Hector Salamanca (Tio): The patriarch who never informed on anyone and took his revenge with a bell

The cold open of “One Minute” (S3E7, 2010) takes Breaking Bad to Mexico, years earlier. Two twin boys, Marco and Leonel, fight over a toy while their uncle talks on the phone and sneers at a prospective partner for the cartel, the “Chicken Man.” Leonel complains that his brother broke his toy and says he wishes he were dead. The uncle calls Marco over, pushes his head into a tub of icy water and does not let go until Leonel hits him in the face. Then he gives them the lesson, in Spanish: “Family is all.” That uncle is Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), and the boys are the silent killers the third season has turned loose in Albuquerque to avenge another nephew.

// The theoryA norm learned underwater

Hector, whom his nephews call Tio, is the patriarch of the Salamanca family and a veteran boss in Don Eladio’s cartel. He is the uncle of Tuco, the impulsive distributor of the second season; of Lalo, the charismatic nephew of Better Call Saul; and of the twins, whom the show calls the Cousins. In Breaking Bad he is an old man in a wheelchair who cannot speak and answers with a bell: one ring means yes. In Better Call Saul we see him before and after the attack that left him that way. Fair warning: this case file reveals his ending. His way of being in the world has a classic explanation. In The Subculture of Violence (1967), Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, building on Wolfgang’s study of homicide in Philadelphia (1958), argued that in certain groups answering an affront with violence is what is expected. It is not a counterculture: it shares almost everything with the society around it. Violence is a readiness that switches on in certain situations, it is learned from one’s elders, and whoever uses it does not necessarily feel guilt, because to him it is not illicit.

// The subjectOne finger, one bell and a list of debts

The show introduces him as motionless and then reveals he is lucid. In “Grilled” (S2E2, 2009), Tuco holds Walter White and Jesse Pinkman captive at the desert house where he looks after his uncle. Hector sees Walt slip ricin into Tuco’s food, rings his bell, gets the plate handed to him and knocks it to the floor; later, when Tuco asks him whether he dislikes the two men, he answers with one ring. In “Bit by a Dead Bee” (S2E3, 2009), the DEA questions him with the same code and, when they ask about Jesse, he soils himself rather than cooperate. What he denies the police he gives to the family. In “Caballo sin Nombre” (S3E2, 2010), the Cousins visit him at the Casa Tranquila nursing home with a letter board and, ring by ring, Hector spells out the name of the man they hold responsible for Tuco’s death: WALTER WHITE.

He shouts it years earlier, while he can still speak. In “Rebecca” (S2E5, 2016), Better Call Saul shows him asking Mike Ehrmantraut, whom Tuco has assaulted, to tell the police that his nephew’s gun was his. In “Lantern” (S3E10, 2017), Juan Bolsa informs him that Don Eladio will now move the product only in Gus Fring’s chicken trucks. Hector answers that the Salamancas built the business and that they are treated like dogs. Bolsa tells him it is not personal. “It is! It is personal!” Hector replies, and collapses: Nacho Varga, his lieutenant, had swapped his heart pills. They are the last words he speaks aloud.

// The crackRevenge disguised as snitching

The theory has well-known cracks, and Hector shows them. Not everyone who lives inside a subculture makes it his own: Nacho sabotages his boss to protect his father, an honest upholsterer whose shop Hector wants to use as a front. In 1973, Sandra Ball-Rokeach compared the values of people with and without a violent history and found hardly any difference, and the theory has been criticized for inferring values from the very violence they are supposed to explain. Then there is the risk of stigma: Gomez’s line about “old-school” Mexican gangbangers sounds like exactly that. The show pins the code on one specific family and one specific organization, not on a people.

The subtlest crack is in the ending. (Spoiler warning.) Gus, whose partner Max Hector shot dead years earlier (“Hermanos,” S4E8, 2011), visits him to torment him: in “Crawl Space” (S4E11, 2011) he tells him that the cartel and his grandson Joaquin are dead and that the Salamanca name dies with him. In “Face Off” (S4E13, 2011), Walt offers him revenge. Hector asks a nurse to call the DEA and, in front of Hank, does nothing but spell out insults. But he has set foot in the office. Gus arrives at the nursing home to kill him and humiliates him with the worst insult in the code: “What kind of man talks to the DEA? No man,” he says; Hector is nothing but a crippled little rat. Hector looks him in the eye for the first time and rings his bell, which sets off the bomb Walt has fixed under the wheelchair. He, Gus and the henchman Tyrus die. To honor the highest norm, blood for blood, he agrees to look like a snitch. Explaining that norm does not justify it: Max, and a boy held down in a tub, paid for it.