‘Narcos Mexico’ Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: “La Voz”

Take it from me, or my accountant: Journalism is a tough enough racket even when your delivery trucks aren’t being blown up.

Titled “La Voz” after the newspaper targeted in its opening sequence, Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 7 sees a pair of wars declared—and as reporter/narrator Andréa Nuñez says, the first casualty of war is the truth. Even as the powerful people who don’t want the death of presidential candidate Colosio investigated any further take aim at her newspaper, some of the country’s most powerful narcos form a new alliance to take down the weakened Arellano Félix siblings and their Tijuana cartel.

Interestingly, the real mover and shaker in this episode is neither Amado Carrillo Fuentes from Juárez nor El Chapo from Sinaloa, but the previously low-key and laid-back shrimp-and-coke supplier El Mayo. Now that the Arellanos have torched his beloved old boat, he’s out to make them pay. To do it, he forges a complex alliance. First he travels to the prison where Chapo is housed to say he’d like to take him up on his prior offer to join the Sinaloa cartel. When Chapo protests that the cartel is basically finished, Mayo simply replies “I’ve got some ideas.”

Next, Mayo makes a pitch to Amado to join their new alliance against the Arellanos. Amado has neither love for nor confidence in the Sinaloans, but he does believe in El Mayo, and admires the man’s bravado when he says that he and Chapo plan to take over Tijuana rather than seize some other border crossing elsewhere. Amado offers the newly formed outfit the product they’ll need to get up and running, on the condition that his violent brother Vicente gets a shot at the hitmen who were sent to kill Amado, and that the Arellanos must all die.

Mayo’s final brainwave is effectively narrated by Amado’s uncle Don Neto during a prison conversation with Chapo. Instead of waging an all-out war in the streets for control of Tijuana, a losing proposition, Neto says, Mayo will start small, “like cancer,” by chipping away at the other independent groups who the Arellanos allow to operate out of the city in exchange for a hefty tax. If Mayo lets them know that the Arellanos aren’t in charge anymore, one by one they’ll fall in line, starving the Arellanos of the taxes they need to survive.

Up until this point, Mayo has seemed like a genial fisherman, the kind of guy you want to share a beer on the docks with. That changes when he starts lighting people on fire to make his point.

And though we don’t see Vicente’s revenge go down, we do get a look at its gruesome aftermath: three decapitated corpses, with their heads stuffed into their opened bellies, lined up in the town square as a message. “We’re at war,” Enedina says simply as she’s driven past the gruesome display.

It’s enough to send big-shot businessman Carlos Hank González to see Amado in Juárez, warning him that his bank accounts will be frozen until the battle for Tijuana is put to an end. After all, keeping a low profile was part of their deal, and Amado’s protestation that things change when people try to kill you doesn’t cut any ice with Hank.

Unfortunately for the Arellanos, the Amado/Chapo/Mayo alliance isn’t the only direction from which they’re facing intense pressure. Angered by the gun battle that claimed some of their own, the army is gunning for the Hodoyan brothers, Alex and Alfredo. The latter gets away; the former is illegally detained, bound hand and foot, and subjected to psychological and physical torture by the military until he coughs up his brother’s new location. Walt tries to call it all off when Alex (who thanks to actor Lorenzo Ferro has the cherubic face of a tormented saint in a Renaissance painting) tells him he’s actually an American citizen as well as a Mexican one due to his San Diego birthplace, but General Rebollo talks Walt down. The episode ends with Walt watching as an army goon goes to work on Alex with a car battery, the screen darkening until only the glow of the monitor in Walt’s eyes can be seen. Yikes.

One plot point I did not relish was the inevitable breakup of Walt and his Long-Suffering Girlfriend, Dani. As I’ve written many times before while covering the Narcos franchise, Long-Suffering Significant Others are the only kind the lawmen on this show have—or the only kind the writers know how to write. Maybe I was foolish to think there really was a chance that Walt would finish his Mexican mission and rejoin Dani in Chicago, but either way, the whole storyline is wasted time, and Dani existed just so Walt could have something to be sad about.

But the episode has one more card up its sleeve: Victor Tapia, the Juárez cop who, seemingly in spite of himself, can’t leave the case of his neighbor’s slain niece and the other missing and murdered women of the city alone. Furious to discover that DEA chief Jaime Kuykendall’s DNA test results on the blood sample he provided were inconclusive, Victor approaches the women who work at the same factory as the victim face-on, begging them for information about her disappearance. One timid young woman says she last saw her getting into a car—a big, nice, American car—with an unidentified man. 

Will this get Victor any closer to justice? I doubt it, just as I doubt that Walt acquiescing to torture is going to end the drug war anytime soon. I mean, maybe Victor will be able to find and stop one particular killer. But killers are a limitless commodity in this story, rising and falling like the tide. New ones will always roll in to replace the old.

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 7 on Netflix