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“You are at the gates of hell”, warns Dr José Manuel Mireles at a gathering of the townspeople of a village in the Mexican province of Michoacán. The “hell” is the notorious Knights Templar Cartel, which is terrorising the entire region with its blood-soaked narcotics ring. The saviour is the civilian-led militia, the “Autodefensas”. This private army of Mexican citizens is led by Dr Mireles, an elderly practising medical surgeon, who took up arms against the cartel and earned a semi-mythical image among locals in the process.
In Cartel Land, directed, co-produced and co-edited by Matthew Heineman (winner of the Best Director award at Sundance this year), the devastation of the Mexican cartel wars is depicted simultaneously with a focus on border vigilante Tim Foley in Arizona and his attempts to defend the state from both Mexican illegal immigrants and cartel smugglers. Unlike the more humorous, dramatised portrayals of border politics and drug wars recently seen in popular media, such as Breaking Bad, Heineman’s captivating documentary provides little, if any, comic relief to the struggle against organised crime. Instead, it offers a grim, often graphic and ultimately chilling study of the brutality of Mexico’s drug war and the plight of its innocent citizens living in fear. From the opening scene of interviews with balaclava-clad, gun-wielding men preparing meth in a deserted wasteland in the dead of night, to the harrowing sequence of crying Mexican grandmothers mourning at the graves of their grandchildren, murdered at the hands of gang violence, there is a clear sense of chaos and desperation. Shocking images of severed heads and bloodied corpses encapsulate the sheer extent of the conflict in a way that sanitised news reports could never achieve.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Cartel Land is the filmmaker’s in-depth examination of the rise of the Autodefensas from the unlikeliest of people, to their ultimate collapse as the movement becomes infiltrated by cartel members and pressurised by the Mexican government. There is almost a tragic symmetry to the the initial success of the vigilantes and their eventual split into a nominally “legitimate” police force which turns on its original leader. The cult-like admiration of Mireles as some kind of contemporary Robin Hood or Clint Eastwood-esque stoic hero is at once bizarre and inspiring. Even the music is reminiscent of an Ennio Morricone Western score.
The documentary intersperses its cataloguing of the battle south of the border with a look at the activities of Foley, leader of the Arizona Border Recon, a small, armed group of vigilantes in military gear who patrol the hills and plains of the USA’s frontier to track down and capture immigrants. The aerial shots of the walled divide between the two countries are spectacular and the nightmarish night-vision footage of a reconnaissance patrol, hand-held and filmed in murky green, possesses the feel of a Vietnam War movie. The director manages to elicit more than just stereotypical xenophobic frustration and racist sentiments from Foley during the course of the interviews (though these elements are certainly present); the self-appointed border policer becomes surprisingly candid about his abusive childhood, his descent into drug use and a broken marriage.
There are weaker points too: Heineman is unable to resist over-cinematising much of the rise of the Autodefensas, as if trying too hard to straddle the line between documentary and Hollywood. Likewise, the impressions of the vigilantes never veer far from familiar clichéd insights. Nevertheless, the topicality of immigration in American politics and the upcoming election makes this film an engaging and relevant work. Overall, Cartel Land makes for gripping viewing and is impressive in terms of both its cinematography and the proximity and intensity of its subject matter.
