The enemy isn’t cartels, or even drugs, per se, but geography a lucrative criminal economy has been created by the position of a wealthy nation next to a poor one. The Mexican thread is told through the closely observed perspective of Mireles and the Autodefensas, touching on an aspect of the drug war that had not been addressed in American popular culture: How do citizen militias figure in the war? By focussing on upstart vigilantes as they accrue power, the film reveals a reality more troubling than has been depicted by other drug-war stories-an increasingly fractured system, with new organizations cropping up to compete violently in Mexico’s criminal economy.
The footage, a stunning scene of societal retribution, set the standard for a yearlong shoot that became “Cartel Land,” a documentary that premièred at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won for best director and cinematography, and was released this summer in the United States and Mexico. An aggrieved member of the militia punched one of them repeatedly through tears, he demanded to know what had been done with the remains of his uncles. It made them happy.” Heineman filmed the Autodefensas closing in on El Chaneque and Caballo in a shootout. They cut their head, their hands, their legs-everything-into pieces. After that, they came in with four more people. A woman told Heineman that she had seen the men kill her husband and other members of the Autodefensas: “First, they burned my husband with a blowtorch while he was alive. When he arrived, the Autodefensas had tracked down two Knights Templar assassins, known as El Chaneque and Caballo, men allegedly responsible for the kinds of barbaric atrocities now standard in cartel culture. He took a camera, called his fixer-a local journalist-and headed back to Los Reyes. As Heineman and his crew boarded a plane home, he was struck by the feeling that they were missing something. “I wanted to know what happens when government institutions fail and citizens feel like they have to take the law into their own hands.” He hoped to emancipate the drug-war story from the headlines, and avoid telling it, as so often happens, through talking-head interviews with experts and officials.Įarly visits to the region yielded little: he scored a meeting with Mireles and followed the Autodefensas as they took over a town called Los Reyes, but nothing much seemed to happen cinematically. “The minute I read that article, I knew I wanted to create a parallel story of vigilantes on both sides of the border,” Heineman told me. In June, 2013, as Heineman was setting out to document citizen militias in Arizona, his father sent him an article about the leader of the Autodefensas, a charismatic doctor named José Manuel Mireles.
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Said to be composed of bricklayers, fishermen, lumberjacks, and other working-class types, the Autodefensas, a citizen militia, were making progress in their efforts to free Michoacán from the control of the Knights Templar, the area’s operating cartel.
For three weeks, they’d worked twenty-hour days, trying to capture footage of the Autodefensas. Matthew Heineman, a thirty-two-year-old American filmmaker, was at the airport in Michoacán, the war-torn Mexican state west of Mexico City, when he had second thoughts about returning home. The documentary “Cartel Land,” a winner at Sundance, has been released in the United States and Mexico.
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