MEXICO CITY - In a country where nobody trusts the police, can you make a routine cop television show?
Mexican prime time is full of melodrama and comedy, variety shows and even historical series. But until last month a home-produced version of the police procedural, a staple of American television, was nowhere to be found.
Old as the formula is, it translates easily. Upright officers gather evidence, question witnesses and mostly get their criminal. In Mexico, though, the idea of a police protagonist with integrity poses such a dramatic disconnect from most Mexicans’ reality that a standard precinct drama had long seemed out of reach.
But in May the Mexican incarnation finally arrived. The show, “El Equipo” (“The Team”), does not try to resolve the contradiction between what citizens here think of their police - incompetent at best, criminal collaborators at worst - and a sympathetic portrayal on screen. The show focuses on the exploits of an elite crime-fighting team so heroic that its members don’t even need last names.
The team’s work is split between action-packed “operativos” and time spent tapping on computers in what is supposed to be the Mexican federal police intelligence center but which looks more like a neon-lighted conference room.
“If there is a message we wanted to transmit, it’s that inside the police forces there is technology, there is intelligence, there are committed men, people of flesh and blood who go to work every day,” said Pedro Torres, who produced the series for Televisa, Mexico’s dominant broadcaster. “I think there are many heroes and many very honest people inside the federal police.”
The series collided with the real-life politics of Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers. One of the centerpieces of President Felipe Calderon’s strategy against organized crime is the creation of an effective national police to take over from the military. The man in charge of building the federal police, Genaro Garcia Luna, the secretary of public security, has become a polarizing figure in the drug war as the death toll mounts and violence spreads to states that were formerly peaceful.
The Mexican press immediately branded “El Equipo” an advertisement for the federal police, which gave Mr. Torres extensive access to its facilities as he filmed. Legislators in Congress demanded that Mr. Garcia Luna give an accounting of how much police money was spent to support the filming and how many hours real officers spent working as extras.
When it comes to American police dramas, Mexicans have long suspended their disbelief. But when the action is closer to home, TV police clearly seem to irritate. “In principle there is no problem with an institution promoting itself,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, one of Mexico’s leading experts on police reform. “But the image and the reality don’t coincide.”
“El Equipo” investigators spend a lot of time sneaking into drug lords’ houses disguised as delivery men or waiting tables in cafes where sex traffickers discuss business. Some critics found the officers’ behavior so foolhardy that the program ended up blackening the reputation of the federal police instead of polishing it.
The streets and houses are real, a break from the claustrophobic sets Mexicans are used to seeing in their soap operas. But audiences never see the protagonists collecting evidence or interviewing witnesses, fundamentals in police work, even on television.
Most real cases are solved with information from the public, Mr. Lopez Portillo said, explaining that unless people trust the police, they won’t report suspicious activity. “The most advanced police forces try to win people’s confidence,” he said. On the show, “if they don’t appear talking to people, it’s a complete fantasy.”
By ELISABETH MALKIN
