Cartel Land

Cartel Land opens with a group of crystal meth cooks at work somewhere in the dead-of-night Mexican wilderness. They boast about the quality of their goods: they have the best production equipment, and were even taught their expertise by a visiting American father-and-son team. They know the harm their drugs do, but what, they ask, are they going to do? They come from poverty. If life had gone another way, “We would be like you.”

Matthew Heineman’s powerful documentary challenges our assumptions of loyalty – like you, like us? – as well as of good and evil. What happens when people rebel against their societies, and assume the role of vigilantes? If their motivation begins as “heroic”, whatever that may mean, how does their conduct change in reality?

Foley describes his group as a David up against the Goliath of the cartels

Heineman focuses on two men fighting back against the Mexican drug cartels that traverse the Mexican-American border. Out in the Arizona desert army veteran Tim “Nailer” Foley has set up and leads a small paramilitary group, Arizona Border Recon (ABR), whose first priority is stopping the cross-border narcotics trade. Effectively they’re doing what the law enforcement agencies might (should?) be doing, only with greater dedication and that extra element of loner will power. Foley describes his group – no indication here that it’s very numerous – as a David up against the Goliath of the cartels.

Much further south in the Mexican state of Michoacán the Autodefensas are a citizen rebellion opposing the Knights Templar cartel, which not only controls drugs in the area but has used extreme brutality to exert a mafia-style control on the local economy; there’s a strong suggestion that they’re running more in parallel with the power structures than they're being pursued by them.

They’re led by Dr Jose Mireles (pictured below), known as "El Doctor" for his day-job as a local physician. We do see him treating patients in one scene – and he’s clearly a respected member of the community – but his time these days must be given over almost totally to the Autodefensas, of which he was a founder and remains its highly charismatic leader/spokesman. Motivation for setting the group up was Mireles’ realisation that “it was time to decide how we wish to die” – as victims of the murderous tactics of the cartels, or by resisting them. The urgency of the question was harrowingly illustrated in funeral testimonies from families whose members – down to young babies – had been brutally killed, as well as images of hanging bodies and severed heads.

El Doctor was the one who removed his mask first, no longer hiding behind anonymity, when the Autodefensas went into towns that the movement was planning to “clear” of the Knights Templar: the process usually took three or four days, then they’d move on to a new place. He won over the hearts and minds of residents, whose obvious support in one particularly tense scene of conflict with the Mexican army defused the situation.

Heineman was clearly totally embedded in the group, filming intrepidly during its armed raids as well having the total confidence of its protagonists. The “progress” of the Autodefensas brought its own problems, however: when they handed over cartel members to the police the latter seemed to do very little – those concerned would soon reappear on the streets – so taking matters into their own hands became more than a temptation (“put him in the ground” was one euphemism that cropped up). When Mireles was put out of action after a plane crash (which looked very like, though never seemed proved as an assassination attempt), temporary control passed into the hands of the surreally-named Papa Smurf, whom we saw in one galling scene totally failing to win locals’ support, berated instead for the group taking the law into its own hands. The most worrying thing was the suggestion that the cartels themselves had infiltrated the Autodefensas to discredit them, while Mexico’s president tried to parlay the group to put down their weapons and assimilate into an officially aligned Rural Defense Force, possibly under the auspices of corrupt authorities.  

Nothing back in Arizona was anything like as dramatic. Whether Heineman set out to consciously make a “double-hero” film or just followed his instincts is hard to say, but the action was all happening in Mexico. We may also wonder how important the American element was to widening the film’s release prospects at home: with Kathryn Bigelow as an executive producer and Heineman taking the US Documentary award at Sundance, it’s achieved coveted (for a documentary) big-screen release, in the process adding on rather formulaic extras like a “bigged-up” score and some monumental go-pro landscape bridging shots. They’re far away stylistically from the meat of Cartel Land, which is the sense of sheer immediacy that the director (pictured below), often working as his own cameraman, brings to his story.

By the end we have seen just how different the film's two main characters are. We learn little more about “Nailer” other than that he’s an outsider who’s been through a difficult childhood (and his own addictions). Heineman certainly doesn’t quiz him about the real status of his group, which has been labelled as extremist by some organizations: there’s a whiff of racism in ABR’s structures too, though the word isn’t uttered by Foley.

Mireles is another matter altogether: he’s clearly not camera-shy, and his charisma is obvious even when he's failing to maintain unity within the Autodefensas. We learn more of his personal life in one scene of relaxation with his extended family. And then, towards the end, he’s suddenly shown on intimate terms with a young female acolyte. His wife leaves him, and Mireles ponders whether, with the loss of his family, he’s lost his wider motives, not least as an assumed moral arbitrator of his society (he had wider political ambitions in the past, and was clearly making Mexico's high-ups uneasy). By the end of the film he’s gained tragic contradictions, which doesn’t make Cartel Land any less impressive, just somewhat different in its closing direction. Mireles clearly now has other things on his mind, anyway: arrested in June 2014, he remains in prison.

• Q&A events with Matthew Heineman in London September 2-4
  

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cartel Land