Cartel Land

Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. 

         (Old Major, Chapter 1 of Animal Farm)

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a fatalistic look at life after a revolution. In the beginning of the story, the animals of Mr Jones’ farm are tired and embittered: they work diligently day and night to provide the yield that will only go to making their employer richer. With Old Major’s above words, the animals envisage a different future, one where they don’t work in servitude for one, but in a collective for one another. Heeding the eloquent battle cry of Major, Jones is turfed off the land and a new, more benign dawn begins. Over time though the milk of socialism becomes curdled when the dastardly pigs launch an insidious coup to wrestle control of Animal Farm. By the end of the book, the animals are back where they started: their utopian dream vanquished by dystopian reality. They are again under control; it’s just this time control has another name.

The animals have had enough of Mr Jones.

The reason I talk about Orwell’s polemical allegory is because I couldn’t help thinking about it whilst watching the brilliant documentary, Cartel Land. The film is an expose on the Mexican-American meth trade - the victims surprisingly are neither supplier nor consumer, but the communities and lives in-between.

We begin in Mexico. Under the cloak of darkness, barrels are rolled out the rear end of a truck. Inside is the methylamine that will be ‘cooked’ and packaged into the addictive drug that will go on to scourge communities. Concealed by a bandana, one of these cooks tells us why he has chosen a life of crime: poverty is his answer. If he had what the cameraman had, he wouldn’t need to risk punishment in this life or the next. As it is he doesn’t, so he prays God gives him the means to carry on turning a trade. This invocation to the Almighty to facilitate drug production is laughable to First World ears, but in the world of the have-nots the irony between being God-loving and people-hurting is completely missing.

The meth cooks.

The camera then takes us to Arizona’s Altar Valley, which lies on the Mexican-American border. Tim ‘Nailer’ Foley stalks the terrain like an extra who hasn’t been told Apocalypse Now has wrapped. Coming clean from years of drink and alcohol abuse, his eyes have the intensity of a man who has seen his own death. He is fitted out in full camo, a firearm sits snug in his arms; he looks every bit a soldier. But he isn’t. Foley is part of a vigilante group that have migrated to the border to fend off the marauding drug cartels. With an under-funded Border Patrol agency unable to hold back the tide, a patriotic militia group have formed to fire the devils straight back to hell.

Foley and his a million-yard stare.

Now, we’re in Michoacan, a Mexican town that lies 1000 miles from the border. A funeral cortege is in process. This is no ordinary one though. There is not the dignified solemnity of your typical service, instead there are the strangulated cries of raw emotion. Body after body is being put in the ground. A family has been killed. 13. From elder to teenager to baby – all killed. You can’t treat death with dignity when lives have been taken without it. Their crime: working for a person who owed the drug cartel money. Their employer couldn’t pay so they paid with their own lives. This is the warped justice system of a country whose constitutional one is seriously lacking.

The family of the deceased.

Finally in our four-pronged narrative, we’re introduced to Jose Manuel Mireles - or as he’s popularly known ‘El Doctor.’ The fact that Mireles has a moniker only supports the idea of him being styled on Western folk heroes. He has the hat, the moustache and the gun of his inspirations. He also has the cause: as a resident of Michoacan, he has seen too many deaths arising as a consequence of the cartels. He feels that the police are corrupt, handcuffed to greed with the very men they are meant to arrest. In his eyes, he has no other option but to establish the AutoDefensas, a people’s army that will bear arms and bring down the criminals that blight their community. The fact he manages to do all this whilst doing his day job as a doctor makes him the stuff of filmmaker's dreams.

Michoacan's answer to Clint Eastwood.

This is Cartel Land then: a modern day Wild West where the Sheriff saw the gunfire and quickly left town, a country where the saloon door has been kicked in and been co-opted by a gang of desperados. But outside a movement is growing. Can you hear it? It’s the AutoDefensas rising, ready to show these outlaws the long arm of the draw. And it works. For a time the cartels go running to the hills, but it’s not long before the corruption within El Doctor’s own tribe sends the revolution back to the warning Farm's Old Major envisaged.

I loved Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land because it says something about the time we live in. Poorer communities aren’t tended to by the state, as a consequence the weeds of lawlessness and violence take hold. Surely for a better land it’s worth listening to the people responsible for its destruction. After all, as the cartel cook argues, poverty led him to where he was. Maybe if we watered people with education and hope then Eden would be possible. Otherwise the alternative is UKIP. As this week proves, we have been warned.

Cartel Land is available on Netflix.