There’s just something about a drama-fuelled, fast-paced drug cartel drama that’s hard not to love.

If somehow, you’re out of the loop – the new season of Narcos is out, and this time it’s set in Mexico.

This season focusses on Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, AKA El Padrino (The Godfather). He also went by El Jefe de los Jefes (the boss of bosses).

You get the idea early on that this guy is not someone you’d want to mess with.

Here’s The Guardian:

The mafia expert Roberto Saviano said Pablo Escobar was “the Copernicus” of narcotraffic because he was “the first to understand that it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine”. Cocaine: the perfect commodity that knows no such thing as recession, which can sell reliably without quality control at a steady price. If Escobar was Copernicus, Félix Gallardo was the great entrepreneur, the empire-builder with foresight and an astutely perfect understanding of his market: the Henry Ford or Bill Gates of cocaine.

In the 1980’s Gallardo created and managed the first narco corporation in Mexico. The Guadalajara Cartel dealt primarily in distribution rather than production.

After Operation Condor destroyed poppy production in Mexico, the stage was set for a narco from Sinaloa called Pedro Avilés to step into the vacuum and escalate existing marijuana smuggling routes into a full-scale cocaine-trafficking operation. But when Avilés was killed in a shootout in 1978, it was time for his heir Félix Gallardo, with two lieutenants – Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo – to take over the operation. By the mid-80s, the Guadalajara Cartel had become the biggest in the world.

Gallardo and his lieutenants modernised, commercialised and internationalised narcotraffic. Trafficking routes were established from South America, through Mexico to the US and Europe. These routes are still operational today.

Gallardo understood the markets as well as any of his opposite numbers on Wall Street or Canary Wharf. He spoke their language and set up the Mexican dominance of the narcotraffic it still enjoys today.

Gallardo laid the foundations for a system of corruption and conviviality with the Mexican state that would protect mutual interests on the principle of Pax Mafiosa (the Mafia’s Peace). The system worked with the cartel, guaranteeing a modicum of calm if corrupted officialdom helped it keep the product flowing against challenges from rival, smaller syndicates.

They started to streamline a model of money-laundering into the supposedly “legal” economy north and south of the border that would be perfected by Gallardo’s successors: Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, standing trial in New York this week, and Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada.

Netflix has taken some liberties with the history of the cartel, including things like the completely absurd and fictional meeting depicted between a young, lowly El Chapo Guzmán and Pablo Escobar in El Chapo.

There really is no need to add flame to the fire though. Gallardo’s life was pretty epic. We know this because he kept a diary.

The diary was procured by the Mexican journalist and writer Diego Osorno, and extracts published in an expansive piece on Gallardo in Gatopardo magazine in 2009. Gallardo takes no prisoners: he talks openly about his interests in the Mexican banks which cleaned his money, while pleading “my innocence” in the murder of Camarena. Gallardo was moved to the Jojutla jail in Morelos where he lingers still, finally convicted of Camarena’s killing – after decades of legal manoeuvring – in 2017.

Gallardo wanted his business to run smoothly, with little to no violence – unless it became necessary.

His imprisonment also did nothing to slow the flow of drugs into the US and Europe. In this sense, the ‘Bill Gates of cocaine’ remains, now emeritus.

[source:guardian]