Injustice all around

Cartel Land is a documentary about the drug war in Mexico that feels like a war movie. Between scenes of shoot-outs and interrogations and funerals, the film masterfully depicts the cycles of corruption that seem impossible to break.

At the beginning, men across Michoacán state in Mexico, fed up with the government’s collusion with cartels, grab white T-shirts and guns to join the vigilante force Autodefensa. And when you hear the stories of what families in the Michoacán state endured at the hands of the drug cartels, you will want to join up too.

A woman lists 15 people the cartel killed as retribution after a lime farmer didn’t pay his dues to the cartel. The families are burying all 15 as she speaks, including a baby doll representing a 3-month-old whom the cartel members dashed against rocks and threw down a well. This is only one of many stories of rape, kidnappings, torture, and beheadings. The cartel represents evil, and anyone fighting them is good.

But evil doesn’t stay in its assigned role. The townspeople in Apo pressure the corrupt Mexican military to clear out of their town and allow the vigilantes to handle their security. As he is leaving one commander tells the vigilantes: “It’s on you whatever happens here now.”

The homegrown militia goes down a historically predictable path. Initially welcomed into towns with shouts of joy, it becomes its own lawless organization. The inspirational leader of Autodefensa, doctor-turned-fighter José Manuel Mireles, sees this coming, but he can’t manage to stop it and contributes with his own failures. His wife states at one point, “The only law he had to protect was the law of God and family, and he has done neither.” Individuals here discuss “breaking cycles,” in terms of violence and corruption, but also in terms of family brokenness. No one seems to know how to stop evil from continuing.

Homicides are down slightly in Mexico most recently, but drug-related violence remains high. One event is not covered in the documentary but underscores its narrative. A man who had joined the Autodefensa in 2013 to fight the cartels spoke to reporters from The Washington Post about how Autodefensa had become corrupt. Last summer he was tortured and murdered along with his wife and three children.

The film’s primary plotline follows the Autodefensas, but the story also follows a small American group of vigilantes on the U.S. border. Their leader, Tim Foley, was initially angry about losing his construction job to immigrants, and started an outpost to monitor the Arizona border. But he found his real enemy in the drug cartels, and he and his growing posse relentlessly track cartels’ scouts and suppliers, turning them over to federal agents (a markedly different protocol than the Mexican vigilantes).

At moments you forget you’re watching real life and not a movie, because the filmmaker, Matthew Heineman, is dashing around with his camera as bullets are flying. Heineman finds himself in the middle of multiple shoot-outs, and he watches vigilantes conduct torturous interrogations of suspects. The film is rated R for profanity and violence, including gruesome images of murders. Notably, Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow backed this project as executive producer.

Pay close attention to the opening shot, where cartel members are cooking meth in the middle of the night. The documentary closes with the same footage, but by then we understand where the lines of evil are really drawn.