Pubdate: Sun, 05 Aug 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Reed Johnson

'ESTADO DE GRACIA' PONDERS DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION IN MEXICO The
dramatic series airing on Cinelatino in the U.S. was judged too
controversial to air in its homeland during election season.

Karina Gidi stars in "Estado de Gracia," the series about drug
legalization, seen in the U.S. exclusively on Cinelatino. (Adrian
Ibanez, (c)Once TV Mexico 2012 / August 5, 2012) Related photos)

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times August 5, 2012, 8:00 a.m. Mexican
federal legislator Julieta Toscano isn't afraid to say what some
Mexicans have long been thinking: After six years of turmoil and
55,000 people killed in narcotics-related violence, it's time to stem
the bloodshed by legalizing drugs.

Of course, in real life it would be political suicide for most
politicians on either side of the border to stump for drugs-on-demand.
But Toscano, played by Mexican actress Karina Gidi, is the lead
character in "Estado de Gracia" (State of Grace), a highly addictive
fictional TV series that began airing this summer in the United States
on the Spanish-language Cinelatino cable and satellite channel.

Gruesome drug-related plots and scar-faced mafiosos have been staples
of Mexico's melodramatic telenovelas since a 2006 crackdown on
narco-trafficking by President Felipe Calderon caused his country's
already escalating violence to go viral. But "Estado de Gracia" is
almost certainly the first Mexican fictive TV series about drugs to
place more emphasis on character arc, dramatic nuance and social
critique than on exploitationist scenes of beheadings, torture and the
like.

Even so, the Mexican public TV channel that commissioned "Estado de
Gracia" considered the series too inflammatory to run during Mexico's
recently concluded presidential election season. That allowed
Cinelatino, whose headquarters is in Coral Gables, Fla., but has most
of its operations in Mexico City, to purchase the 13-episode series
and air it first.

Although Cinelatino's primary focus is movies, the company's chairman,
James McNamara, said that the series' high-quality production values
and complex story line, the tragic relevancy of the subject matter,
and the skillfully neutral handling of a taboo topic sold him on
"Estado de Gracia."

"I think this really did start out on the premise 'Let's do a drama
where we posit from the get-go the concept of 'war against drugs is
not working, so let's wake up, people, and legalize it, thereby reduce
the violence, reduce the collateral damage,'" McNamara said. Still,
the series suggests that decriminalizing drugs, much like the current
war on drugs, could bring its own set of contradictions and deadly
unintended consequences.

Stylistically similar to Steven Soderbergh's 2000 feature film
"Traffic," "Estado de Gracia" jumps among interweaving story lines to
depict the drug trade's insidiously corrupting influence. All the
characters are complex and flawed in some way; there are no cardboard
saints or villains in this shadowy moral universe.

The virtuous Congresswoman Toscano, who sparks a screaming match in
Mexico's federal legislature when she proposes legalizing drugs in the
show's first episode, harbors a secret dependency on sleeping pills.
Her seemingly angelic teenage daughter Ximena, played by Sara Cobo
Botello, is loosening up for parties with handfuls of Ecstasy-like
stimulants.

Other major characters include a high-minded Mexican police captain,
played by Raul Mendez, whose devotion to his career has horrific
consequences for his family, and a sullenly charismatic bad-boy TV
star (Adan Canto) who's waging a losing battle with the bottle.
"Estado de Gracia" depicts the impunity that drug lords enjoy under
Mexico's Swiss-cheese criminal justice system as well as showing a
reporter's morally ambiguous role in covering the bloodbath.

Conceived as a verite, documentary-like drama that aspires to be a
cross between "The Wire" and "The Shield" (doesn't every serious TV
drama these days?), the series originally was developed by director
and executive producer Carlos Bolado for Once TV (Eleven TV), Mexico's
publicly funded equivalent of PBS or the BBC.

But "Estado" was regarded as such a hot potato during Mexico's
presidential contest that Once passed on running it because station
officials feared that running the series before the July 1 election
might be perceived as partisan.

Through its first eight weeks the series has performed well in U.S.
markets, with an average weekly rating of about 150,000 households, a
solid number for a Spanish-language cable TV show that's not news,
sports or a soap opera. Last weekend, viewers were given a chance to
catch up on the first eight episodes in a two-day marathon. Regularly
scheduled episodes 9 and 10 will resume Aug. 6, and the final episode
will air Aug. 27.

Cinelatino plans to re-air the series in September with English
subtitles in hopes of attracting more of the English-dominant,
bilingual U.S. Latino audience.

The series' stateside success also helped persuade Once TV to start
airing "Estado" on Aug. 1, one month after Mexico's election. Rafael
Lugo Sanchez, Once's director, speaking by phone from Mexico City,
said that "obviously for us it's very important as a public television
station to have a lot of caution and consideration about what we put
on the air" and stay above the partisan fray.

Yet tackling thorny topics is part of Once's mission, Lugo said,
whereas the country's powerful, politically well-connected main TV
networks, Televisa and Azteca, "don't like to touch uncomfortable
subjects." What distinguishes "Estado" from other shows with
drug-related narratives, he believes, is its "holistic vision" of
Mexican society. "The theme isn't only the legalization of drugs," he
said. "It's also how do drugs impregnate the entire society, legal
drugs and illegal drugs."

Director Bolado has made a career out of making people occasionally
uncomfortable, with documentaries about Jewish and Palestinian children
("Promises," 2001) and a just-released thriller about the 1994 murder of
a Mexican presidential candidate ("Colosio: El Asesinato"). Speaking by
phone from Mexico City, Bolado said that the series' writers, one of
whom is a journalist, sought to invest "Estado de Gracia" with as much
authenticity as possible by incorporating scenes and ideas based on
actual events.

"Telenovelas are very formulaic in the way they're shot," Bolado said.
"This series includes a lot of street shooting and shooting in other
real locations. And it's filmed in a manner that's more daring, more
fragmented, with shorter phrases in terms of the imagery, and this
makes it more dynamic. It's a narrative logic and velocity that's
better than telenovelas, which are rigid and repetitive."

Despite the slaughter of recent years and the Mexican public's weariness
of the killing, it's unlikely that drug decriminalization or
legalization will gain traction with Mexico's government soon. "It's a
political nonstarter in Mexico because of pressure from the U.S.
government," said George Grayson, a professor of government at the
College of William & Mary and co-author of the just-published book "The
Executioner's Men: Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs,
and the Shadow State They Created."

Grayson thinks it's likely that the current levels of violence will
diminish in the months ahead, as more Mexican state governors cut
deals with the narco lords. "In most states the governors either turn
a blind eye or shall we say have a special arrangement with the
cartels," Grayson said. But at the federal level, he said, drug
decriminalization is "the third rail" of Mexican politics, as it is in
the United States.

Gidi, the series' star, hopes that "Estado de Gracia" at least may
help open a cultural dialogue between two countries that share a big
problem each tends to blame on the other.

"Americans don't think that we are doing our part of the job very
well. And I think that the Mexican government sometimes answers,
'Yeah, we make the drug, we send the drug, but it's your people that
consume the drug,'" Gidi said. "And I don't know if you guys are right
or if we are right. Or if we both are a little bit right."
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