1994

Netflix sat Salinas and Galeano in the same series

The gossip that still clings to 1994 is access. Diego Enrique Osorno, a Monterrey journalist with a National Journalism Prize and an Ariel for a documentary short, got former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Subcomandante Galeano, once Marcos, to talk on camera for the same five-part Netflix series. Variety called that pairing a feat. The series, produced with Vice Studios Latin America, dropped on 17 May 2019. Osorno later told Los Cabos it was built from about 800 hours of archive and interview material, latestnetflix.com maintains, the interviews coming from nearly 50 people.

Netflix's own card is colder. Archival video and new interviews examine Mexican politics in 1994, a year marked by the rise of the EZLN and the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio. Five episodes. Spanish original. Limited series.

The climax is one day in Tijuana.

Wikipedia lists the hours. El sucesor. Revolucion. La culebra. Caballero Aguila. Tierra redonda. All five went up on the same Friday. Runtimes sit between 44 and 52 minutes. Episode 3 is the assassination at a Tijuana rally on 23 March 1994. Osorno told Variety he hunted 13 extra video records beyond the famous single camera, footage from police, journalists, and people at the rally that authorities had impounded. He called that episode the climax of the series and of "our current reality as a country." Wikipedia currently misspells him Orsono in the infobox. Trade coverage and the Decider review keep Osorno. , ,

The opening before the credits, Osorno said, holds Colosio at the 6 March Mexico City meeting promising that "Mexicans have a hunger and thirst for justice." There is also a scrap of audio from Mario Aburto, then 22, in prison. Osorno named his three most important interviews as Salinas, Galeano, and Colosio's son Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, first seen in archive as a child when his father became the PRI candidate.

Joel Keller at Decider watched it as a companion to Crime Diaries: The Candidate, the scripted Colosio miniseries Netflix had released less than two months earlier. Keller's verdict was stream it. He argued the documentary cared more about the election machinery than the family melodrama. He also flagged a visual slip. Salinas's timeline for NAFTA sits next to pictures of George H.W. Bush signing, when Bill Clinton was the president who ratified it in 1993.

Osorno would not play judge.

At Los Cabos he sounded allergic to the old binary. He told the room he felt amphibian, unsure if he was a reporter, a documentarian, or a screenwriter. "Most of all I feel like a narrator, a storyteller." Mexican theatrical documentaries, he said, often cost 5 million to 10 million pesos. Netflix would not publish a 1994 budget. Variety's reporters wrote that the money is on screen from the drone pull off the Monumento a la Revolucion.

Netflix's episode copy still names the guests. The Successor has Salinas walking through Colosio's rise as the PRI candidate in 1993. Round Earth has Raul Salinas remembering his 1995 arrest, then people close to Colosio talking about the hole his death left. The series does not close the case. Aburto was convicted. Special prosecutors came and went. Osorno's bet was that putting Salinas and Galeano in the same cut would do more than another rumor about who ordered the shot. Netflix still files it under political documentaries and true crime. The gossip is the guest list. ,