#peter schuler

What I’m stumped by is how/when he would have met Max in the slums of Santiago and how he would have been able to pay for Max’s education. Hector Salamanca calls Gus “el gran Generalissimo” mockingly in a throw-away line, so it’s not totally clear to me if Gus was actually a General in Chile or if that was just Hector fucking with him. But, according to scholarly journal Wikipedia, it takes 31-32 years of service in the Chilean Army to reach even the lowest ranked Brigade General. So if Gus joined at age 18, it would be about 1976. And if he served for 31-32 years to reach Brigade General status, he would’ve had to stay in Chile until about 2006. So that doesn’t work. So maybe he could’ve been a Lieutenant (5-9 years of service), which would give enough time between him meeting Max and Max completing at least a few years of schooling before they arrived in Mexico in ‘86. I doubt that a Lieutenant would earn enough money to bankroll a P.h.d at the University of Santiago, so Gus was probably already be involved in the drug game to some degree. Maybe he met Max as a street level dealer or amateur cook á la Jesse in his Cap’n Cook phase and decided to nurture his aptitude for chemistry?

I don’t know. I’m probably thinking way too hard about this. But the timelines are just a bit off. Like, maybe Gus should actually be a bit older, like born in the 1940s or at least early 1950s. It’s fun to speculate, though, and consider what his timeline would have been. And what the mysterious debacle in Santiago was that made him so close to Peter Schuler and was possibly the catalyst for him and Max fleeing Chile. I used to think that maybe he fled because of the coup, but if he was 18 in 1976, it would already be a few years into the Pinochet regime. So maybe he was about to be busted for some crimes related to the military junta? Or his extracurricular drug activities? Idk, his history is so mysterious and intriguing!! I want to know more!

Also, a little fact that tickled my brain was Salvador Allende, the Socialist President of Chile from 1970 until the coup in 1973, served for several years as a Senator whose constituency included Chiloé island. I headcanon that Gustavo grew up on Chiloé because of some lovely art made by @geitonas that depicts him playing as a kid by the distinctive palafitos (houses on stilts). So now I’m imagining that maybe young and desperately poor Gustavo was inspired by his Socialist Senator, but by the time he was old enough to join the Army, the government had already been taken over by Pinochet’s right wing dictatorship.

I’m for sure rambling, but just having fun speculating on Gus’s history and how he might have met Max.