Cartel Land

Although initially it looks to be heading into similar territory to Joshua Oppenheimer's remarkable 2012 documentary The Act Of Killing the real victims of the Mexican drug wars - ordinary citizens.- occupy the background to Matthew Heineman’s film. Instead it looks at grassroots attempts to quell the seemingly endless and brutal violence which the Mexican drug cartels inflict on the local native population. A second story moves north across the border to Arizona to look at a group of self-styled vigilantes trying to stem the inflow of drugs and illegal immigrants to the U.S..

The latter group is headed up by Tim “Nailer” Foley, a lean and leathery individual who has attracted a rather dubious-looking gaggle of disposal store patriots calling themselves the Arizona Border Recon who patrol a strip of the U.S.-Mexican border trying to intercept drug and human traffickers.  For all Foley’s machismo and the evident potential for tragedy the heavily armed group poses, these guys are like something out of Enid Blyton compared to the drugs cartels for whom beheading and dismembering their victims is a favoured sport. It is the campaign against this group that constitutes the bulk of the film, in particular the work of Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician in the Mexican state of Michoacán. He has founded the Autodefensas, a group which have taken up arms against the Knights Templar, a cartel that has terrorised the region for years. The film follows the charismatic doctor around as he rallies the local citizenry, survives a plane crash (a possible assassination attempt) and, somewhat surprisingly, tries to charm the pants off an attractive female follower.

This is revealing material but as divisions within the group appear, with revelations of cartel infilitration and Mireles’s lieutenant’s squeezing him out and forming an alliance with the government who we can reasonably suspect are on the drug baron’s payroll, things seem to get really interesting.  Heineman however remains largely at arm’s length to these developments and is content to showus that with Mireles in jail (although his fall seems to have been occasioned by his endless womanizing) everything reverts to what we started with - a quagmire of poverty, drug money, violence and institutionalized corruption.  Presumably Foley and his would-be cowboys are still out there in the scrub looking for wetbacks and drug mules.

Although rich in potential, Heineman simply does not extract enough emotion or insight out of his material which for all its commendable aspects is ultimately too superficial in presentation.

Available from: Madman

 

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