Mapache, on the other hand, is portrayed as slothful, treacherous, stupid, and childlike. In a cultural trope stretching perhaps as far back as Anglican portrayals of Catholic Spain, Mapache's Mexico is a world of superstition, feudalism, and titillating excess. The Oriental despot relocated to the Americas. In contrast to Pike's freely-entered contracts, Mapache and his followers are united by chains of wealth and patronage, power and appeasement. In his almost Rabelaisian excess, he represents a world where the scripts of liberal individualism no longer work.
Gratification is immediate instead of delayed.
Power is overtly autocratic instead of ostensibly contractual, and commodities are more important than capital. Mapache, then, is a Harrigan, the US railroad baron who dispatches bounty hunters after Pike and his gang, made uncomfortably concrete and immediate. And pain and death, perhaps not surprisingly, are what the film falls back on when significant boundaries threaten to become deterritorialized. The orgiastic slaughter at the end of the film terminates several of its structuring tensions. Angel, whose status in the gang had been tentative, becomes worth dying for.