Don Pedro Áviles—Güero Méndez

Don Pedro Áviles—Güero Méndez is a relationship of apprenticeship, trust, and succession: Don Pedro raises Güero from an orphaned child into his right-hand man, and Güero’s survival when Don Pedro is killed becomes the condition through which that training gives way to independent authority. Their connection is practical as well as personal. Don Pedro teaches Güero the business and relies on him, while Güero knows his employer’s habits well enough to imagine his reaction even after his death.

From Orphan to Apprentice

Don Pedro takes Güero off the streets of Culiacán while the boy is an orphan, in connection with a religious offering to Santo Jesús Malverde, whom the novel identifies as the patron saint of Sinaloan gomeros. He brings the child into his world and raises him in the business, teaching him everything he knows. The account makes Güero’s later standing more than a matter of sudden promotion: his place beside Don Pedro has been built through years of instruction and proximity.

By the time Don Pedro is seventy-three, Güero is a young man and his assistant and right-hand man. He is described as exceptionally quick with figures and perceptive, qualities that complement the experience of an employer who has survived by being careful. Don Pedro trusts him with the wheel of his Mercedes while five trusted gunmen follow in another car. Their families live in Don Pedro’s compound in Culiacán, making the protective arrangement part of a wider network of dependence around the older man. Güero’s position is close, but it exists within a household and organization whose security is bound to Don Pedro’s survival.

Familiarity in the Everyday

Their relationship also appears in small, revealing habits rather than only in the language of training and authority. On the rough road, Güero drives the Mercedes too fast, and Don Pedro tells him to slow down. Güero laughs at Don Pedro’s fussing over the car: despite possessing immense wealth, the older man is inclined to complain about even the modest cost of washing road dust from it. The contrast suggests how well Güero knows Don Pedro’s ordinary manner. He recognizes the disproportion between the man’s fortune and his attention to small expenses, and treats it as familiar behavior.

That familiarity returns after the ambush in an altered form. With Don Pedro dead and the Mercedes ruined, Güero foolishly thinks about how angry the old man would be over the damage. The car, once an object over which Don Pedro could scold his driver, has become a reminder of the lost person whose reactions Güero still anticipates. The thought conveys their intimacy without turning the relationship into a simple sentimental bond: their closeness has been shaped by work, instruction, authority, and everyday routine.

The Ambush and the Survivor

When armed men surround Don Pedro, he sees Adán Barrera in a black suit and assumes the arrest is a performance for the Americans, one that will end with his release. He stands and raises his arms, ordering his men to do the same. Güero, by contrast, slowly sinks to the floor of the car. The difference in their positions marks the abrupt end of Don Pedro’s authority: he expects the danger to be staged, while Güero’s survival will carry him into a new arrangement of power.

Güero later tells other traffickers that Santo Jesús Malverde shielded him from the bullets. He recounts firing at the federal police, escaping from the car into the brush, and making his way back to the city, repeatedly describing himself as unsure whether he was alive. His account gives religious meaning to his survival, but the subsequent transfer of the Baja Plaza supplies a political consequence. At a later meeting, Adán Barrera awards Güero the Baja Plaza. Adán understands the appointment not as an unexpected favor but as fulfillment of a promise, and connects it to the fact that Güero survived the ambush that killed Don Pedro.

Mentorship Becomes Succession

The appointment gives public form to what Don Pedro’s mentorship had prepared: Güero moves from the role of apprentice and assistant to control of a major plaza. The novel does not present the transfer as proof that Güero has become Don Pedro’s equal in character or experience. Instead, it connects the older man’s investment in him to a specific inheritance of responsibility and position. Güero’s survival, first recounted as a miraculous escape, is also the event that allows that succession to take effect.

The relationship therefore joins intimate knowledge to the transfer of criminal power. Don Pedro’s training establishes Güero’s capabilities; daily reliance establishes his place at the older man’s side; and the ambush removes the person on whom that position depended. The later promise gives the loss an institutional aftermath, as the former apprentice receives the Baja Plaza and enters the new order as its holder. Don Pedro’s influence persists not through his continued command, but through the successor he raised and the authority passed to him.