Narcos: Mexico----"A show for people who want the drug war to last forever"(By Dwaipayan Mondal)

                            Narcos: Mexico

"A show for people who want the drug war to last forever"

Narcos: Mexico is the story of Mexico’s first drug kingpin, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (Diego Luna). The 10 episodes that premiere this week detail the dramatic implosion of Gallardo’s empire, a collapse that makes for extremely bingeable television. Yet, despite the thrilling spectacle, exhaustion seeps in. Even though it aims at being something more, Narcos: Mexico doesn’t seem to have ambitions far beyond those of the criminals it follows, pushing more product.

All druglord sagas are alike. A driven young man with a flash of insane ambition in his eyes, who’s smarter, more brutal or luckier than his rivals, rapidly ascends a teetering mountain of cash, corpses and addictive substances. Then his appetite for success overtakes him and there’s a reckoning.

For the ordinary U.S. viewer, Narcos Mexico is likely the only representation of Mexico they will consume all year. Even in this saturated “peak TV” market, Narcos Mexico catapulted to the top five streaming shows on Netflix in the United States. One week after its February 13, 2020 release, the show boasted nearly 50 million average demand expressions. The popularity of Narcos Mexico is easily explained: It is a well-crafted show with a big production budget, stellar acting, and a strong aesthetic sensibility. It also doesn’t hurt that it delivers a pre-history of the inter-cartel violence that fascinates U.S. audiences. Despite its claims to accuracy, however, this season of Narcos Mexico delivers a DEA version of events, silencing the anti-left politics that undergirded the expansion of the drug trade in the 1970s and 1980s.

While it was created by three U.S. men, Narcos Mexico provides a strong sense of place thanks to the Mexican directors, writers, and actors who helped make the show, which was filmed on location. U.S. viewers, who may have little knowledge of Mexico beyond sensationalist headlines and trips to Cancún, can thus witness the distinct regional geographies of the country, from the vast Chihuahuan desert to the dense cityscapes of the Federal District and Guadalajara. If they are attentive, they may even notice the characters’ distinct regional Mexican accents. Perhaps for this reason, the show has also found an audience in Mexico, where on February 26 it was ranked the number two show on the platform.

Throughout, Narcos occasionally makes overtures at the grander significance of the story it’s telling. Across 10 episodes, Gallardo’s desperate maneuvers to retain control of his business and stick it to those who have slighted him have consequences that reverberate beyond the criminal underworld, ultimately resulting in a rigged presidential election. “Sound familiar?” the show’s narrator winks.

The show’s conscience is Michael Peña as DEA agent Kiki Camarena, who arrives in Guadalajara as Gallardo’s operation is gaining momentum, and is aghast at his new colleagues’ inadequacy. The institutional corruption that was the backdrop to the original Narcos is even more explicit here, as Camarena’s resourcefulness and obsessive desire for justice runs repeatedly into interference from above, most infuriatingly from a US embassy that’s following a vague but malign agenda of its own. This is the beginning of the modern war on drugs, where law enforcement officers who actually want to enforce the law will find that someone somewhere has their thumb on the scales. Peña initially plays Camarena’s irate fussiness for laughs, before bringing dignity and tragedy to a hopeless quest that ensures Narcos: Mexico is a layered drama with political nous, and not just a snorting frenzy of cheap glamour and throwaway murder.

The second season of Narcos: Mexico wants to make a point about consequences, at least on a surface level. The collapse of Gallardo’s empire stems directly from brash actions taken during his ascent — most directly, the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena (Michael Peña), which sends agent Walt Breslin on a reckless mission of retribution. There are also bridges burned along the way, friendships set ablaze to use as fuel for ambition that leave many eager to see Gallardo out of power.

By the season two finale, the federation has dissolved, and Mexico’s trafficking routes have been divided geographically among the different organizations. In one of the show’s final scenes, when Félix Gallardo and Breslin finally meet, the former predicts that, absent his leadership, Mexico will soon descend into violence. However, such claims wrongly suggest that the spectacular violence witnessed today was the result of organizational disunity rather than the government’s militarized war on drug trafficking organizations. Such representations are not without political consequences.

“I’ve always sort of seen this as of the Marvel superhero universe of connecting narcotraffickers, and that they all coexist,” showrunner Eric Newman told The Hollywood Reporter not long after the season premiered in 2018. It’s a crass way of describing the dynamics at play in these stories of cartels and corruption, but also a very American one. The gringos, as the Mexicans doing the dirty work for the cartel bosses say, always want more. And what better expression of “more” is there than the excesses of the modern cinematic universe?

You could tell this story indefinitely, because it is still being told today, with every story of a white person enraged at the sound of Spanish being spoken, with every ICE raid, with every chant for the wall. Cartel dramas like Narcos are fairy tales for a nation in decline, flattening diverse and complicated countries for the benefit of a nation that refuses to acknowledge the havoc it has wreaked on the world.

-------Dwaipayan Mondal------