During the 1990s, he acted in films and continued to make records with Seis/Son del Solar. In 1994, he mounted his unsuccessful Panamanian presidential bid, founding the party, Movimiento Papa Egoró. The album that followed this experience, "La Rosa de los Vientos". He also made the award winning music such as Pena and Amor y Control, won the 1997 Grammy for Best Tropical Latin Performance, and all its songs were by Panamanian songwriters, recorded using all Panamanian musicians. In 1996, Blades along with Son Miserables performed "No Te Miento (I Am Not Lying [to you])" for the AIDS benefit album "" produced by the Red Hot Organization. In 1997, Blades headed the cast of singer/songwriter Paul Simon's first Broadway musical, "The Capeman", based on a true story about a violent youth who becomes a poet in prison, which also starred Marc Anthony and Ednita Nazario. His many film appearances include "The Milagro Beanfield War" (1988), "The Two Jakes" (1990), "Predator 2" (1990), "Mo' Better Blues" (1990), "Color of Night" (1994), and "Devil's Own" (1997). He also guest-starred in an amusing episode of "The X Files" titled, "El Mundo Gira" ("As The World Turns"). He played immigration agent (la migra), Conrad Lozano, who works with Mulder and Scully to solve unexplained murders involving both rural California migrant workers and the Mexican folklore of El Chupacabra. In 1999, he played Mexican artist Diego Rivera in Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock". In the 2003 film "Once Upon a Time in Mexico", starring Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, and Willem Dafoe, he played the role of a retired FBI agent.