The Mexican film La captura, by Chava Cartas, arrived on Netflix on August 21, 2026 and has accumulated 18 million views in its first week, according to Proceso. It reconstructs the arrest of Joaquín Guzmán Loera in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not from the capo's point of view, rather from that of two federal police officers who pulled over a car reported stolen.
The project took nine years to come together. Bernardo Esquinca's screenplay builds on the chronicles journalist Héctor de Mauleón published in 2016 about the operation, and fictionalizes the agents' dialogue and decisions. Chava Cartas, director of Contraataque, had already worked on series for the same platform. For the Mexican community in the United States and Canada the release carries a double weight: the story unfolded just hours from the border, and narco narratives are among the most consumed Mexican genres. The film tops the platform's global Top 10 of non-English-language films and appears in the Top 10 in 90 countries.
On screen, Arturo Carmona (Alfonso Herrera) and Héctor Rosales (Noé Hernández) pull the vehicle over during a night shift and face a dilemma: hand over the detainee or accept the money they are offered. Héctor Kotsifakis plays Guzmán Loera, Juan Pablo Cruz García plays Jorge Iván Gastélum, El Cholo Iván, and Gerardo Trejoluna plays commander Valladares. The film runs 91 minutes and devotes the first 22 to introducing the two agents. It was shot in Chihuahua, not Sinaloa, over seven weeks. Critic Jorge Ayala Blanco describes it in Confabulario as a structure of simultaneities with multiple suspense, running counter to January 6 to 8, 2016, and one in which, unlike series about capos, the good guys win.
Cartas said he sought to steer clear of glorifying crime and of the invulnerable cop of action cinema. The film remains in Netflix's catalog and its performance in the global Top 10 is updated every week, a figure the Mexican industry watches closely.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.