On the evening of January 9, 2012, the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo poured a glass of wine, sat down at her computer, and opened Twitter. She had just returned home, to Los Angeles, after a Caribbean cruise with her sister and her parents. The previous year had been difficult: in November, her marriage to the actor and model Aarón Díaz had ended. Del Castillo had spent much of the year starring as a drug trafficker in “La Reina del Sur” (“The Queen of the South”), a sixty-three-episode telenovela on Telemundo. Her character, Teresa Mendoza, a small-town Mexican woman whose love life enticed her into the narcotics trade, was given to ruthlessly practical observations. “Life’s a business,” Teresa once said. “The only thing that changes is the merchandise.” The series had dominated ratings in the Spanish-speaking world, and made her a household name, particularly in Mexico, but for del Castillo, who is forty-three, the experience had been overwhelming; at one point during filming, she had received medical treatment for exhaustion.
