The year is 1980, in Guadalajara, Mexico. The government had launched “Operation Condor,” an order from Mexico City to burn all the marijuana fields they could find in a bid to cut off the supply of opium poppies in the country.
It’s a drug war all right, and it has killed over half a million people in Mexico.
But despite the seemingly serious military threat to Mexican cartels, the pot business was booming. The drug lords were running the country. They owned posh hotels, mansions and even bought the banks to park their money. Local and state cops and government officials were on their payroll.
Welcome to “Narcos: Mexico” Season 1, a companion series of “Narcos,” Netflix’s gripping real-life series of infamous drug traffickers and the US agents who hunted them down. Super watched the first five episodes of the crime drama set in Guadalajara—the birthplace of tequila, mariachi and a confederate of Mexican drug traffickers. Here are five things you should know:
- Mexican actor and humanitarian Diego Luna is Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, an ambitious cop moonlighting as bodyguard to the lords of the Sinaloan cartel when the precious crops were burned during Operation Condor. Gallardo proposed to his bosses to move the pot plantation from their home in Sinaloa to a desert in Guadalajara, in the jurisdiction of another cartel.
With the help of his weed genius cousin, Rafa (Tenoch Huerta), who created a strain of hybrid quality cannabis that yields to more leaves and less scraps, Gallardo convinced the two plaza to work together.
Gallardo also did the impossible and united the small-time Mexican cartels from Tijuana to Sinaloa to create a drug-trafficking union that would ease the shipment of marijuana from the fields to the United States. This pipeline would eventually extend to Colombia’s cocaine dealers.
- The narc of the story is the fearless Enrique “Kiki” Camarena—“Ant-Man’s” Michael Peña—the legendary officer of US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who would later grace the cover of Time magazine. In “Narcos” Season 1, he was mentioned as “The Jesus of the DEA,” and for good reason.
Camarena is as fearless and ambitious as Gallardo (his intel gathering scenes are seriously panic inducing). The Mexican-American agent from Calexico single-handedly penetrated the grassroots of the marijuana empire by posing as a farmer in Gallardo’s pot plantation. Eventually, Camarena and the tight-knit DEA team in Guadalajara exposed the multibillion-dollar weed business to Washington DC.
- Gallardo is the “El Padrino” (the godfather) to Mexican officials, and the “Rockefeller of Marijuana” to US agents, but there is another essential character in the series that brings continuity to the story: Joaquin Guzman. The Sinaloan kingpin known as “El Chapo” (which means shorty) is introduced early as a driver to the drug lords of Sinaloa. Like Gallardo, El Chapo would rise to his ranks and become a legendary Mexican icon (he has been compared to Robin Hood) and a notorious drug trafficker (he has escaped prison twice—in 2011 when he hid in the bottom of a laundry bin, and in 2015 when he slipped out through a tunnel dug into a shower in his cell). El Chapo is now extradited in the United States where he is facing drug-trafficking charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.
- The much-awaited “Narcos: Mexico” requires patience. It takes its time in painting portraits of its complicated characters, carefully rolling out small details until everything blows up in episode 5. The story lights up, smoke comes out and, before the viewers know it, they are on a “Narcos” high.
- Mexico is ground zero of the modern war on drugs. Thus the strong message of “Narcos: Mexico”: The drug war is a hopeless government crusade that can never be won.
DEA agents briefed Camarena that, in the name of the drug war, the cartels “give” an exact amount of “token” drug bust every month. The police received medals in eliminating small-time drug peddlers outside the union of drug traffickers. Gallardo and his crony live the high life.
And, despite the presence of an incorruptible Mexican-American hero like Camarena, there is no guarantee of a happy ending in “Narcos: Mexico.” In fact, the narrator in the beginning of the season warns: “It does not have an ending at all.”
“Narcos: Mexico” is now streaming on Netflix.