
Narco Gays. Dir. Christian González. Felipe Perez Arroyo, 2002. ENG.
Lo Negro del Negro (The Black Side of Blackie). Dirs. Ángel Rodríguez
Vázquez and Benjamín Escamilla Espinosa. Cin. Esgon, 1984.
Las nieves de enero (The January Snow). Dir. Hernando Name. Baja Films,
1995.
Nosotros los chemos (We, the Junkies). Dir. Christian González. Felipe Perez
Arroyo, 2001. ENG.
Operación Mariguana. Dir. José Luis Urquieta. Cin. Rodríguez—Pels.
Latinoamericanas, 1985.
Pilotes de combate (Combat Pilots). Dir. Rubén Galindo. Filmadora
Chapultepec, 1970.
La Pistolera (The Gunwoman). Dir. Mario Hernández. Televicine, 1979.
Polvo de luz (Dust of Light). Dir. Christian González. FFCC—IMCINE—
Rosebud, 1988.
Por Mujeres Como Tú (For Women Like You). Dir. Christian González.
Laguna Prod., 2004.
Por un salvaje amor (For a Savage Love). Dir. Christian González. Grupo
Imágen Prods., 1992.
El Pozolero (The Stew Maker). Dir. Alonso O. Lara. JC Films, 2009.
 Works Cited 189

La Puerta falsa (The False Door). Dir. Toni Sbert. CONACITE DOS, 1976.
Qué se muera la cabrona (Let the Bitch Die). Alejandro Todd. La Raza Mex,
2002.
La Reyna del pacifico (Queen of the Pacific). Dir. Miguel Angel Saldaña. Baja
Films, 2009.
Ritmo, traición y muerte: La cumbia asesina (Rhythm, Betrayal and Death:
The Cumbia Killer). Dir. Christian González. Kybalion Prods., 1991.
Rojo Orgasmico (Orgasmic Red). Dir. Christian González. La Raza Mex,
2012.
Salvando al Soldado Pérez (Saving Private Pérez). Dir. Beto Gómez. Lemon
Films—Terregal Films, 2011. ENG.
Savages. Dir. Oliver Stone. Onda Entertainment et al., 2012.
El secuestro de Camarena (The Kidnapping of Camarena). Dir. Alfredo B.
Crevenna. Filmadora DAL, 1985.
El Señor de los cielos (The Lord of the Skies). Dir. Javier Montaño. Baja
Films, 1997.
El Señor de los cielos 2 (The Lord of the Skies 2). Dir. Fernando Durán Rojas.
Baja Films, 1998.
El Señor de los cielos 3 (The Lord of the Skies 3). Dir. Fernando Durán Rojas.
Baja Films, 1998.
Shibari. Dir. Christian González. Uzy Films, 2002.
Sí Desearás la mujer de tu narco (Thou Shalt Covet Your Dealer’s Woman).
Dir. Christian González. La Raza Mex, 2005. ENG.
Sí Honarás tu coca madre (Thou Shalt Honor Your Junky Mother). Dir.
Christian González. La Raza Mex, 2005. ENG.
Sí Matarás (Thou Shalt Kill). Dir. Christian González. La Raza Mex, 2005.
ENG.
Thanatos. Dir. Christian González. Grupo Cine Unido—IMCINE, 1985.
Tijuana Jones. Dir. Gilberto de Anda. G& R Trujillo, 1991.
Todo por nada (All for Nothing). Dir. Alberto Mariscal. Prods. Almada,
1968.
Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Bedford Falls Prods. et al., 2000.
Tres veces mojado (Three Times a Wetback). Dir. José Luis Urquieta. Cin.
Tamaulipas—Los Tigres del Norte, Inc., 1988.
El tunco Maclovio (One-Armed Maclovio). Dir. Alberto Mariscal. Prods.
Brooks, 1969.
El último narco del cartel de Juárez (The Last Narco of the Juárez Cartel).
Dir. Aurora Martinez. Mexcinema Video Corp., 1998.
La Venganza de Camarena (The Vengeance of Camarena). Dir. René Cardona
III. PRODA Films, 1992.
Verdugo de traidores (Executioner of Traitors). Dir. Alfredo Gurrola.
Filmadora Morben, 1986.
Yerba Sangrieta! (Bloody Weed!). Dir. Ismael Rodríguez. Pels. Rodríguez,
1986.
Las Zetas. Dir. Carlos Samperio. MCM Studios, 2012.
Los Zetas. Dir. Jorge Aldama. Jorge Aguado Bazua, 2007.
 Index

24 cuadros de terror, 146 Bauer, Steven, 57–9

Acapulco, Guerrero, 69 Bay Theater (San Diego,
Acosta Villareal, Pablo, 69, 77–8 California), 45
Agreement on Informative Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, 87
Coverage of Violence (Acuerdo Benavides, Rubén, 52, 69
para la Cobertura Informativa Benitez, Manuel, 108
de la Violencia), 8 Benjamin, Walter, 41–2
Aldama, Jorge, 93 Bernal, Agustín, 9, 108
Almada, Fernando, 46, 50, 63, 152 Blaxploitation cinema, 115
Almada, Horacio, 50 border crossing, cinematic
Almada, Mario, 15, 27, 33, 40, 46, representations of, 45–9,
50, 51, 52, 63, 64, 72–3, 101, 88–9, 116
104, 119–20, 129, 135–6, 143, Border Patrol, 46–7, 65
152, 160 Borolas, 122
Álvarez, Lourdes, 126 Bowden, Charles, 19
Alvarez-Macháin, Humberto, 58 Brownsville, Texas, 45, 47, 49, 91
Ángel Rodríguez, Miguel, 74, Burroughs, William S., 114
81–2, 137 Bus Regulatory Reform Act, 125
Ángeles, Verónica, 126 Butler, Judith, 140, 152
Anslinger, Harry, 114 Byron, Lord George Gordon,
antidrug films, 52, 66 80–2, 105
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 124
Arcila, Irene, 108 cabrito western, 50–1
Arellano-Félix Organization. See Calderón, Felipe, 84
Tijuana Cartel Calderoni, Guillermo González, 78
Ariel Awards, 141, 159 Camarena, Enrique (“Kiki”), 56–8,
Astorga, Luís, 16 63–4, 67, 73, 77, 161
Ávila Beltrán, Sandra, films about, 114 films about, 56–60, 62,
Avilés Pérez, Pedro, 53–4, 55, 114 63–4, 161
films about, 54 Camarena Vive!, 63–4
Camelia la texana (character),
Baja Films Internacional, 5 116–21, 124, 128, 130, 132,
La banda del carro rojo, 45–9, 133, 140
53, 117 Camelia la texana (telenovela), 121
192 Index

camp, 32, 72, 140, 142, 144–6, Chicana/os, cinematic

151–2 representation of, 64
see also kitsch Chihuahua, Mexico, 15, 55, 57, 64,
Camus, Albert, 80 69, 77
Cannes Film Festival, 159 El Chrysler 300, 110–13, 118, 127
El Capo de capos, 74–7 churro film, 50–1
Cardenás, Osiel, 86 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),
Carillo Fuentes, Amado, 55, 69, 55, 57–8
73–83 Ciangherotti, Alan, 136
as Byronic hero, 80–2 La Clave 7, 54
films about, 73–82, 82n92 El Clon de Hitler, 27, 145–6
Carmen (opera), 147 Coatlicue, 123–4
Caro Quintero, Rafael, 55, 58–60, Commando Zorras, 103n1
63–4, 67, 69, 80, 114, 161 Contrabando y traición, 116–19, 121
films about, 56–64, 80, 97, Cortez, Gregorio, 51, 53n28
122, 161 Cosío Martínez, Sara, 60
Carrera, Carlos, 71 Cronicas de un narco, 98–100
El cartel de los “Z”: La Realidad de Cuarón, Alfonso, 71, 141
Mexico, 88–93 Cuernavaca, Morelos, 117
cartels Culiacán, Sinaloa, 16
from Colombia, 55, 68, 69, 78 La curva del olvido, 146
connections to Wall St., 44, 57
earnings, 73, 84 Darketos, 146
financing narco cinema, 4, 51, DEA (Drug Enforcement
52, 63, 69, 99–100 Administration), 53, 55, 56, 58,
government corruption and, 67, 99, 158
44, 55–6, 57, 73, 75, 78, Decalogue (film series), 147
84–5, 86 Derrida, Jacques, 140
legitimate investments of, 55, 75 Diosas de Plata, 50
from Mexico (see under La Dolce Vita, 131–2
individual cartels) Las Dos Michoacanas, 121
murdering media-workers, 10 Dreyfus, Diego, 99
social media and, 44 drug cultivation in Mexico, 15–16,
Casas, Claudia, 110, 113 26, 53, 55, 57, 64, 70–1
Castro, Fermin, 82 drug war statistics, 13, 44, 83, 84
Cayo la reyna del pacifico, 114 Drug Wars: The Camarena Story,
Centro Universitario de Estudios 56–60, 61, 63
Cinematográficos, 141 drugs and globalization, 12, 19–21,
Cepero, Alicia, 128 25–6, 44–5, 66, 75, 81, 87, 132
Chagoyán, Rosa Gloria, 62, Durango, Mexico, 15, 55
122–3, 125 Durazo, Arturo (“Negro”), films
charro film, 50, 72 about, 56
Chávez Araujo, Oliverio, 69
Chelo, 119–20 Emilio Varela vs. Camelia la
Chicago, Illinois, 46 texana, 119–20
 Index 193

Encinas, Alicia, 127 films about, 70

Erceg, Zdenka, 137 Guzman, Roberto (“Flaco”), 109
Escalante, Amat, 159
Estévez, María Dolores (“Lola la Hayek, Salma, 123
Chata”), 114 Hecho de coca, 23–42
Heli, 158–60, 163
La Familia Michoacána, 85, 87 Hemingway, Ernest, 48, 49, 85, 105
El fantástico mundo de los hippies, Hernan, Jorge, 28
52–3 Hernández, Mario, 8–9, 101
Fernández, Raúl, 121 La hija del contraband, 121
Fernández, Rolando, 60, 122 El hijo de Camelia la Texana, 121
El fiscal de hierro, 114 hippies, 52
Fonseca Carillo, Ernesto, 55, Houston, Texas, 46
69, 77 Huatabampo, Sonora, 50
Fox, Vicente, 86
Franco, Emilio, 10n27, 77 Ice-T, 106
Freud, Sigmund, 154–5 Infante, Pedro Jr., 46–7
Fuentes, Carlos, xiii–xvi El Infierno, 158–60, 163
La Fuga del Chapo, 70 Internet Movie Database, 5, 27, 50,
126, 126n28
Galindo, Rubén, 53
Gallardo, Miguel Angel Félix, 55, Jasso, Ignacia (“la Nacha”), 114
69, 114 JC Films, 10, 13, 99
García Abrego, Juan, 69 journalism, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 20,
gender politics. See narco 50, 160
cinema and femininity; and JS Films. See JC Films
masculinity Juárez, Chihuahua, 13, 58, 75, 78,
Golden, Diana, 27, 36 83, 114
González, Christian, 136, 141–3, Juárez Cartel, 55, 73, 75–6, 87, 161
145–7, 149–55 films about, 73–82
interview with, 151–4
González, Gibrán, 136, 154 Kaibiles, 86
Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas kitsch, 6, 12, 13–14, 16–17, 30,
Especiales, 86 41–2, 97, 140, 142, 144–6,
Guadalajara, Jalisco, 55, 151–3, 159
57, 70 see also camp
Guadalajara Cartel, 55–6, 57–8, Knights Templar, 85
64, 67, 69, 73, 77
films about, 56–68 Ligarde, Sebastián, 136
La Güera Mendoza, 126–33 Llaven, Jose, 137
Guillen, Marisol, 90 Lola la Trailera, 54–5, 121–6
Guinness Records, 50 Lopez, Oscar, 110
Gulf Cartel, 69, 85, 86–7, 99 López Portillo, José, 51, 56
Guzmán, Joaquin (“El Chapo”), López Portillo, Margarita, 51
69, 70 López Uriarte, Raydel, 97
194 Index

lucha libre, 52 Mexico City, 74, 114

Luke, Jorge, 110 Meza López, Santiago, 97
Lynch, David, 145 Michoacán, Mexico, 9
Michoacán a poco madre, 108–10
machismo, xv, 14, 18, 36, 48, 52, Los Michos, Sinaloa, 85
104, 105, 108, 113, 122, 125, migrants, cinematic representation
130, 136, 143–4, 152–3 of, 46–9, 55, 64–8, 88–93,
see also narco cinema and 158–9
femininity; and masculinity as film audience, 5, 12, 17, 19,
de la Madrid, Miguel, 56 42, 45, 47, 51, 125
La Mafia Tiembla, 60 Miss Bala, 158–61
Malaverde, Jesús, 38 Miss Narca, 161
Manríquez, Silvia, 119 Monroy, Xochitl, 111
Manuel Romero, Juan, 10; 13, Monsiváis, Carlos, 68
99, 100 Montemayor, Reyes, 68
maquiladoras, xvi, 14, 26, 42, 75, 83 Montreal, Quebec, 149
Marin Verdugo, Rene, 58 Moro, Frank, 62, 122
Martínez, Aurora, 126 La Muerte de un cardinal, 70
Marx, Karl, 31 Mujeres de media noche, 146
Los más buscados, 69 El Muletas al 100, 97
Masacre en Ensenada, 82, 88 My Fair Lady, 147
Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 45
Mataran a Camelia la Texana, 121 NAFTA (North American Free
Maten al fugitivo: La fuga de Caro, Trade Agreement), 70, 75, 81,
60–3, 66, 80, 97, 122 83, 148
McGann, Jerome, 81 effects on film industry, 71–3
MCM Studios. See La Raza Mex narco cinema
Films audience, 5, 12, 18–19, 32–3, 42,
Me dicen el Z: el alterado, 93–6 51, 63, 80–1, 100, 114, 117,
Medellín Cartel, 57 118, 125, 126, 130, 132, 151,
Melendrez, Bernabé, 103–5 153, 159, 160
melodrama, 18, 30–3, 41–2, 132, automobiles and, 45–8, 49, 61,
144, 146 94, 99, 112, 122, 124, 127
Mexican film industry, 161 cartel financing of, 4, 51, 52, 63,
history of, 50–3, 71–2 69, 99–100
privatization of, 51–2, 56, 71–2 censorship of, 8–11, 63n46
vs. narco cinema, 2, 5, 9, 15, as cultural catharsis, 12, 14,
17–18, 98, 141–2, 160–1, 163 17–18, 41–2, 48, 92, 97–8
Mexico, stereotypes about, xv–xvi, ephemerality of, 6
10, 58 femininity and, 14, 36, 61, 80,
economic crises in, 51, 55–6, 98, 105–33, 143
70, 125 financial success of, 4–5
political corruption in, 15, 44, homosexuality and, 124, 135–40,
55–6, 57, 73, 75, 78, 83, 142–5, 147–55
84–5, 86 ideology and, 15–18, 50, 97, 107
 Index 195

masculinity and, 36, 46–9, 52, Operation Condor, 53

59, 63, 66, 74, 79–80, 95, Ortín, Jorge, 25
103–9, 110, 112–13, 118, 119, Ortiz Torres, Ruben, 121
121, 122, 127, 129, 136, 144,
149, 152–3 Paglia, Camille, 115
precursors to, 50–3 Paredes, Américo, 91
production and technical aspects Partido Revolucionario Institucional
of, 5, 50, 71–2, 96, 153 (PRI), 60, 71, 86
as propaganda, 4, 7, 8, 9, 52, 63, Patiño, Jorge, 47
69, 93, 99–100 Paz, Octavio, xvi–xvii, 17, 20, 98,
sex and, 14–18, 34, 36, 38, 41, 144n22
60–1, 90–1, 94–5, 106–7, 109, Peluffo, Ana Luisa, 117–21
118, 120, 139, 143–4, 147–9, Peniche, Flavio, 90, 95, 99, 148
150, 152–3 Perez-Arroyo, Felipe, 26
soundtrack of, 29, 35–6, 47–8, Pilotes de combate, 53
49, 79, 89, 116, 121, 124, Por mujeres como tú, 78, 146, 150
127–8, 138 Posadas Ocampo, Cardinal, 70
violence and, 7, 11–14, 28–9, El Pozolero, 97, 98
34–5, 37–8, 41–2, 47–9, 52, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, 76
61–3, 65–6, 74–5, 77–8, El Puma de Sinaloa, 82
89–91, 92, 95–6, 108–9,
111–12, 116, 118, 120, 124, raculfright_13’s Blogo Trasho, 151
128, 130–1, 137–8, 143–4, Rancho Búfalo, 57, 64, 67
147–9, 150, 158–60 La Raza Mex Films, 5, 24,
narco code, 15, 41, 82, 101, 108 26–7, 160
narco culture, 7–9, 15–18, 20, 45, Rebollo, Jesús Gutiérrez, 78
56, 98, 100–1, 114, 162 Reyes de Pruneda, Simona, films
Narco Gays, 136–40, 142–6, 148, about, 114
150–5 La Reyna del pacifico, 114
narcocorridos, 6, 16, 35–6, 49, 60, Reynoso, Jose, 4, 15, 54, 74,
84, 93, 116–17, 159 104, 152
Navarro, Agustin, 92 Rinza, Ignacio, 153
Nelson, Craig T., 57–8 Ritmo, traición y muerte: La
neoliberalism, 44, 66, 70, 71 cumbia asesina, 147
Nikkatsu Corporation, 115 Rodarte, Miguel, 160
Norris, Chuck, 50 Rodríguez, Milton, 122
Nosotros los chemos, 148 Rojas, Patricia, 151
Novaro, Maria, 71 Rojas, Rafael, 27
nuevo cine de narco, 159–60 Rojo Orgasmico, 146
Nuevo Cine movement, 2, 71 Rush (band), 79–80
Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 86,
99, 114 Sáenz, Fernando, 96
Sáenz, Patricia F., 126
Ojinaga, Chihuahua, 77 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 70–1,
Operación Mariguana, 64–8, 97 73, 80, 81, 83
196 Index

Salinas de Gortari, Raúl, 73, 80, 83 Teóyotl, Tina, 126, 130, 133
Salvando al Soldado Pérez, 159–60 Los Tigres del Norte, 49, 60, 117
Samperio, Carlos, 13 Tijuana, Baja California, 5, 88, 113,
Samperio, Isabel, 126 161
San Antonio, Texas, 116 Tijuana Cartel, 69–70, 78, 82, 87,
San Diego, California, 5, 45 88
San Fernando Massacre, 7, 91–3 films about, 69, 69n56, 76, 82
San Martín de las Pirámides, 28n5 Toei Company, Ltd., 115
Santos, Lina, 78 del Toro, Benicio, 57–9
scholarship, 18, 30–3, 50, 56, 81, Trujillo, Valentín, 117–18
104–6, 115, 123–5, 140–1,
154, 161–2 United States, cinematic
El secuestro de Camarena, 63–4 representations of, 16, 45–9,
El Señor de los cielos (film), 74–5, 55, 60–4, 65, 77, 78, 99, 125
77–82, 97 collusion with narco economy,
El Señor de los cielos 44, 57–8, 84
(telenovela), 83 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
sexy-comedies, 14, 26, 51–2, México, 141
101, 115 Urquieta, José Luis, 4, 52, 68
Shaw Brothers Studio, 115
Shibari, 146, 151 Valdez Villareal, Edgar (“la
Sí Desearás la mujer de tu narco, Barbie”), 99–100
147, 150 Vanilla Ice, 68, 105
Sí Honarás tu coca madre, 147, Vega, Isela, 160
149–50 La Venganza de Camarena, 63–4
Sí Matarás, 147–8 Vice (media franchise), 11n28
Sicilia, Javier, 41, 101 videohome, origins of, 9, 71–2
Sieber, Fernando, 129 Villa, Pancho, 53n28
Sinaloa, Mexico, 3, 15–17, 34, 39,
53, 55, 69, 75, 85, 110, 136 Walmart, 101
Sinaloa Cartel, 16, 69–70, 85–7,
99, 114 Y Tu Mamá También, 15
films about, 70, 99, 114 YouTube, 3, 5, 45, 93, 99
Soberón, Héctor, 129
Solís, John, 96–7, 110 Zamarripa, Armando, 148
Somilleda, Fernando, 136 Zapata, Emiliano, 51
Stiglitz, Hugo, 52 Zapatistas, 82, 86
structuralism, 105, 123 Zayas, Alfonso, 52, 55
Los Zetas, 7, 58, 85–96, 99, 101,
tabloids, 56, 60, 68, 72 114–15
Tamaulipas, Mexico, 15, 86–7, 91 films about, 88–96
Telemundo, 121 Los Zetas (film), 88, 93
Televisa, 51 Zúñiga, Laura, 161