
Luis Aguirre
Gorostiaga

Former Colonel Fernandez is appointed Minister of the National Anti-Drug Agency (SENAD) and purges the special forces to fight the first of many battles against drug trafficking on the border of Paraguay and Argentina.
I’ve seen this story before. A grizzled military man, hardened by war and disillusioned by bureaucracy, is called back into the fray to clean up a system rotten to its core. It’s a familiar archetype, one that stretches from The French Connection to Sicario, a fantasy of righteous violence in a world where the lines between good and evil are drawn in blood and cocaine. Leal, the 2018 Paraguayan crime drama directed by Pietro Scappini and Rodrigo Salomón, doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
What it does, though, is something far more interesting: it grounds that fantasy in the specific, brutal reality of Paraguay’s border wars, where the state and the cartels are often indistinguishable, and the only loyalty that matters is the one you can enforce with a gun.
The film follows former Colonel Fernández (Luis Aguirre), a man who carries himself like a soldier even when he’s in a suit. Appointed as the head of Paraguay’s National Anti-Drug Agency (SENAD), he sets out to purge the special forces of corruption and take the fight to the drug traffickers operating along the Paraguay-Argentina border. It’s a mission that should feel noble, but Leal is too smart to let Fernández—or the audience—off that easily.
The film’s opening act is a masterclass in tension without spectacle. Fernández interrogates a suspect in a dimly lit room, the camera lingering on the man’s sweating face, the way his fingers twitch against the metal table. There’s no music, no dramatic cuts, just the slow, suffocating weight of power being exerted.
It’s the kind of scene that makes you lean forward in your seat, not because something is happening, but because you can feel what’s about to happen.

What makes Leal more than just another gritty crime thriller is its refusal to romanticize Fernández’s mission. The film is steeped in the moral ambiguity of its setting, where the drug trade isn’t just a criminal enterprise but a way of life, a corrupting force that seeps into every institution. The borderlands of Paraguay and Argentina aren’t just a backdrop; they’re a character in their own right, a lawless expanse where the rules of civilization don’t apply.
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On 2 August 2018, Leal took 2,721 tickets on 27 screens and knocked Mission Impossible Fallout off the Thursday chart in Paraguay. Cruise, in his second Thursday, sold 483. By the first weekend the local action movie had 16,844 viewers, a hair past the opening of Los buscadores a year earlier. Fifteen weeks later the producers were talking more than 100,000 tickets. On 1 March 2019 it became the first Paraguayan feature on Netflix,. The English listing is The Last Runway. latestnetflix.com's view is that the title that sold the seats is Leal, solo hay una forma de vivir.Loyalty. There is only one way to live,.
HEi Films, the new movie arm of Dani Da Rosa's media group, shot for five weeks from 6 November to 9 December 2017 in Asunción, Atyrá, San Bernardino, Tobatí, and Pedro Juan Caballero on the Brazilian border. Production director Vicky Ramírez told Radio 970 that Paraguay had put up more than $600,000, Argentina had put up its share, and more than 350 people worked on the picture. Agents from SENAD, the National Anti-Drug Secretariat, coached language, tactics, and codes. Screenwriter Andrés Gelós, the Argentine behind Cumbia Ninja and 2091, said the plot braids five real police cases spread across seven or eight years,. That is the rumor the production itself printed. Inspired by real events, with the agency in the room.
Debut directors Pietro Scappini and Rodrigo Salomón put the commandos through two to three hours of physical training a day for four months under Édgar Torres, then weapons work with TAC-OPS Paraguay. One hundred seventy actors tried out for the main roles. Thirteen made it. Silvio Rodas plays retired colonel Ramón Fernández, the new SENAD minister who purges the special forces. Luis Aguirre is sergeant Carlos Gorostiaga, the insubordinate loner asked to lead Comando Yaguareté. Andrea Quattrocchi is analyst Betty Jara. Bruno Sosa plays Dante, a Brazilian-Paraguayan trafficker. Chilean actor Gonzalo Vivanco is capo Javier Salcedo. Argentine Andrea Frigerio and her real daughter Fini Bocchino play a mother and daughter who control landing strips,. Gelós told La Nación he was not afraid of the gunfights. He also said it was shot entirely in Paraguay, in four and a half weeks, and that he did not want festival prestige. He wanted screens. The official trailer still sells the raid, not the art-house version.
Ramírez, announcing the Netflix date, called the technical bar the point. Subtitles in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. IMDb still files the trivia line. First Paraguayan film on the service,. In 2022 Gelós said Netflix was interested in a continuation. Leal 2, Comando Yaguareté opened in Paraguay on 31 August 2023 with Quattrocchi and Lali González in the lead, and Paraguay sent it as its Oscar entry,. The first film is the one still sitting on the streamer. The sequel did the victory lap at home.
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