There are many bizarre villains in the worlds of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul; just take a look at the Salamanca Family, for example. All of them have the heart of a killer; Lalo is a charming and cunning killer, The Cousins are stealthy but deadly killers, and Hector, to use Lalo’s phrase, just wants to kill everyone.
But you have to be a certain kind of spontaneous cuckoo to make even Don Eladio scared of you, and Tuco Salamanca fits that description. Even though he only made an appearance seven times over two different TV shows, the real psychopath super villain of the early seasons of Breaking Bad has left a lasting impression on its viewers.
But who is he really? Why did he change into the person he was? And what might be the most well-known figure created by Raymond Cruz has any real-life counterparts? This video, Origins – Explored by Tuco Salamanca, will address all of those queries in addition to others.
Be Careful What You Wish For Because It Might Be Crazy – Tuco in Breaking Bad
After getting to know Skinny Pete, it is difficult to believe that he ever had any sort of relationship with Tuco, but when we first started watching Breaking Bad, it appeared as real as it could be. However, once we met Tuco, we realised that only some of what Pete had stated was accurate. They were cellmates in Los Lunas, yes, but they were not quite as close as he had implied.
This presented a challenge for Jesse because he does not only work in the consignment business, yo. When Captain Cook realises that Tuco is the personification of trouble with a capital T, he tries to take the stockpile of crystal that he and Walt had created to entice a distributor, but his decision to flee marks him for the beating of a lifetime. Tuco snatches Jesse’s batch while high on the 99.1% meth and beats him to within an inch of his life, initiating the trend of Jesse receiving punishment for Walt’s illegal aspirations.
But from the moment he is introduced to the series, we know that he is a big player, because Tuco is introduced as Krazy-8’s boss and up until this point, he was the only person that we as the audience knew of in the distribution business. It would later be revealed that Tuco was the head of operations for the notorious Salamanca family in New Mexico, and that through his ruthless business tactics; he had quickly become a kingpin of renown north of the border.
Perhaps because he was unaware of all this, Walt got the bright idea to confront Tuco with a bag of fulminated mercury disguised as meth, but turns out that all Salamanca’s might be varying degrees of crazy, but they respect cojones. After Heisenberg nearly blows Tuco’s headquarters to smithereens with a single shard of his chem-bomb, he manages to wink out a proper deal out of him. Tuco will start buying Heisenberg’s product and pay him money upfront, and the distribution will only go up with every deal.
But at the first deal that Heisenberg and Jesse Pinkman cut with Tuco, things nearly end for both of them as they end up falling short due to not having precursor. They narrowly escape a hairy situation and make it to the next meet with the requisite quota, but Tuco is suspicious of it at first because it’s blue. Walt and Jesse assure him of the product’s quality, but after he tries it himself, Tuco declares he doesn’t care if it’s blue, pink or yellow he just wants more of it.
But then he does something that firmly establishes him as a psychopath. His associate No-Doze backs him up by telling Walt and Jesse to remember who they’re working for, which Tuco takes as disrespect and beats him to death, forcing Walt and Jesse to look at the wrist he punched him with. After realising what he had done, Tuco asks his brother-in-law Gonzo to dispose of No-Doze’s body.
They leave and the next time we see Tuco, he is kidnapping Walt and Jesse and taking them across the border! Turns out, the DEA raided his HQ after Gonzo “disappeared”. Tuco thinks that Gonzo ratted him out, but Walt and Jesse know that he is already dead thanks to Hank’s machismo. They had planned ahead and prepared ricin in advance to kill off Tuco at the first opportune moment.
Sadly for them, it presented itself in front of Tuco’s beloved Tio; Don Hector Salamanca, whose origins you can check out on our channel. Tuco was planning to take Walt and Jesse to the cartel’s superlabs where they would “cook meth 24/7” and make beaucoup bucks but he swiftly changes his tune once his uncle warns him that the pair he is going to go to work with are actually punking him. Tuco lashes out at Jesse like a wild animal because he knows Walt is the brains of the operation, and he realises that they were trying to poison him.
This causes him to lose his equilibrium for a moment which was enough for Jesse to smash him in the face with a rock and then shoot him with his own gun square in the belly. The two meth cooks then hide out, hoping that Tuco would bleed to death but he just keeps getting up. If it weren’t for Hank showing up unexpectedly, all three of them would’ve died a painful death that day. Tuco was looking for Jesse in his car when Hank pulled up behind him. When he realised what was happening, he immediately started a shootout with Hank.
Tuco had the firepower advantage, of course, but Hank was the more stable hand that day and he managed to take Tuco out for good. From that point forward, Tuco’s shadow loomed large over the story. His grill, which Hank took as a trophy, began making him feel disgusted with what he was becoming, and it signalled a change coming for his character.
Tuco’s death spurred Hector to summon the cousins for revenge, which gave Gus the perfect moment to strike the cartel hard and fast. And without Tuco there to look after things, the Salamanca Family lost its last potential don-level member. Because in a meeting between Hector, The Cousins and Gus following Tuco’s death, it is revealed that Hector was grooming him for the family business and thought of him as a son.
When you realise just how ruthless Hector himself was when he could still walk, it will all make sense to you. But Tuco is the lynchpin for both Walter White’s success and the cartel’s downfall. He can be thought of as the first domino, in fact, which was not the case in Better Call Saul, where he was treated more like a rabid dog off its leash.
The Calm Before the Storm – Better Call Saul explains how Tuco “went insane”
Although he only appears properly in 2 episodes of Better Call Saul, Tuco reminds us just how crazy he can be even when he isn’t on meth all the time. He’s living with his grandmother in New Mexico and is actually cooking food for a change, when his peace is disturbed by a couple of conning twins. They come barging into the house alongside Tuco’s grandma and start demanding that he pays them for what she did, but it isn’t until they call her a biznatch that Tuco really loses it.
He calmly asks his grandmother to go upstairs and watch her TV shows while he handles business with these gentlemen, and then promptly attacks them and knocks them out cold. When Saul shows up, introducing himself as an “officer of the law”, Tuco nabs him as well and takes all three of them out to the desert. Saul starts mouthing off about how they shouldn’t kill him because he’s a big deal but Tuco and Nacho see right through it.
They instead discover that Saul had put the twins up to the scam but he explains that his intended target was not Tuco’s abuelita. Saul somehow manages to talk down Tuco from gouging out his accomplices’ eyes, giving them Colombian neckties, or doing something even worse to them, to simply breaking a leg each which would have been inconceivable in Breaking Bad. He even allows No-Doze to live without striking him when he talks up for him in front of Saul, though we do get the foreshadowing of his fate.
A lot of what Tuco does in the early half of Better Call Saul can actually be seen as black comedy because he isn’t nearly as erratic as he gets towards the Breaking Bad timeline, but Nacho thinks it’s only a matter of time before he gets there, so he orders a hit on Tuco and personally hires Mike for the job. When Mike refuses to do it on the grounds that Tuco might one day become a nuisance for Nacho, he tells him the story of what Tuco did to one of their dealers when he was tripping on meth one time.
He tells Mike that Tuco got so paranoid that he didn’t even interrogate this dealer; he just shot him point-blank with a sawed off shotgun. Nacho knew that day just what he was dealing with, and he will have a piece of that dealer’s skull in his body till the day he dies as a reminder of just how crazy Tuco could get. Mike takes him up on the offer but he amends it to pure sabotage, because Nacho doesn’t need Tuco dead to continue his side business; he just needs him gone. So, they plan to get him arrested whilst committing a felony in full view of the cops.
The plan works perfectly; Tuco is seen by multiple squad cars re-arranging Mike’s face for him, with his wallet in his hands and a gun in his vicinity. But as it would turn out, this detention is what would make Tuco go completely off the rails. Hector manages to negotiate with Mike and make him take the gun charges onto himself and allowing Tuco to only serve for battery in exchange for $50,000; but during his time at Los Lunas, Tuco knifes an inmate- which was referenced in Breaking Bad- and attacks a guard as well, which sends Hector into a rage.
By the time Season 6 Part 2 of Better Call Saul came out, Tuco was 11 months away from being released. In Part 2, Gus is handed exclusive control over territories north of the border, which implicates that Tuco also setting up shop right there was no coincidence. In fact, it was an agitation by the cartel, because they knew Gus wouldn’t try to move against someone as unpredictable as Tuco without an ironclad plan.
And given that his killing of Lalo was only successful because of a hunch, we don’t think it would’ve been enough to kill Tuco. But that’s it for the character. Now let’s talk about the man behind him, and the real-life inspirations for Tuco Salamanca himself.
Tuco Salamanca’s possible real-life inspirations and why Raymond Cruz hates him
It’s rare to hear an actor openly state that they hate a character that they portrayed, especially one as popular as Tuco, but Raymond Cruz is in that rare class who is able to distinguish between characters and real-life; mainly because he has seen just how ugly gang violence could really get. A lot of his performance was based on his childhood, which was very troubled to begin with. Cruz was brought up in East Los Angeles, an area that was notorious for gang violence in the 20th century and continues to be so till this day.
He recalls watching his first man die at the age of 12. When he was 13, he first encountered a person on methamphetamine and personally saw just how destructive the drug could be. According to the anecdote he gave to The Daily Beast in an interview, the man he saw was so out of his mind that he was running naked on the streets and he bashed in a car’s windshield with his bare feet. It’s traumatic stuff for an adolescent to witness, and Cruz admits that every time he played Tuco, he had to channel that darkness within him to do justice to the part.
And it truly paid off on screen, because the moment Tuco put out a cigarette with his tongue and called Jesse his favourite swear word, he instantly became our favourite maniac on TV. But as Cruz puts it, the performance is extremely draining and physically destructive for him. Other than the disturbing dialogue work, he also has to go through a lot of physical damage which once almost broke his neck.
And his wife also hated Tuco with a passion, especially the fact that he was playing it. So even though Tuco was being set up as the biggest antagonist of Season 2, Vince Gilligan and Co. had to change plans because Raymond Cruz requested to be killed off. In retrospect, we respect his decision because we personally can’t imagine all the horrid pictures he’d have had to conjure up from his memories to play Tuco, but it also makes us glad that he was open to doing cameos for Better Call Saul because he got to show a different side of Tuco there. He was violent still, yes, but somewhat controlled thanks to the people around him.
And, of course, there was also the matter of him being the lead actor of The Closer, which was also filming at the time Cruz was working on Breaking Bad. So a cocktail of issues culminated in Tuco Salamanca being taken out much earlier than the show-runners wanted him to go, but it all worked out in the end as Tuco’s crazy works for us precisely because we received it in small doses. Had we gotten more of it, we probably wouldn’t think as highly of him as we do.
But having explored the reasons behind why we didn’t get more Tuco, let’s speculate who he might be based off of from real-life cartel members. As we have already mentioned in our Hector Salamanca origins video- go check that out if you haven’t already- the Salamanca family seems to be a composite of two separate cartels operating from the Michoacán region: The now-defunct Beltran-Leyva Organization and La Familia Michioacana; their composition being inspired by the former, and their “values” being derived from the latter.
The Beltran-Leyva Cartel was founded by 5 brothers, which sounds awfully similar to the composition of the Salamanca family as we know it. There’s Don Hector at the top, with Don Lalo right underneath him, and then we have Tuco, Marco and Leonel. Sure, there’s also Hector’s grandson Joaquin, but he serves as Eladio’s bodyguard and we find out about him at the very last moment, but this is the exact same number of family members as the real-life Beltran-Levya Cartel’s founders, which indicates that the show-runners might have drawn inspiration from them.
When it comes to La Familia Michoacana, it’s sort of self-explanatory, but we will explain it for you guys anyway. One of the fastest-rising cartels in Mexico today, La Familia Michoacana is an organization that puts “family before all”. This motto is the same as the Salamanca Family motto, indicating this particular cartel as another source of inspiration for Gilligan and Co. La Familia is especially known for having a chokehold over the state of Michoacán, which is where Hector’s family is from in the series if Lalo is to be believed.
Another thing that makes this connection make sense is the fact that La Familia Michoacana and Tuco were both keen purveyors of methamphetamine; in fact, it’s possible that when Tuco was talking about taking Walt and Jesse “way out into the woods” to “cook 24/7”, that he was referring to La Familia Michoacana’s infamous superlabs in the highlands of the Sierra Madre.
And another blatant connection would be the nickname of their second leader Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, who was known throughout his life as El Mas Loco- or The Craziest One. As the story goes, during his childhood at his family ranchería of Guanajuatillo in Apatzingán, Michoacán, Nazario would get into street fights; and we mean a LOT of them. He wouldn’t win all, but he would keep getting into them anyway, having as many as 10 fights in a day at one point.
This earned him the nickname of being the Craziest One in the game, which he would carry with him for the rest of his life. In season 2 episode 5 of Better Call Saul when Hector visits Mike at the diner, he apologizes for his nephew and says that Tuco thinks he’s a boxer, which implies that he too has had a volatile nature since his early childhood.
And you know that when Don Eladio thinks you’re off the rocker, you are indeed the Craziest One in the room. So it is possible that all these real-life sources influenced Tuco Salamanca’s character; but we wouldn’t go asking around too much because we know how the Salamancas deal with rats and we don’t want to end up like them.
Marvelous Verdict
Tuco Salamanca will undoubtedly go down as one of the most heinous and captivating bad guys of all-time. He has that uncanny knack for putting you on the edge every time he makes an appearance, and leave you there long after he himself has exited the screen.
Raymond Cruz has played several iconic roles on both TV and film, but ironically enough, his legacy will be defined by the character he hated portraying. His depiction of psychopathy was near-perfect, and it is terrifying just how much of it was based on real-life influences. Tuco is- no pun intended- one of the tightest characters in modern TV history, and you better watch your mouth around him lest you want to lose it to a K.O. punch from the best brawler of the cartel.