Sinaloa's drug trade generates an estimated three to twelve billion dollars a year, and this film gets rare access to the people running it. Cooks demonstrate how drugs are manufactured inside a clandestine lab and hidden in vehicles bound for the United States, while an armed cartel leader explains how the organization actually operates. A hitman called El Guero describes his routine before a killing, including prayers to the folk saint of death and bullets marked with his targets' names. In Culiacan, a young woman named Jamilet pursues a drug lord as an escape from poverty, and a 17-year-old named Luis considers dropping out of school to become a hitman. A funeral director races between crime scenes chasing contracts, and a woman named Isabel who searches for mass graves receives a tip slipped under her door. With over 230,000 people killed and 50,000 disappeared in Mexico's drug war over fifteen years, the film treats the cartel as an economy with its own workforce, casualties, and grief.