Susan Granger’s review of “Cartel Land” (The Orchard)
Inspired by “Border Madness,” an investigative article in “Rolling Stone,” this documentary revolves around the recent battles between drug cartels and two vigilante groups along the Arizona/Mexico border, where idealism has been destroyed by economic reality.
Stark and scary, it opens on the front line – in the desert, south of the Rio Grande – in the middle of the night, when Mexican drug dealers are cooking methamphetamine. Meth is their ticket to money and power.
In the Mexican state of Michoacan, Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles, a gray-haired surgeon known as “El Doctor,” leads the Autodefensas, a citizen’s militia against the ruthless Knights Templar cartel that has threatened the region for years.
At the same time, in Arizona’s 52-mile-long Altar Valley, a corridor known as Cocaine Alley, Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran, heads Arizona Border Recon, a small paramilitary group whose goal is to stop Mexico’s drug wars from seeping into the United States.
“They’re terrorizing their own country,” Foley says, “and now they’re starting to do it over here.”
Apparently, in this area south of Tucson, corruption abounds, and the U.S. Border Patrol has basically abandoned enforcement.
Intrepid filmmaker Matthew Heineman, along with co-cinematographer Matt Porwoll, has captured on-camera dozens of real shootouts, disturbing episodes of brutal torture, agonizing interrogations at gunpoint, and severed heads, resulting in violent, dramatic footage that’s not fully explored or explained.
FYI: In the Wild West, the term “vigilante” had a positive spin, designating watchful guardians, often organized without legal authorization, to keep order and punish crimes when lawful prosecution failed. But, in recent years, “vigilante” has been applied by the media to extremist, anarchistic assassins.
Matthew Heineman lets the audience decide which description applies at this particular time and place, explaining, “Over the year I was embedded with both Nailer and El Doctor and their vigilante groups, 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.”
In English and Spanish with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Cartel Land” is a chilling, compelling 7, ripped from today’s headlines.
