Mexican Director Luis Estrada Finally Brings Las Muertas to Netflix, Uncensored and Unapologetic
After three decades of trying, filmmaker Luis Estrada has adapted Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Las muertas into a fearless Netflix series. The show revisits the Poquianchis crimes with an all-Mexican production, exposing not only past horrors but Mexico’s enduring culture of corruption.
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For Luis Estrada, director of La ley de Herodes and El infierno, the adaptation of Las muertas has been his white whale. On the red carpet at Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional, he admitted the series was the “greatest challenge” of his career. For once, he gave up his usual role as a total auteur.
“I have no idea how much the series ended up costing; that’s not my area, and I don’t care. I lacked nothing,” Estrada told EFE. “They accompanied me throughout and let me do it with freedom and independence, which was my main concern, because in all my other films I was the boss. Here, I was an employee.”
The confession landed with irony. Estrada accepted a paycheck if the story could keep its bite. For thirty years, Mexican producers balked at Ibargüengoitia’s blend of satire and brutality. Now, on a global streaming stage, Estrada has delivered it “without any kind of censorship,” a line that resonated like both a promise and a provocation.
A Crime That Never Stops Echoing
The series revives one of Mexico’s most notorious cases: the Poquianchis, a family of women who ran vast brothel networks in mid-20th-century Mexico, hiding deaths and murders of the women they exploited. Estrada’s adaptation renames them the Baladro sisters, but the echoes are unmistakable.
Actress Paulina Gaitán, who plays Serafina Baladro, told EFE that her task was to avoid caricature. “We’re playing very complex characters; they’re monstrous,” she said. “But for me it was important to seek, somehow, the humanity in Serafina—and I feel it’s there. She’s sensitive; even if she’s missing a few screws, she feels and has a heart.”
That nuance, refusing to flatten villains into grotesques, honors Ibargüengoitia’s satirical gaze. His 1977 novel dissected cruelty with cold irony, turning scandal into a mirror of society. Estrada follows suit: the series avoids pulp sensationalism in favor of exposing how exploitation was sustained by gossip, impunity, poverty, and official silence.
A Mexican Megaproduction Built to Compete
Estrada’s first series is not small. It boasts 5,000 extras, 217 sets, and 170 regional actors—numbers more often associated with Hollywood. Actor Alfonso Herrera told EFE the production “can absolutely hold its own. It’s unheard of—and almost impossibly hard—to mount something like this. I didn’t want to miss it.”
The scope is a declaration of confidence: Mexico’s crews, designers, and performers can reconstruct an entire period with precision. Cantinas, bus terminals, brothels, municipal offices—the whole ecosystem of complicity—are recreated with granular authenticity. The timeline spans from 1945 to 1964, a period during which the PRI consolidated power and vice markets flourished openly.
Veteran actor Joaquín Cosío, known for El Infierno, told EFE that the sisters’ empire mirrors Mexico’s structural rot. “Recent Mexican governments seem to have tried to uproot the corruption that was once a hallmark of our politics,” he said. “But it’s still very much with us.” In Las muertas, corruption is not a subplot; it is the atmosphere in which the crimes breathe.
Politics in the Frame, Not Just the Dialogue
Estrada has always preferred satire by implication, and Las muertas continues that method. The camera lingers on overlooked permits, inspections waved through, evidence conveniently misplaced—the small gestures by which power recognizes itself and then looks away.
The series arrives 47 years after Ibargüengoitia’s novel, but lands in a Mexico still asking: who gets protected and who disappears? Which crimes scandalize, and which become routine? Estrada’s insistence on no censorship is less bravado than necessity. The story’s violence cannot be softened without betraying its meaning.
At the premiere, Estrada looked both triumphant and resigned: triumphant to have finally filmed the project, resigned to the fact that its themes remain relevant. Gaitán, too, suggested the series trusts viewers to endure discomfort if it brings understanding. The lavish production—the extras, the sets, the painstaking detail—is all in service of that wager.
The Country Off-Screen, the Country Onscreen
The night at Cineteca felt like a reunion: Estrada, a filmmaker who has spent decades skewering Mexican politics; an all-Mexican cast and crew reconstructing a national trauma; and an audience already steeped in the Poquianchis scandal. Yet Estrada’s adaptation is also a professional recalibration. He accepted the role of “employee” to gain the reach and resources that Netflix could provide, trading some control for the guarantee of independence in content.
The result is not just a prestige outlier but an entry in Mexico’s cultural ledger—eight or ten hours of narrative that follow complicity as a system, not an isolated crime.
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That is why Las muertas may feel less like a true crime spectacle than a civic X-ray. The Poquianchis endure in memory because their crimes were both extreme and ordinary. Estrada, free to offend, casts light on that ordinariness: the bureaucrats, the police, the neighbors who chose not to see. If the series resonates, it will be because it doesn’t merely dramatize a case. It reconstructs the country that made it possible—and suggests that, half a century later, the architecture of impunity still stands.
