I'm not sure I got who he was in the past... Theye said something about the cartel but also mentioned somehing about him being a prosecutor... So, who was he and why was his wife and daughter killed??
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I found a good explanation over at Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3nkk7g/spoilers_sicario_alejandro_whats_his_deal/cy7vqu3
Basically he started off as a prosecutor in Juarez and the Mexican cartel had savagely murdered his family, which then led him to become a Sicario. It's also likely that he got his assassin training from Josh Brolin's character, who was CIA.
It's also likely that they then deployed him to work with the Colombian cartel in order to get access to information on the Mexican cartel
That's pretty close to what I assumed watching the movie and from the clues provided.
The one point I don't see people mentioning is that Colombian cartels produce cocaine, while Mexican cartels serve as middlemen, moving the product to the States. So technically there should be no direct competition between Colombia and Mexico as they may have been partners.
So the line about "he works for whoever gets him closer to the people that killed his family" (not even close to an exact quote), to me, implied the Colombians were perhaps unwillingly helping Alejandro get close to the Juarez cartel, rather than using him as a sicario to kill them.
Which of course opens up a whole list of other questions and possibilities. It is safe to say that his story would have made much more sense if they never mentioned anything about Colombians, at all. :) Then, he could have simply been a prosecutor in Juarez who went to work for the CIA solely to get him closer to the people that murdered his family.
I think this string of posts is exactly right, but I would add one detail - I think the significance of "Medelin" is that Medelin is where the CIA trained him to be the lethal, coldblooded assassin we first saw in the highway shootout.
That wasn't just some lawyer with a grudge - that was an efficient, highly-trained, and very experienced predator. It doesn't matter how many classes you take or how many training videos you watch, you don't acquire those instinctual reactions or that high level of split-second lethality without killing a lot of people in actual combat situations. Who better to teach those skills than the CIA, and where better to practice them than a place like Colombia, where there is never a shortage of drug dealers to be killed?
One of the things I took away from that conversation with the prosecutor/cop in the police station was that there was a big block of time where he had been out of touch with his former colleagues, and I think that was where he spent those "missing years." The fact that the Mexican cartel members knew him as "Medelin" implied to me that he had become something of a legend to them while he was there, and they were terrified to see him again because they knew there was only one reason for him to have come back. That also fits some of the drug lord's dialogue (spacing his name right now) where he asks if Alejandro's wife would be proud of what he's become, and says "I am no different than the people who sent you."
basically he is like Harvey dent,the prosecutor from batman, turn into two face assassin working along with the US side and the columbian cartel side to set up a mutual deals for order, so he can gain revenge towards mexican boss for the murder of his family.
shareI like the Harvey Dent comparison. Accurate.
"What race are you? If you don't tell me I'll just...assume the worst."
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