Cartel Land Online

[Tabita Knezevic]

Editors note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar nomination in the documentary category. You can see Cartel Land on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in July, 2015.

The drug wars among the handful of cartels in Mexico over the past decade have cost tens of thousands of lives, as the nation south of the border struggles to imagine a world beyond the extraordinary level of violence and brutality that has dominated the landscape. North of the border, Americans have helped fuel the narcotics industry with an ongoing demand and an increasingly sophisticated trafficking network that spans all 50 states.

Into this seemingly endless fray stepped filmmaker Matthew Heineman, whose previous film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which he directed with Susan Froemke, covered decidedly less treacherous territory. For Cartel Land, Heineman eschewed the pundits and policy makers, taking a tenacious, ground-level route to gain entry into paramilitary groups on both sides of the border: Autodefensas, a vigilante force combatting the notorious Knights Templar cartel in Michoacn; and the Arizona Border Recon, a faction whose aim is to thwart cartel violence from spilling into the US.

Cartel Land opens with a nighttime scene of a mobile meth lab in the jungles of Michoacn, where heavily armed men cook the product driving the drug trade and spurring the chaos at the US/Mexican border. This stunning footage foreshadows the cinematic adventure that Heineman brings to the screen in his borderland journey. Along the way, he dodges bullets in a hair-raising shootout and even lingers outside a torture chamber.

Having never filmed in dangerous situations before, we talked to journalists and filmmakers before heading to Mexico, had an amazing local crew with intimate knowledge of the area, wore bullet-proof vests, and took what security precautions we could. But at the end of the day, you can only plan for so much, and most situations were on-the-ground judgment calls.

Cartel Land pushed me into some pretty precarious places. I was in shootouts on the streets of Michoacn and in Breaking Bad-like meth labs in the middle of the dark, desert night. Utilizing small crews or shooting by myself, my goal was to be there to capture in real time each chapter of the ever-evolving and arcing stories, with the camera in the action, not observing it from the outside. It was a wild adventure and a grueling film to make. I ended up with a story I could have never imagined.

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.

I became even more motivated, almost obsessed, as the lines between good and evil became ever more blurred. The film doesn't offer simple answers and, instead, presents a story that I believe will be interpreted and understood in many different ways.

It is this moral ambiguity that intrigues me, and it emerges naturally in the story and in our characters. For me, it became a timeless story of the conflict between idealism and violence, which has eerie echoes throughout history and across the world today.

We as Americans have become obsessed by ISIS and frightened by ISIS. But there is a war that is happening in the country to the south of us. Roughly 80,000 people have been killed since 2007. Some 20,000 people have disappeared. And this is a war that we are connecting to. We are feeding it.

I began 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.

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:

Understanding land control is particularly challenging in dynamic frontier landscapes dominated by forms of criminal activity that simultaneously involve use, transformation, and investment in land (McSweeney et al. 2017). In fact, drug traffickers are drawn to frontier landscapes, or those with relative land abundance such as in Indigenous territories and protected areas, precisely because land tenure regimes are weak and political authority or the rule of law is already in question (Ballv 2018; McSweeney et al. 2017; PRISMA 2014). With this study, we examine how expanded drug trafficking networks lead to narco-driven change in land ownership and control (hereafter, using the acronym NARC-LOC), and the implications of subsequent land use changes for biodiversity conservation in Central America.

The dynamic frontiers of northern Guatemala and eastern Honduras provide the remoteness, maritime and border access, and weak governance systems that drug traffickers prize. The dynamic nature of drug trafficking nodes (N. Magliocca et al. 2019), and the accumulation of excess illicit capital at these locations generates at least five mechanisms that may lead to changes in land control and long-term land use trajectories. Specifically, Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) use land to launder illicit capital, move drugs north (e.g., through clandestine airstrips), acquire land to establish territorial control for smuggling, consolidate land in agri-business landscapes, and enrich local elites operating in frontier regions who secure land near trafficking nodes (Devine et al. 2020, 2018; McSweeney et al. 2017, 2018; Tellman et al. 2020a). As a result, the intensity with which an area is enrolled in drug transshipment correlates with satellite observed land cover changes, such as forest loss (Sesnie et al. 2017). However, drug trafficking does not inevitably lead to land cover change, because traffickers also launder money in real estate and in mobile assets (Maingot & Anthony 1988). While Central American forest loss is not only caused by narcotrafficking, it is nevertheless a significant cause of forest loss, even when accounting for other factors (Tellman et al. 2020b).

Distinguishing land ownership from land control is essential in narco-frontiers, where the drug trade contests the rule of law, reshapes political authority, and injects economic relations with illicit capital and violence (Ballv 2018, 2012). However, narco-frontiers are hardly unique as landscapes in which land control is distinct from ownership. In South African National Parks, for example, state actors have achieved control over de jure private conservation lands in Mozambique (Mass & Lunstrum 2016). Commodity crop booms from Southeast Asia to Guatemala precipitate elite and corporate control of land that is officially held by communities (Alonso-Fradejas 2012; Hall 2011). New urban residents in informally urbanized settlements across Latin America frequently control urban parcels despite not holding legal title (Salazar 2012; Tellman et al. 2021). Sometimes land control leads to changes in de jure land ownership. In Colombia, violent land grabs first involve control of land by criminals, and sometimes, subsequent legalization of their rights to that land (Grajales 2015).

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