Mexican Drug Cartels Movies

[Natalí Stibb]

Ibegan shooting in Arizona in June of 2013, taking two or three trips to Arizona over a four-month period. I had no intention of expanding the scope of the narrative outside the United States until my father randomly sent me a Wall Street Journal article about the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc in the Mexican state of Michoacn for years. Suddenly, I knew I wanted to change the film to be about vigilantism on both sides of the border. More research led me to a Washington Post article about Dr. Jos Manuel Mireles, a small-town physician known as "El Doctor," who was the charismatic leader of the Autodefensas movement.

The more time I spent down there, the more complex the story became: it was partly an ascent of people seeking to fight evil and partly a descent into hell as they took the law into their own hands, with many twists and turns in between. It is about elemental issues of order and chaos, of the desire for law but also of terrifying brutality and lawlessness.

At first, I tried to sniff out what was really happening, who these guys truly were, where the movement was going, what the endgame was. And what I originally thought was a very simple story, especially on the Mexican side, was in fact much more complex and much more grey. I became even more motivated, almost obsessed, as the lines between good and evil became ever more blurred and the story progressed in dramatic and unexpected ways.

It is this moral ambiguity that intrigues me most, and it emerges naturally in the story and in our characters. The film doesn't offer simple answers and, instead, presents a narrative that I believe will be interpreted and understood in many different ways. In a sense, CARTEL LAND is a cautionary tale of what happens when men and women take up arms in a lawless society. For me, it is a timeless story of the conflict between idealism and violence, which has eerie echoes throughout history and across the world today.

What have been the differences in reception to the film in countries it has now travelled to?

I have been humbled and moved by responses from people around the world. In Mexico, this is a topic that dominates the headlines, but the film seemed to strike a deep emotional cord by providing a visceral window into the violence and corruption that people read or hear about every day or see glorified in movies or TV. In Colombia, given their history with cartels and paramilitary groups, the film resonated deeply. In the U.S. the film elicited many responses, but one that I never expected: at numerous screenings, drug addicts have come up to me, crying, saying that family members had tried for years to get them to stop, but that, for some reason, seeing the violence that their habits were perpetuating had a profound and poignant impact.

It was very important to capture this aspect of the story, and we tried for months to get into a lab. Every shoot I would try to find somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who cooked. Amongst our vast network of people down there, we thought we had a guy who could hook it up, and he kept telling us to be patient and promised to make it happen.

We drove through the mountains and made it to the town with minutes to spare. A pair of armed men asked if we were ready and told us to follow them. With the sun dropping rapidly, they drove us down a highway, off the highway, through towns and then small villages, which eventually gave way to vast, open farmlands.

As the barrels sizzled and smoke billowed into the air and the cacophonous sounds of cicadas rose and fell with an arrhythmic beat and huge alien-like bugs crawled down our necks and inside our clothes, I talked to the head chef and he told me:

Designating violent Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations is an alluring prospect for several reasons. The recent kidnapping and murder of two American citizens by the Gulf Cartel has once again made the issue prominent, including for policymakers and members of Congress.

Just as occurred in the film, there are high-ranking U.S. officials who believe that designating the cartels as terrorist groups will solve the twin national security crises of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The most notable is former U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr.

Yet, while designating the cartels as terrorist organizations has obvious emotional appeal, such an action is more likely to backfire than to stave off illegal immigration and drug trafficking fueled by instability emanating south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Next, designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations would dilute the list, conflating crime and terror. This inevitably leads to a slippery slope, especially when one considers the number of drug trafficking organizations that would qualify under similar criteria. Adding more terrorist groups to the list could outstrip the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to collect information on the most pressing foreign-based terrorist threats, Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Adding the cartels would mean reallocating resources away from those threats.

Lastly, Mexican drug cartels are already deeply entrenched within the United States. Americans are operating on behalf of various cartels in myriad ways, from retail-level drug distribution to more complex logistical operation. If the U.S. takes the step to label Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, the potential militarization that comes with such a designation could have substantial spillover and second-order effects on how Americans could be prosecuted. Are teenage drug dealers and gang members in Chicago really on par with hardened Islamic State supporters plotting to attack U.S. citizens? We believe not, even though the scourge of fentanyl and other deadly drugs remains a serious challenge worthy of more resources and policy attention. It is different from terrorism.

The film's director Matthew Heineman embedded himself with two vigilante groups working to combat the drug cartels on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. He took extraordinary risks to film the shootouts, corruption, greed and torture chambers that make up life in the drug fight. The film explores the sometimes convoluted moral ambiguities of vigilante justice.

Cartel Land follows the doctor Jos Manuel Mireles, who in 2013 rose to prominence as a leader of the Autodefensas, a vigilante group battling the Knights Templar drug gang in the Michoacn state of Mexico. On the other side of the border, Heineman meets Tim "Nailer" Foley, a former construction worker who leads Arizona Border Recon. The group wants to stop the drug wars from spilling onto U.S. soil.

I really wanted to tell the story in the present tense. I wanted to be there as the story unfolded, and I ended up with a story that I never could have dreamed of or imagined or predicted. I'm not a war reporter, I've never been in any situation like this before, but the film led me into crazy situations. Shootouts between the vigilantes and the cartel, meth labs, places of torture. ...

One of the main questions that sort of fascinated me and drove me to make this film is: What provokes men and women to take up arms? And obviously in this story, it's specific to the drug war. There's a wide range of motivations that led folks to patrol the border, to be part of Arizona Border Recon.

When [Foley] lost his job he was angry and he blamed his inability to get work on illegal immigrants who were taking his jobs. And so he went down to the border ... to try to stop the flow of immigrants coming across the border. And he over time realized that the real enemy was not them in his mind, the real enemy was the cartel that controlled everything.

In this file photo, Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles speaks during an interview Dec. 1, 2013. Mireles is one of the subjects of the new film Cartel Land which follows vigilante groups fighting drug gangs. Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

When I first started I really felt like it was this sort of heroic story of citizens rising up to fight against this evil cartel. And then over time, these lines between good and evil that seemed so stark when I first started became ever more blurry. Those who were fighting against evil started to become evil. And as this happened it got more and more interesting. It also got more and more scary. By the end of the film I could be on an operativo, on a mission, and look to my left and look to my right and not know if I was with the cartel or the people fighting against the cartel.

One of the reasons that I wanted to make this film is [that] I was so struck when I first started making it at the suffering of the people of Michoacn, of the people of Mexico that I was filming. [They were] living in a society where institutions had failed, in the face of a very ineffective government that was allowing the cartel to operate with impunity.

Unfortunately, the sad reality that we see vividly in this film is the cycle repeating itself. And the cycle is perpetuated by America's voracious appetite for drugs. ... You know, it's basic supply and demand, it's basic economics. As long as there's a demand for drugs here in the States, there'll be a supply of drugs coming from Mexico and South America. And with that the violence and with that all the suffering that we see so vividly in the film.

Pablo Escobar is possibly the most notorious and recognizable of cartel kingpins in recent years, his notoriety attributed in part to being the face of the infamous Medelln cartel in 1980s and '90s Colombia, but also from being the subject of the Netflix smash hit, Narcos where his reputation as the most fearsome man in South America preceded him. Charlie, chang, snow, blow, or as many know it, cocaine, the drug that has as many names as Salvador Dal, was the commodity Escobar dealt in. That white powder which is hoovered up through rolled-up dollar notes is associated with wealth, addiction, and a seductive quality that can be traced back to the days of 1920s Hollywood.

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