There is a way in which Netflix writes history. Its portrayals of the drug-trafficking barons who form the dramatis personae of Narcos in its Colombian seasons are now ingrained in the popular imagination. And, of course, the less well-known the original, the more space for the fictive version to fill. The latest season focuses on the founding father of Mexican narcotraffic: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, AKA El Padrino, The Godfather – and that he certainly was. There is a famous drug ballad (or narcocorrido) by the masters of the genre, Los Tigres Del Norte, called El Jefe de los Jefes – the boss of bosses. It is near universally presumed to be a tribute portrait to Gallardo.

The mafia expert Roberto Saviano said Pablo Escobar was “the Copernicus” of narcotraffic because he was “the first to understand that it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine”. Cocaine: the perfect commodity that knows no such thing as recession, which can sell reliably without quality control at a steady price. If Escobar was Copernicus, Félix Gallardo was the great entrepreneur, the empire-builder with foresight and an astutely perfect understanding of his market: the Henry Ford or Bill Gates of cocaine.

In the 1980s, Gallardo created and managed the first great narco corporation in Mexico that dealt primarily in distribution rather than production. The Guadalajara Cartel can be seen as parallel to Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, rather than the latter incarnations of Mafia, such as the Neapolitan Camorra or Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta – who disliked violence for violence’s sake when it interrupted the running of the business, but applied it ruthlessly when it helped.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former cartel boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in1989 Photograph: AP

Gallardo was born near the state capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán, where he joined the police and became a bodyguard for the governor, Leopoldo Sanchez. But with Sanchez’ protection, he soon gravitated towards the business traditional to the wild Sierra Madre Occidental.

After Operation Condor destroyed poppy production in Mexico, the stage was set for a narco from Sinaloa called Pedro Avilés to step into the vacuum and escalate existing marijuana smuggling routes into a full-scale cocaine-trafficking operation. But when Avilés was killed in a shootout in 1978, it was time for his heir Félix Gallardo, with two lieutenants – Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo – to take over the operation. By the mid-80s, the Guadalajara Cartel had become the biggest in the world.

Gallardo and his lieutenants modernised, commercialised and internationalised narcotraffic. They established cocaine routes from South America, through Mexico, to the USA and Europe that pertain today. Gallardo understood the markets as well as any of his opposite numbers on Wall Street or Canary Wharf. He spoke their language and set up the Mexican dominance of the narcotraffic it still enjoys today.

Gallardo laid the foundations for a system of corruption and conviviality with the Mexican state that would protect mutual interests on the principle of Pax Mafiosa (the Mafia’s Peace). The system worked with the cartel, guaranteeing a modicum of calm if corrupted officialdom helped it keep the product flowing against challenges from rival, smaller syndicates. They started to streamline a model of money-laundering into the supposedly “legal” economy north and south of the border that would be perfected by Gallardo’s successors: Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, standing trial in New York this week, and Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada.

But in 1985, a calamity mutated the cartel, and the history of Mexican political conviviality with it. An undercover DEA agent, Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena, had infiltrated the cartel, harvesting detail on its routes, personnel and connections to power. Camarena was kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and killed (there is evidence that the CIA knew this was to occur but did nothing in order to protect its own sources – relations between the two agencies have never recovered). Whatever the whole truth behind Camarena’s death, Washington demanded that the Mexican government do something, and that something was to arrest, in 1989, the man it was in part protecting: Gallardo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Peña as Kiki Camarena in Narcos: Mexico Photograph: Carlos Somonte/Netflix

From prison, Gallardo sought to keep his organisation together, allocating its component “Plazas” – the turf on which to operate. You could say that Félix Gallardo invented outsourcing. Gallardo’s vision was Pax Mafiosa, whereby criminal syndicates know their place with reference to each other, law enforcement knows its place in the same scheme of things, and the product keeps flowing. Gallardo knew that politicians understand the price this relative calm comes at – protection.

With semi-official blessing across his spheres of influence, Gallardo franchised smuggling plazas along the border into the USA into zones: his relatives, the Arellano Félix family, were allotted Tijuana, the plaza into San Diego made famous by Steven Soderbergh’s film Traffic. The Beltrán Leyva family took Sonoran desert crossings into Arizona further east, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes, “Lord of the Skies”, was assigned the historic crossing from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas. The Pacific coast was given to Gallardo’s rising young proteges, Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Crucially to what followed, Gallardo left the territory east of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, to the Gulf Cartel, newly forged by Juán Garcia Obrego. But the cartels were not destined to work together harmoniously and Gallardo’s demise marked the beginning of the end of the old, stable, Mafia.

Gallardo’s cartel split into different branches, each claiming its mantle in this zone or that. The Arellano Félix brothers forged their own organisation: the Tijuana Cartel. Carrillo Fuentes founded the Juárez Cartel, which later grew its enforcement arm, La Linea. The Beltrán Leyva brothers at first co-operated with the most important figure of all to emerge from all this, Guzmán, who formed his Sinaloa cartel with Zambada and in 2006 declared war in pursuit of the whole border. He targeted not only his former fellow affiliates under Gallardo, but the forbidden territory of the Gulf Cartel, now with its own military wing, Los Zetas, which in time became a brutal syndicate of their own. And there began the nightmare into which Mexico has descended since.

Netflix can take outrageous liberties with truth, such as concocting a meeting between a young, lowly El Chapo Guzmán and Pablo Escobar in El Chapo – a scene rightly described by Deborah Bonello of InSight Crime website as “preposterous”. But Gallardo kept a journal, from which the Netflix series would depart at its peril, whatever its veracity.

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The diary was procured by the Mexican journalist and writer Diego Osorno, and extracts published in an expansive piece on Gallardo in Gatopardo magazine in 2009. Gallardo takes no prisoners: he talks openly about his interests in the Mexican banks which cleaned his money, while pleading “my innocence” in the murder of Camarena. Gallardo was moved to the Jojutla jail in Morelos where he lingers still, finally convicted of Camarena’s killing – after decades of legal manoeuvring – in 2017.

Unlike so many who followed in his wake, Gallardo wanted business to run smoothly, with as little violence as possible – until, as Camarena learned, it became necessary. Shattering the Pax Mafiosa did not result in a reduction in the flow of drugs into the USA, Europe and eventually the world – in no small degree due to the man Gallardo spotted young, and whose trial opens in earnest in New York this week: Guzmán. Quite the reverse, it increased and increases exponentially, yet the flow entails no decrease in retail price at the “consuming” end of the line, literally, in our society. The Godfather, the CEO, chairman of the board, remains so, now emeritus.

Ed Vulliamy is author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline, published by Vintage

Narcos: Mexico is available on Netflix from Friday 16 November