‘Narcos: Mexico’ Season 3 Episode 3 Recap: The Kids Aren’t Alright

You can file this episode of Narcos: Mexico in the “boys will be boys” department. Entitled “Los Juniors” (and directed by none other than Wagner “Pablo Escobar” Moura himself), this ep of the long-running crime franchise officially introduces us to the clique of rich kids who’ve formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Arellano Félix brothers in Tijuana—the “narcojuniors,” as our narrator, dogged reporter Andréa Nunez, dubs them. These pampered princes of the city get to taste the life of a gangster, while the narcoseniors gain access to their rich parents. When her newspaper editor asks her why the parents would get in bed with cartel bosses when they’re already rich, Andréa cheekily replies “Rich people always want more money—that’s why they’re rich.” Truer words, Andréa, truer words.

(That’s musician Bad Bunny, in character as narcojunior Arturo “Kitty” Paez, playing dress-up.)

Meanwhile, Amado Carrillo Fuentes continues to dream big for his Juárez cartel. After cleaning up the mess left behind by his former partner Aguilar, he brings aboard some key new personnel: his killer brother Vicente (Fernando Bonilla) and numbers guy Gerardo Corral (Eugenio Rubio). His plan is to divide his cartel into independent cells, so that if one person or group gets arrested, the rest of the cartel will remain safe.

Unfortunately, setting all this up requires time—a precious commodity when the Cali cartel down in Colombia expects you to keep up your regular shipments and payments. So Amado travels south and makes his pitch to Cali co-chieftain Pacho Herrera (the returning Alberto Ammann, a fellow holdout from the Escobar seasons) personally. Reticent at first, Pacho is worn down by Amado’s persistence, his confidence in his vision, and his sob story about his late daughter, whose “bad luck” has driven him to ensure nothing similar befalls his other baby, the cartel. Pacho gives Amado a month to get everything set up, and my feeling is that anyone who’s earned the nickname “Lord of the Skies” can probably pull it off.

Elsewhere in Juárez, crooked cop Victor is feeling the pinch, since bribes and shakedowns are netting less money due to Aguilar’s death and Amado’s planned slowdown of the drug trade. But he wants nothing to do with his partner’s plan to set up a crew of cops and move weight themselves. Nor is he happy to see DEA Agent Walt Breslin arrive at his doorstep, carrying evidence of his participation in the violent safehouse raid that opened the season up in El Paso, and an offer to look the other way if Victor will turn informer for him. Given that Walt spends the rest of the episode preparing for his transfer to Chicago to accommodate his wife’s new job, I’m not sure how this relationship will shake out in the end.

The episode’s main action, however, centers on neither Juárez nor Tijuana, but the relative backwater of Sinaloa. The rural region’s bosses—“Güero” Palma, El Azul, and El Chapo—have fun nicknames, but no access to the American border, and thus are subject to the whims of the Arellano Félix brothers and their minions. When some of said minions stop a valuable shipment on its way through the desert in the Imperial Valley, the triumvirate approaches independent operator El Mayo for help. While he refuses their offer to join up, he agrees to broker a meeting with Benjamín Arellano Félix, who’s down south for his 40th birthday festivities anyway. Their plan is to make a play for the Imperial Valley’s border region; it’s remote and inhospitable, but it still gets you to America in the end.

The meeting goes okay, by all appearances. While he refuses to sell the Sinaloans the Imperial Valley outright, he agrees to lease it to them for two years, after which they’ll renegotiate. Everyone shakes hands on the deal—but Chapo seems comparatively unhappy with the results.

Cut to Benjamín’s birthday party later that night, at a nightclub blasting Depeche Mode’s greatest hit “Enjoy the Silence.” “Mín” is having a blast with his brothers Ramón and Francisco (Francisco Barreiro) and his new brother-in-law Claudio Vazquez (Claudio Lafarga), until cops show up to sour the mood. But when he dispatches his guard Barron (Bobby Soto) to buy the cops off, the gunman quickly senses there’s more to these cops than meets the eye.

Sure enough, they’re not police at all—they’re a crew of killers, led by Chapo himself. A massive gunfight breaks out, sending revelers scrambling and forcing the Arellano Félix bunch to flee. Francisco is wounded, though, and Claudio is killed outright. This leaves his stunned wife Enedina vowing revenge: “I want their heads,” she says simply.

The funny thing—funny ironic, not funny ha-ha—is that Amado had just assured Pacho that the ouster of former boss-of-all-bosses Félix Gallardo had not caused a breakdown in the Mexican drug trafficking business. Yet here we are, with a relatively mild disagreement causing one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top guys to dress up as a cop and open fire on his ersatz Tijuana associates. This—along with the apparently nightly discovery of dead women in Juárez, a situation Victor is still half-heartedly investigating—appears to be the shape of things to come, a Hobbesian war of all against all. Can mega-rich gangsters like the Arellano Félix brothers and their narcojuniors staunch the bloodshed? Can a visionary like Amado? Or does the future belong to El Chapo, guns blazing when given even a fraction of an excuse? You don’t have to be a student of recent history to figure out where this is all headed.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 3 on Netflix