Drug wars are brewing in the first official teaser trailer for Narcos: Mexico season 3, the long-overdue continuation of Netflix’s hugely successful and relentlessly violent scripted drug kingpin series. It’s been well over a year since the second season of the spin-off, which was spliced from the original Narcos back in 2018, and from the teaser trailer it’s looking like, thankfully, not much has changed.
Except for the antagonist. Diego Luna’s Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo (AKA El Jefe de Jefes – the ‘Boss of Bosses’) will no longer serve as our pioneering marijuana kingpin. Instead, the plot of Narcos: Mexico season 3 will time-jump into the drug wars of the 1990s, tackling the increasingly global scale of the drug trade running out of Mexico. This, of course, means the cartels of Mexico will be as blood-thirsty and competitive as they’ve ever been across any of Narcos‘ previous five instalments.
The official synopsis for Narcos: Mexico season 3 is as follows:
As newly independent cartels struggle to survive political upheaval and escalating violence, a new generation of Mexican kingpins emerge. But in this war, truth is the first casualty - and every arrest, murder, and take-down only pushes real victory further away.
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While there will be a few cast changes, particularly with the exit of Luna, Narcos: Mexico fans will spot a few familiar faces in the teaser trailer. Returning to the cast of series regulars is Scoot McNairy as Walt Breslin, leading alongside José María Yázpik (Amado Carillo Fuentes), Alfonso Dosal (Benjamín Arellano Félix), Mayra Hermosillo (Enedina Arellano Felix), Matt Letscher (DEA agent James Kuykendall), Manuel Masalva (Ramón Arellano Félix), Alejandro Edda (Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán) and Gorka Lasaosa (Héctor Palma).
New cast members include Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, best known as Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, Luirs Gerardo Méndez as Juarez cop Victor Tapia, Alberto Guerra as drug trafficker Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and Luisa Rubino as journalist Andrea Nuñez. Reportedly, Bad Bunny will star as Arturo “Kitty” Paez, one of the key members of Ramon Arellano Felix’s gang.
Wagner Moura, who portrayed Pablo Escobar across the first two seasons of the original Narcos, will be returning to the series. Although he’ll be behind the scenes, serving as one of the directors as part of a team that includes Andrés Baiz, Alejandra Márquez Abella, Luis Ortega and Amat Escalante.
Fans of Narcos’ chaotic drug cartel action should be pleased. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, the shows’ executive producer and showrunner Eric Newman was not at all tight-lipped about the kind of intensity we can expect.
“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,” he says.
“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 blood present.”
Narcos has plenty of twists, and while we aren’t privy to any of them just yet, we do know one major change. Instead of the smokey narration of Pedro Pascal, or the gravelly voice of McNairy, the series will be getting its first-ever female narrator. That’d by Luisa Rubino, who as noted above joins this season as a young and ambitious journalist determined to expose corruption.
Narcos: Mexico season 3 will premiere via Netflix on November 5th 2021, with all 10 episodes set to be released at once. It will be the final chapter for the Narcos franchise, with no other spin-offs planned at present.
Check out the first teaser trailer above.
