My first time through the respective series, I liked Narcos but grew to really love Narcos: Mexico. Diego Luna’s fantastic performance, understandably, is a big part of that. However, I also really like the way this story is told, all the different elements that come together to make it happen.
One reason that Félix and Rafa needed to go into business with the Guadalajara traffickers is because they can’t grow sinsemilla, Rafa’s revolutionary new strain of marijuana, in Sinaloa. It needs to be away from other plants to avoid cross-pollination. As Rafa gets underway with their new fields, Félix plants some seeds of his own, looking to unite traffickers from multiple regions of Mexico under one central cartel operated out of various “plazas.”
We’ll start with the DEA stuff. Mexico definitely isn’t what Kiki hoped it would be; the DEA has hardly any real power there, and they’re stuck working within the narrow constraints put upon them by the various corrupt forces around them. When they make a drug bust and one of his colleagues notes that they’re seizing nearly the exact amount they seized the month before, Kiki asks, “So this is a setup?” His colleague drawls back, “It’s more like a donation.”
But Kiki is still determined to make something, anything, happen here, to the point where he stops on the way home from his wife’s OB appointment to check out a lead, because “you never know when you’re gonna get lucky.” His crusading is tenacious, but it’s also all-consuming for him, and his colleagues are also quickly getting irritated at his attitude toward them.
Meanwhile, on the cartel side of things, a lot of different players are making their way onto the board. Amado, a pilot who probably has the best knack for this business after Félix. Acosta, a old trafficker from Juarez who’s set in his ways and holds old grudges. The Arellano Félix brothers, Benjamín and Ramón, Félix’s nephews in Tiajuana. Isabella, a friend of Félix’s from back home, one who’s looking to make her own moves in a male-dominated business. And Avilés, “the lion of Sinaloa,” a man who’s used to being a big fish in a small pond and isn’t sure about Félix’s expansion ideas.
In this episode, we get a closer look at a couple of Félix’s particular talents. First, as the narrator puts it, is “the fucking audacity” of his dream, his shrewd idea to unite Mexico’s competing plazas under one banner. He proposes a system where everybody gets rich together, fixing prices and eliminating violent rivalries—as another character puts it, it’s like “OPEC for weed.” Félix identifies all the pieces he’s going to need to make his vision a reality, including trafficking infrastructure, police protection, and the blessing of the local cocaine king.
This brings us to Félix’s second major asset. He’s really good with people, up to a point. His sheer belief in his ideas can get him in trouble at times, can carry him confidently into situations he’s not prepared for, but on a surface level, he has a talent for managing people, which he really needs in this business. In order for his plaza system to work, he needs to take a bunch of people who aren’t inclined to play nicely with each other and get them to break bread. As he travels from plaza to plaza making his proposal, the narrator explains, “He’d done his homework. That meant knowing which asshole responded to flattery and which just wanted to hear the fucking numbers.”
Luna is so, so good in these scenes. We see the way Félix walks into each plaza with a tailored pitch already prepared, knowing what to say to each of his chess pieces to get them to move. We see how he sometimes adjusts his approach on the fly when a curveball is thrown at him, like when he discovers Acosta refuses to work with Avilés due to an old feud; he immediately recalibrates and starts BSing, saying what he needs to to keep Acosta on the line.
The really interesting thing about this is that many of the things that motivate the other plaza bosses mean very little to Félix. He’s driven by his belief in the logic of his own plan, and for all intents and purposes, he thinks everybody ought to align behind that simply because it makes sense. The plaza system will bring everyone money and power, and it will cut out a lot of extraneous headaches—where’s the downside? But he accepts the reality that most of these people are driven by other things, and so he plays a dozen different little games to keep everybody happy long enough to realize his vision. That air comes across in Luna’s performance. Félix doesn’t feel like a con man who has an easy talent for manipulating people to get what he wants. Instead, he feels a little bit like an alien who’s become an expert on human behavior and begrudgingly submits to their illogical whims in order to achieve an advantageous outcome.
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