Postcard from Tijuana

Rico says the post title is a phrase you won't often hear, but Tim McGirk has an article at Time.com about the movie that inspired it:

It's a hazy morning, and I'm standing outside a McDonald's just a few yards from the US border. The fast-food joint seems to be the favorite place in Tijuana for assignations of every kind. Near me linger a pair of mismatched lovers, some drug pushers, and a giant of a man crosshatched with scars, as if somebody has played tic-tac-toe on his face with a knife. He eyes me briefly before stepping forward. "America," he says, nodding toward a concrete and steel tunnel full of shuffling foreigners waiting to clear immigration. "You want to cross?" He is a coyote, a human trafficker, and because of my complexion and my gear— jeans, a grubby cotton shirt, a backpack— he apparently mistakes me for an Eastern European, a Pole perhaps.
I am due to meet with a director who makes gory shoot-'em-up flicks about the Mexican drug cartels. Tijuana, both on film and in real life, is their battleground. My ride to the film shoot, a steel gray van, pulls up, and the scarred giant turns away, scowling. Cruising down La Sexta, the heart of the tawdry tourist district, my driver points out all the once famous restaurants and clubs, now shuttered. The wide boulevard is empty save for a man leading a donkey painted like a zebra. Most of the traffic in Tijuana these days is one-way, heading north. While a trip to Tijuana's nightclubs and sleazy bars used to be a rite of passage for every teenage boy from Southern California, that is no longer the case. A ferocious war between the drug cartels and the army litters Tijuana's streets with a few dead bodies every night. "Why have the American turistas stopped coming?" my driver grumbles. "Don't they know that these gunmen only kill each other?"
The van stops in front of a cemetery; colorful, chaotic, and overpopulated, much like Tijuana itself. A stray dog laps water from a vase of wilted flowers beside a tomb. Many victims of the drug killings are buried here. Graffiti slashed across a marble headstone serves as a final insult from a gloating enemy.
Amid the tombstones stands Mexican film director Enrique Murillo, shooting a scene for his latest movie, Eagles Fly Alone, in which a suave drug runner howls for revenge as he collapses on the grave of his murdered girlfriend. "This is a violent tale with hot women and plenty of heart," Murillo says, grinning. These themes are typical of Tijuana's film industry, which produces quickie movies celebrating the fast and furious lives of the drug lords. The most successful venture, Baja Films, can crank out a $20,000 movie in two weeks and market it throughout Mexico and to the huge Hispanic market in the US. Since the mid-'90s, Baja has produced over 130 films, a mini-Hollywood of tackiness and violence.
"We usually kill off about fifty guys," says Murillo. In the film he is shooting, the hero dies, and along the way, the audience gets to revel in the glamorous life of a drug runner who outwits and outguns the cops until the very end. Mario Valenzuela, who plays the villain, shrugs off accusations by the Mexican government and press that these films glorify the drug cartels. He says: "Violence is as much a part of our daily life as bread."
The action shifts to a junkyard in the ravines outside Tijuana. A gleaming white Dodge arrives, and its brawny driver hands the keys over to Baja Films producer Oscar Lopez. "He's one of the real ones," whispers a film crewman, nodding to the driver. It's not unusual, says Lopez, for actual drug traffickers to demand cameos in these films, lend their flashy cars, or open their many homes in Tijuana for location shoots. It confers a kind of fugitive celebrity. "We were invited to a mansion that had everything: lawns, swimming pool, fountains, even a tiger," recalls Lopez. "We were allowed to film everywhere except the basement. The guy tells me, 'If you go into the basement, I'll have to kill you. And I'm not kidding. I really will have to kill you.' So we stayed away from the basement." Whether aboveground or below, Tijuana has more than its share of dangers.

Rico says it's been a lot of years since he and his father shared a beer (an early one; Rico was still underage) in Tijuana, and it looks like they may not go back...