Life imitates art in a New York Times article that probes the events that inspired Steven Soderbergh’s movie “Traffic.†The article focuses on a former Mexican police official who helped hunt down drug traffickers, much like the character Benicio del Toro so memorably portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie.
The police official became an informant for the DEA, just like the character in the movie. But the actual events that followed - carefully kept secret by the United States and Mexico for more than a decade - left the informant’s life in ruins, a sharp departure from how things played out on the silver screen.
In this video, the reporter Ginger Thompson talks with Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter who won an Academy Award for “Traffic,†about the ways in which the movie verged on real life. She also interviews Ralph Villarruel, the DEA agent who worked with the people at the center of what is widely considered the biggest drug trafficking case in Mexican history.
