Breaking Bad: Hector Salamanca - Family Is All

The Salamancas are one of the main recurring villains in the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul story. One of the most prominent families in the Mexican cartel, they serve as muscle for the organization as well as having a drug operation in New Mexico. Members of the family include the crazed Tuco, the silently murderous twins Marco and Leonel, and the charismatic Lalo.

The patriarch of the Salamanca family is Hector Salamanca. A ruthless and cruel gangster, he was one of the main leaders of the cartel alongside Eladio and Juan Bolsa. As a Don, Hector is responsible for some of the most violent and atrocious acts of the cartel. However by the time of Breaking Bad, Hector is a wheelchair bound old man, unable to even speak.

As I talked about in a previous video, Gustavo Fring hates Hector for murdering his chemistry femboy Max, and plans a decades-long scheme to get revenge on him and the entire cartel. Gus takes pleasure in psychologically torturing Hector with the downfall of his criminal organization and the deaths of his family. And on some level this is justified, as Hector was a vicious scumbag.

However, part of me always felt torn when watching these scenes. As bad as Hector was in his life, in the present day he’s a crippled old man, unable to fight back or even cry out as his family is ripped away from him. It’s all the more tragic given Hector’s philosophy that family is everything. Gus, though a reasonable man on the surface, shows his worst side when dealing with Hector, and it left me conflicted on who to support in their fight.

So in this video, let’s go over Hector Salamanca, and see if there is anything sympathetic about this old narco.

Like I said before, Hector is the leader of the Salamanca family. Though he has no children of his own, he is the uncle of Tuco, Marco, Leonel, and Lalo. The Salamancas refer to him as “Tio”, or Uncle in English, because of this.

Hector was a founding member of the Cartel, alongside Juan Bolsa and the boss of the organization Eladio Vuente. Hector says that the Salamanca family was the driving force behind the cartel, providing the most money and blood for the organization. The fact that we see more Salamancas than any other family in the cartel supports this claim.

However, despite the Salamanca’s critical role in the formation of the cartel, Don Eladio did not seem to like Hector. When Hector comes to see him at his hacienda, he goes for a hug but Eladio only shakes his hand. He later hugs Bolsa, and is very happy to see Lalo, so it seems like this is a personal dislike of Hector himself, not the Salamanca family.

Part of this is his leadership style. Eladio liked to pit Hector and Gustavo against each other, ensuring that they would work harder to surpass each other and thus make more money for him. It also meant that they would never unite and try to overthrow him.

However it seems to go beyond that. When Hector is later paralyzed and left wheelchair bound, Eladio makes fun of his bell as well as taunts him with the fact that he can no longer have sex with women. Bolsa seems to find this distasteful, and it seems to be a personal problem that Eladio has with Hector.

Hector too seemed to dislike Eladio. In a flashback, we see him pissing into Eladio’s pool, a clear sign of disrespect. As we saw on the Sopranos, peeing into someone’s pool is a way of getting some petty revenge when you have no real options. Perhaps Hector, feeling disrespected because of Eladio’s treatment over the years, took the only revenge he could in this little act.

Despite this animosity, Hector was deeply loyal to the cartel. He’s distraught when he learns of Eladio’s death, and he refuses to cooperate with the feds, even against the people who killed or betrayed his family like Gus or Jesse.

That’s not to say that Hector is not a vicious criminal. He commits numerous heinous acts, including the murder of Max, the murder of his driver and the witness who discovered him, and the burning down of a hotel whose owner disrespected him. He also threatens Mike’s family in order to get him to cooperate.

However Hector’s one redeeming quality in all of this is his love of his family. He is deeply protective of his nephews. He threatens Mike in order to get Tuco a reduced sentence in prison. He directs Lalo to get proof of Gus’s betrayal instead of attacking him and risking the boss’s wrath. And he teaches them the philosophy of the Salamanca family.

When the twins Marco and Leonel were kids, Marco broke one of Leonel’s toys. Angry, Leonel said that he hated his brother and wanted him dead. Hector then held Marco’s head underwater, threatening to kill him unless Leonel stopped him. Leonel then hit Hector in order to save his brother. As brutal as this lesson was, it was done to impart to them the lesson that family is all.

Hector’s philosophy is in stark contrast with Gustavo’s. Where Hector believes in family and the more personal aspects such as blood for blood, Gus believes in rationality and treating drug dealing like a business. He’s dispassionate and cold blooded, which is why he and Hector are enemies from the start. Gus’s very nature is in opposition to Hector's philosophy.

This makes it all the more tragic when Gus slowly destroys that family. In revenge for killing Max, Gus systematically kills everyone close to Hector, including his nephews. It’s even revealed in Better Call Saul that Gus is responsible for Hector’s condition after his stroke, saving his life but only giving him enough medical care to keep him paralyzed and wheelchair bound.

Now on some level, this can feel like justice. After all, Hector did murder Gus’s partner Max in cold blood, and along with all the other evil things he’s done in his life, he deserves to suffer for his crimes. And it’s not like his nephews were innocent either. Tuco, the Twins, and Lalo were all vicious murderers who killed innocents and people not in the game, and again they arguably deserve their fate.

But are we really supposed to celebrate Gus torturing an old, crippled man? Sure the Cartel deserved to be destroyed, but this prolonging of Hector’s life only for him to continue to suffer at Gus’s hands is deeply disturbing. Gus tells Hector a story of when he was a child and he tortured a small animal for stealing fruit from his family’s tree. This is psychotic behavior, and as reasonable as some of Gus’s actions can appear, it’s hard to justify sadistic pleasure in his enemy’s suffering like this.

It also pokes some holes in the idea that Gus is this emotionless, logical machine. Gus is the same as Hector. He’s motivated by his love of the people close to him, driven to seek revenge on their behalf. It’s the same as the blood for blood philosophy he pretends to be above. And ironically, it’s this similarity that allows Hector to get the final revenge on Gus.

When Walt and Gus have a falling out, Walt allies with Hector to take him out. Walt straps a bomb to Hector, and lures Gus to him in the nursing home. Though Gus would be safer having his men take Hector out for him, he can’t deny himself the final pleasure of killing Hector himself. It’s this personal action that leaves him exposed, and with nothing left to live for Hector is able to take out his lifelong rival.

Though pitted as polar opposites, Gus is more like Hector than he would probably like to admit. Just like him he is also willing to do horrible things in order to get the revenge he desperately wants. Though perhaps not as wonton as Hector, Gus is willing to threaten the lives of innocents such as Nacho’s father and even Walt’s infant daughter. It’s even hinted that he may have been the one who ordered the murder of Tomas, the child working for his dealers.

I bring all of this up not to paint Hector as this sweet old man. Even in his old age he’s still a gangster through and through. But as bad as he was in life, I could never fully get behind Gus’s torture. Watching the scenes between the two left me really conflicted on who to root against, and I think that’s the beauty of the characters.

The conflict between the two was one of the best parts of the story, and the gray nature of the conflict makes Gus’s character that much more interesting. He’s not this unfeeling machine of logic and business. He’s a man driven by his passions the same as Hector, and it’s this very similarity that ends up destroying them both. It’s poetic in a way, and definitely changed how I viewed Hector.

But that’s just my opinion. Let me know what you thought of Hector Salamanca in the comments, and stay tuned for more Breaking Bad videos coming soon!