Phoenix 24
The cartel boss is no longer the protagonist.
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
Mexican director Chava Cartas is challenging the familiar screen mythology surrounding organized crime with La Captura, a new film that shifts attention from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the federal officers who detained him. Released internationally as Facing El Chapo, the production reconstructs the tense hours surrounding the drug lord’s final capture in January 2016. Instead of presenting Guzmán as a charismatic outlaw, strategic genius or symbol of defiance, the film focuses on two officers confronted with fear, corruption and an extraordinary moral decision. Alfonso Herrera and Noé Hernández lead the cast as the fictionalized policemen Carmona and Rosales.
The story begins after Guzmán and his lieutenant, Jorge Iván “El Cholo” Gastélum, escaped from a Mexican Navy operation in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Traveling in a stolen vehicle, the fugitives were intercepted by two federal highway officers near the Las Brisas-Los Mochis section of Highway 15. What appeared to be a routine stop quickly became a dangerous encounter with one of the world’s most wanted criminals. According to accounts that inspired the film, Guzmán offered substantial rewards in exchange for his freedom, but the officers rejected the proposal, restrained both men and alerted their superiors.
La Captura is based on journalistic chronicles by Mexican writer Héctor de Mauleón, with a screenplay by Bernardo Esquinca. The real officers’ identities remained protected, leading the production to use invented names and dramatized personal histories. Documented elements, including the stolen vehicle, the detention, Guzmán’s appearance after fleeing through drainage tunnels and the temporary transfer to a motel, provide the narrative’s factual foundation. Other conversations and emotional conflicts were developed for dramatic purposes, making the film an interpretation of the operation rather than a complete historical record.
Cartas’s decision to elevate the officers carries particular significance in a country where public confidence in police institutions has repeatedly been weakened by corruption, abuse and collaboration with criminal organizations. The film does not erase that reality, but argues that institutional failure should not make individual integrity invisible. Its perspective also confronts decades of narcoculture in which traffickers have frequently received the most memorable dialogue, visual power and narrative complexity. By centering two officers who refused intimidation and money, La Captura proposes a different kind of protagonist: an ordinary public servant whose heroism lies in performing a duty when surrender would have been safer and more profitable. Whether audiences accept that reframing will reveal how much cultural space remains available for stories in which integrity, rather than criminal power, commands the screen.
Cinema changes society by changing whom it asks us to admire. / El cine cambia la sociedad al cambiar a quién nos pide admirar.