It's easy to find young men who are willing to pick up machine guns and go kill bad guys for the common good. When Nailer watches a television show about the autodefensas, he immediately sees their common purpose: "I hope they kick some ass down there." Both groups have armed themselves both have emerged, at least by their own lights, as a response to the failure of the government both proudly call themselves vigilantes. The American paramilitary unit is filled with bigots and the Mexicans, naturally, regard America as the source of their affliction.
At first, the Mexicans and Americans seem to have little in common. In the state of Michoacán, Jose Manuel Mireles is the organizer of "autodefensas" or anti-drug paramilitary groups that go town to town, clearing the cartels out by force. Tim "Nailer" Foley runs a paramilitary organization from the border that scouts and arrests, without any legal jurisdiction, anyone he can catch on the American side of the border. It cannot even be lost.Ĭartel Land follows two separate groups that resist the cartels because their governments can't. Mexico's crime problem amounts to a minor civil war, but a civil war so clandestine that it cannot be won. Are the cartels criminal organizations that need to be taken down using the powers of the law or are they invading armies that simply need to be slaughtered? The truth is that they are somewhere in between. Whole provinces are controlled in every important way by the cartels, createing a new kind of political situation. In Mexico, the government has failed to provide basic security for its people. In the case of the United States, despite massive investment of resources, people and drugs flow over the border with insouciant ease. The government failures against the cartels are several. Scattering the heads of their victims in prominent places is typical cartel behavior, practically a cliche at this point. They take a three month old and grabbing his leg smash his head on the rocks. Instead, they go and kill thirteen of his workers-mostly teenagers and young children. They don't kill a lime farmer who can't or won't pay them. The point of cartel violence is not just to impose their will by force, but to shock everyone into a paralysis of fear by the spectacles of violence they orchestrate. The evil of the cartels that surround this simple production of meth is breathtaking. But the facts are the facts they're poor, they need the money, somebody will buy the drugs they are making. They know what they're doing is evil, and sigh about it. They are wearing masks and carrying AK-47s, but otherwise look like anyone engaged in anxious and difficult work around dangerous chemicals. The film opens with a scene of a cartel group cooking meth in the middle of the night out in the desert. Not that there's much glamour to meth production. The truth of the cartels is much more shocking than any fiction. Breaking Bad was not nearly graphic enough. But Cartel Land, a documentary released this Friday, reveals just how unrealistically soft and gentle our popular depictions of the drug wars are. The shock of drug war violence is what gave these two series, and film antecedents, their fascinating edge. This thread has continued into television with The Wire and Breaking Bad. Goodfellas can be seen as a long visual essay about cocaine destroying the mafia. Even in the first Godfather movie, the precipitating action is Virgil Salazzo's plan to set up a system for importing and distributing heroin throughout New York.
#CARTEL LAND ROGER EBERT HOW TO#
All gangster films boil down to the questions of how to deal with the arrival of uncontrollable quantities of drugs into American cities. The drug war is the main subject of American drama.
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