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CARTEL LAND

A group of men, faces shrouded in bandana's and heavily armed, drag several barrels into the Mexican desert.  The begin the hours long process of making several pounds of Crystal Meth.  They self identify as members of a Michoacan Drug Cartel.  "We would like to have nice jobs, like you, but we can't  So we do this," the apparent leader says to camera.  The sun rises, and the cartel meth cooks load their finished product into a van and drive off. 

This is the cold open to this documentary.  At the end of the film, we will see them again. 

The bulk of the film, is no about those men, however, even though the presence of the Knights Templar Cartel can be felt throughout the breadth of the film.  Instead the main characters are two leaders of separate Vigilante groups on both sides of the border.  In the US, Tim "Nailer," Foley leads the Arizona Border Recon through the Altar Valley, looking for someway to disrupt the Cartel's use of drug mules who bring the aforementioned meth into the country.  In Mexico, Dr. Jose Mireles leads the group he founded, the Autodefensas, in a town by town campaign to force the Cartels out.  This film is the story of both groups, and in that is it's greatest strength and possibly it's greatest weakness.  I say possibly, because I'm not sure what the intent of the filmmaker was.  Conversely, I grapple with wether the intent is relevant to the finished work.  Normally, I find intent to be less relevant, but it is this wholly original film that I find myself needing the intent cleanly defined before I can render an opinion. 

Some context is necessary, and it can be properly analogized by the main characters themselves.  Nailer was an out of work construction worker with not a whole lot better to do than start patrolling the border.  His group is successful in so much as they make plenty of citizens arrest of drug mules (who, as Nailer himself points out, are just hapless victims of the cartels) and hands them over to BPE and ICE.  Most of the scenes featuring Nailer are tense, though that has most to do with the editing and scoring of the film.  For while Nailer and his men are dressed in full Battle Dress Camouflage and armed to the teeth, they see surprisingly little action.  We do see a few arrests, but they are positively calm affairs compared to the hellscape that Dr. Mireles and the Autodefensas encounter on the daily. 

Dr. Mireles is a kindly looking literal grandpa who runs a charitable medical practice.  He also has seen way too many friends and family members be executed, tortured, and raped by the Knights Templar Cartel (and the several preceding cartels before them, as the Doctor points out).  He rose up in arms as a last resort, and through sheer force of will began to loosen the grip of the Cartels on half of southern Mexico.  By nature, the scenes featuring Mireles and the Autodefensas is inherently more compelling.  Credit to first time director Matthew Henieman for shooting his footage while being shot at several times through out the film, as he embeds with the Autodefensas for their countless raids on Knights Templar holdings.  In an early, completely otherworldly scene, the Autodefensas apprehend a captain of the Knights Templar (we know his name because the film interviews one of his rape victims in the preceding scene) and are interrupted by the Mexican Army.  The Army immediately seizes the Autodefensas guns, and is about to arrest them when Dr. Mireles jumps on a PA system and informs the town that the Autodefensas are about to be arrested.  The ENTIRE town comes to their aid, verbally berating the Army in its complete failure to help in the fight against the Cartel.  One woman of the town, who I will refer to as the Best Person Alive, is completely fearless in condemning the Army, scraping her machete along the concrete as she advances on a tank.  Sensing that the situation is about to completely escape them, the captain of the Army tells Mireles, "I'm going to give you your gins back, and I'm going to let you go.  Whatever happens here today...is on you."  The Army retreats, and the Autodefensas leave the adoring and thankful town. 

You might be thinking that Dr. Mireles story is entirely more compelling then Nailers.  You would be right.  Part of this is due to the extremely graphic material on the Mexican story.  The verbal accounts of murder are one thing.  Seeing a funeral with coffins only 3 feet long is another, and still images of hanged and beheaded Autodefensas is entirely another.  That only reinforces the conundrum of this film.   From a purely narrative standpoint, the story is horribly imbalanced.  Mireles faces down gunfights and assassination attempts daily.  Nailer largely looks like he's camping.  It's impossible for the film not to suffer for it, as the audience is constantly waiting for Nailer's segments to end so we can get back to Michoacan.  But in the way it suffers for it's pacing, it may succeed as meta commentary.  Wether Heineman intended too, his two main characters also serve as avatars for how their respective cultures engage the topic of immigration.  The fact that the American vigilante is engaging an enemy that is not at all that threatening is telling.

The movie doesn't really arrive at an end.  Instead, the same drug dealers we met in the beginning also close us out.  That might be the most poignant part of the story.  Regardless of the efforts of the two vigilante groups, these drug dealers are less conquerable bad guys than they are people caught in the thralls of poverty, desperate to do anything to avoid it.