Narcos: Mexico isn't exactly a WTF just happened kind of TV show, and yet, Season 3 managed to pull off a totally WTF ending. As the credits rolled on the series, the show served up one final scene in which the supposedly deceased Amado Carrillo Fuentes' girlfriend walks into her palatial home in Cuba to find two wine glasses sitting on the piano alongside the toy plane that belonged to Fuentes' daughter. You can practically hear the implied "dun, dun, DUN." And yet, the show stops short of straight up saying Fuentes is still alive.
There's a reason for the lack of clarity. By all accounts, Fuentes is dead, but enough drama went down after his death that some people believe he's still out there somewhere, living a quiet life in Cuba. As shown in Season 3, Fuentes died after undergoing plastic surgery on July 4, 1997. According to The Washington Post, the infamous drug trafficker underwent eight hours of surgery to radically alter his appearance. The next morning, a doctor making their rounds discovered he had died.
Seems fairly straightforward, right? Well, here's where things get complicated. After running extensive tests to confirm the identity of the unrecognizable body, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Thomas Constantine, confirmed it was indeed Fuentes. Additionally, the drug lord's mother also verified the body was that of her son.
However, in November of 1997, the bodies of Jaime Godoy Singh and Ricardo Reyes Rincon, two of three surgeons who operated on Fuentes, were murdered and placed in sealed oil drums. According to the DEA, the doctors were most likely killed in retaliation for Fuentes' death, but this hasn't stopped others from speculating they were murdered because they were part of the drug lord's elaborate plan to fake his own death.
Additionally, per The Sun, after the traffickers funeral, Fuentes' cousin, Sergio Carrillo, reportedly said, "Amado is fine. He is alive. He had surgery and also had surgery practiced on some poor unfortunate person to make everybody believe it was him, including the authorities."
Of course, members of Fuentes' family have plenty of reasons to keep the rumor that their powerful relative is still alive. But there's also the small matter of respected journalist and human rights activist Patricia Verdugo reporting in the Chilean newspaper La Segunda that Fuentes was not only alive, but had been flipped by the DEA, and was now working with them. The DEA denied any and all claims that the drug lord was alive, and the organization even issued a statement on the matter in '97, which read, "The rumor has as much credibility as the millions of sightings of the late Elvis Presley."
Despite the DEA's insistence that Fuentes is dead, his legend lives on. In addition to hinting the infamous drug trafficker faked his own death, Narcos: Mexico ends the entire series by playing "El Corrido De Amado Carrillo," a song about how he's almost certainly still alive. Does this mean the show is truly endorsing the conspiracy theory that Fuentes pulled off the ultimate escape? Ultimately, I suspect the twist ending is more complicated.
Narcos: Mexico is a bleak show in large part because drug lords, including members of Fuentes' family, are still making life incredibly dangerous for everyday citizens, journalists, and anyone who dares to challenge their power. In a 2020 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, series co-creator Eric Newman explained, "You can look at season one of Mexico as consolidation of power, and season two as the erosion of it — and then what comes in its place is chaos. If you view the Mexican chapter of Narcos as an acceleration into chaos, the end of season two is very much where we become untethered. We're hurtling out of control, and where it leads is our incredibly bloody present."
In essence, whether he's truly dead or did in fact escape justice, the specter of Fuentes looms large over Mexico, and the chaos he wrought still continues to this day. At least in that sense, the so-called "Lord of the Skies" is still a major player in the drug trafficking scene — whether he's dead or alive.
Images: Juan Rosas/Netflix