This gorgeously pulpy show flips the script on Trump’s ‘bad hombres’
The action-packed The Gringo Hunters, set in Baja California, follows a Mexican police unit capturing American fugitives.
The gorgeously pulpy series The Gringo Hunters recently lit up Netflix screens. It’s teeming with incident and raffish characters and, although a little cluttered in the narrative department, it’s as much an ethnography as a series of interrelated stories.
The show is set in the forests, beaches and deserts of Baja California, Mexico, sharing a busy land crossing with the US with Tijuana, Mexico, being a major border city just south of San Diego, California.
Blending procedural drama with well-engineered action, and lots of it, The Gringo Hunters provides an absorbing look into cross-border law enforcement.
There are the traditional elements of the cop show: the weekly mysteries to be solved; the ensemble playing style; the twists and turns of suspenseful investigations; and the microcosm of a beleaguered police world; but it all happens in a newish, rather exotic landscape. (Among its most popular tourism campaigns? “Escape to Baja.”)
It’s all spiced up with a bit of internal corruption, which becomes the overarching arc of the series.
Bearing the best title around –redolent of those paperback Western novels characterised by their inexpensive paper and often sensational, action-packed stories set in the American West, featuring guys who are dead shots and formidable, dangerous women – it also happens to be based on fact.
And the series works a witty conceit, reversing a well-held, if increasingly unpopular, notion that Mexicans in the US are criminals, drug dealers and rapists. The Mexican government has been accused of “forcing their most unwanted people into the United States” which has become a “dumping ground” for Mexico, according to President Donald Trump. Consequently, many in the undocumented Latino community have been pursued and deported without any due process.
Instead, the show, which as a graphic at the start tells us is “inspired by real events”, is centred on a covert Mexican police unit tasked with tracking down US fugitives hiding in their country.
Known unofficially as The Gringo Hunters (“Los Caza Gringos”), a moniker bestowed by locals, the team operates out of Tijuana and specialises in locating and removing these fugitives who enter Mexico hoping to evade the US legal system. Officially, they are called the International Liaison Unit of the Baja California State Police. Its officers seek out murderers, rapists, fraudsters, kidnappers, billionaires accused of securities fraud, and drug traffickers, and send them back across the border into the strong arms of US Marshalls. They are dangerous offenders, fugitives who believe crossing into Mexico puts them beyond the reach of justice.
In the opening episode, as an American killer is delivered back to the US across the busy Tijuana crossing, heavily armed Marshalls waiting, one of the Mexican cops says: “We should build a wall; Gringos should pay for it.” The long-suffering female Marshalls boss replies, straight-faced: “Where did you get that great idea?”
The series is based on a Washington Post story from 2020 called “A US murder suspect fled to Mexico, the Gringo Hunters were waiting”. It was written by Kevin Sieff, the Post’s international investigative correspondent who had embedded with the unit as they prepared to arrest Damion Salinas, a 21-year-old American accused of murder in California. The unit was relatively unknown until Sieff’s story was published.
“Pursuing American fugitives in Mexico might seem like the punchline of an unwritten joke, a xenophobic stereotype inverted: Donald Trump’s ‘bad hombres’ in reverse,” Sieff wrote. And it’s easy to see why it appealed to Netflix, which started negotiations.
At the time of Sieff’s story, the unit had caught an average of 13 Americans a month. Since it was formed in 2002, it had apprehended more than 1600. “Many of those suspects were inspired by one of America’s oldest cliches: the troubled outlaw striding into a sepia-toned Mexico in the hope of disappearing forever,” he wrote.
Sieff recorded how the heavily armed unit had captured these hombres, ranging from former Playboy models, Catholic priests, professional athletes, C-list celebrities, and ex-Marines, in “beach resorts, dangling from parasails, in remote mountain cabins, in fishing boats, at a nightclub called Papas & Beer, in drug rehabilitation centres, in trailer parks, tending bars, in cars with prostitutes, in Carl’s Jr parking lots”. Enough for a dozen seasons of TV.
The Gringo Hunters is the first series that hails from Imagine Entertainment and The Washington Post’s partnership, executive produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Sieff serves as a consultant on behalf of The Washington Post, and the set-up director is Adrian Grunberg, an emerging Mexican action director who has served as a first assistant on many movies produced in the local industry.
And, confident in his technical facility, he sure knows how to fashion an exciting action sequence and create dramatic energy. The action is skilfully mounted, gracefully choreographed, vividly edited and the burnished photography is by cinematographer Luis Sansans, notable for his work on both Narcos and Narcos Mexico.
“One of the things that caught our attention most is this cliche or idea that Mexico can be a lawless land, where you can escape if you’ve committed a crime. It’s interesting that there’s this team that proves otherwise and is dedicated to capturing them and returning them to face the consequences of their crimes,” says producer Stacy Perskie in an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais.
The inspiration for the tone of the show was Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. “We wanted to do something much more cinematic,” Perskie says. “We felt Lethal Weapon had this fun approach to breaking up dangerous situations while also telling a story involving great adventures for the characters.”
The team is composed of Nico (Harold Torres), Gloria (Mayra Hermosillo), Cri (Hector Kotsifakis), Beto (Manuel Masalva), Archi (Andrew Leland Rogers), and their boss, Temo (Dagoberto Gama).
It begins at a marina in Tijuana, where Temo and the unit are stalking an American accused of multiple murders who is also being hunted by US authorities. While he is armed and dangerous and leads them on a chase across the boats and piers, they get their man and he is escorted to the US Marshalls.
“I don’t agree to extradition,” he sneers. “We are f..king deporting you,” he’s told. The chase is recorded by a ubiquitous blogger, goes viral, and earns the team the name Gringo Hunters. Their boss is not amused as he and his superior, Ortega (Gerardo Trejoluna), have always demanded anonymity for the clandestine group.
They are soon involved in a revenge porn scheme, a kidnapping, and Temo on his own somewhat mysteriously pursues a fugitive accused of fraud. Capturing him, he discovers a notebook containing incriminating information. There’s little doubt this will lead to a series of problems for the group as it obviously implicates important public figures.
The action takes place against the background of some corporate shenanigans around a referendum about to take place involving the construction of a Las Vegas-style casino in Tijuana. This is opposed by locals even though part of the profits is to be directed to social projects headed by the trusted Father Murphy (Sebastian Roche). It’s a project that’s heavily supported by a group of local businessmen headed by wealthy Joaquin Myer-Rodriquez (Jose Maria Yazpik).
If you are wondering about the special dedication to Abigail Esparza Reyes, she was the young leader of the unit and died during a shootout on April 9 this year in Tijuana while the unit was trying to arrest a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Californian prison.
The Gringo Hunters streaming on Netflix.
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