Bandito

Caption? We don't need no steenking caption!

A subset of the Outlaw with a Hispanic flavor. Most often found in stories set in Mexico or near the Mexican border.

Stereotypically, the bandito has a thick Mexican accent, wears a sombrero and poncho or serape, and in later time periods a bandolier of ammunition. A thick mustache is common, but not mandatory.

Usually the villains of a Western, but if portrayed sympathetically will have a Robin Hood code of honor, or be revolutionaries fighting against the corrupt government.

As with the outlaw, the bandito often overlaps with The Gunslinger and Cowboy roles, with the latter being called vaqueros. A bandito might also be a Knife Nut or lariat expert.

Note bandito is the English spelling. In Spanish it is bandido. We get desperado from the Spanish desesperado.

Examples of Bandito include:

Advertising

• Because Mexicans were Once-Acceptable Targets, Frito-Lay had the Frito Bandito as a commercial mascot at one point.

Comic Books

• Jonah Hex's greatest recurring foe, El Papagayo, is a flamboyant bandito leader.
• Naturally,Lucky Luke has a few of these, from the murderous crook Pedro Cucaracha to the head honcho of a band of kidnappers, Don Emilio Espeluas.

Film

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would give us our page quote, if we needed one.
• Three Amigos
• In the Disney film The Apple Dumpling Gang, there was a single bandito among the otherwise homogenous-white bad guys.
• Calvera and his band of outlaws in The Magnificent Seven.
• The bandits in Django.
• Several Banditos are part of Hedley Lamarr's army in Blazing Saddles.
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had Mexican banditos in Bolivia (reportedly, you can tell by the accents).
• Cheyenne in Once Upon a Time in the West is a particularly sympathetic example.
• And speaking of Sergio Leone films, why hasn't anyone mentioned Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez yet?
  • Juan Miranda and his band of outlaws from Leone's A Fistful of Dynamite are also worth a mention.
  • El Indio of For a Few Dollars More takes the sterotypical bandito Up to Eleven. A drug-addicted Large Ham who stalks women, murders families, rigs duels, and takes trophies from his victims, he spends most of the film in an oppium-induced haze, while plotting to use Monco and Colonel Mortimer to do his dirty work, wiping out his gang and leaving all the money from his robberies for him.
  • The Rojo brothers of A Fistful of Dollars are banditos-turned-bootleggers, who sell alcohol on both sides of the border, and have an ugly rivalry with the Baxters, a family of white-collar American gunrunners. While two of the brothers are absolutely stereotypical, Ramon subverts it somewhat by being totally evil, but very bright.
• The Wild Bunch has examples of both. On the villain side, we have Mapache, the primary villain and his army of bandits. On the (anti-)heroic side, we have Angel, one of the Bunch.
• Revolutionary banditos make up one of the bad guy groups in the movie The Professionals.
• Tomas Milian played this type (usually the sympathetic version) in a lot of spaghettis.
• The Hungarian animated film Cat City has a gang of vampire bat banditos.

Literature

• Ben Snow fights to protect the eponymous cross from the bandito Zanja who turns out to be a gringo and his gang in "The Trail of the Golden Cross".
• Banditos feature in several of J. T. Edson's novels. They play an especially prominent role in The Quest for Bowie's Blade.

Live Action TV

• Lucas McCain runs afoul of banditos in The Rifleman episode "The Vaqueros".
• A gang of these turns up in the Doctor Who serial The War Games.

Music

• "El Bandito" in "Cross the Brazos at Waco". He tries to become a Retired Outlaw, but is found and killed by the Posse moments after discarding his guns in the river.

Newspaper Comics

• El Toro and his bandit gang from the Modesty Blaise arc "A Few Flowers for the Colonel" are modern day banditos.

Radio

• The Very World of Milton Jones has an episode where Milton somehow ends up freeing a Mexican village of these. They finally go away when Milton makes them rich by cutting one's arm off, thus making him a one-armed bandit. Admittedly a radio comedy, but the accents and behaviours are very much there.

Video Games

• Sanchez in the Desperados video games is a (deliberately) stereotypical bandito character.
• Bioshock has ammo vending machines with a cartoon/period picture of a bandito's masked face, which spouts recorded messages with an outrageously thick accent. "¡Bienvenidos al Ammo Bandito!"
• Outlaws (1997 video game): has "Spittin'" Jack Sánchez.
• Part of Red Dead Redemption takes place in Mexico, where the protagonist contends with both banditos and revolutionaries.
  • There were few of them in Red Dead Revolver too.
• Renegados, Pistoleros and Comancheros appear as mercenaries and treasure guardians in Age of Empires III.
• Juarez's gang (including himself) in the first two Call of Juarez games.

Web Comics

• Gordito is a heroic variant of this (mixed in with Sidekick) in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.
  • Gordito's uncle Pedro would be a straighter example of this, except Pedro uses a velociraptor as his steed.

Western Animation

• Some of the Quick Draw McGraw villains were sillier versions of this.
• Salty Mike becomes a bandito in the Squirrel Boy episode "Gumfight at the S'Okay Corral".
• Yosemite Sam appears as bandito 'Pancho Vanilla' in the Looney Tunes short "Pancho's Hideaway".