Matthew Heineman's 'Cartel Land'

Alarmed by the rumored devastation that drug cartels are causing in Mexico, Matthew Heineman became “fascinated by how citizens take the law in their own hands.” So this young filmmaker risked his life and spent a year where angels fear to tread, in Cocaine Alley on the Arizona/Mexico border and in the Michoacán state, 1,000 miles deeper into the Mexican heartland. The result is a riveting documentary, Cartel Land, which gained Heineman a best director award at Sundance this spring, as well as a special award for cinematography.

“My goal is to put my camera in the middle of the action, to show people a world they’ve never seen before,” he said in a telephone interview. And indeed he did. For a year, he lived among the cartels and the vigilante groups that fight them. He filmed drug dealers mixing, transporting, and delivering drugs to the United States. He captured shots of streets strewn with the corpses of innocent villagers murdered by cartels to punish their lack of cooperation. He recorded the screams of the tortured and the wounded. He ventured into the desert at midnight to film vigilantes tracking down drug scouts at the border.

Parallel trajectories

The brilliance of this gripping two-hour documentary lies in the way Heineman tells his story. He follows the parallel lives of two men who have played leading roles in the current vigilante struggle. One is Tim “Nailer” Foley, a spokesman for the Arizona Border Recon, an organization fighting the cartels in Altar Valley (aka “Cocaine Alley”). The other is Dr. José Manuel Mireles, founder and head of Autodefensas, a group of villagers in Michoacán who took up arms against the local drug cartels there. Both charismatic men began by taking the law in their own hands. For a year, Heineman was one step behind each of them, filming their struggle as they mobilized their respective forces.

Foley and Mireles are compelling tragic figures, both courageous and flawed. Foley, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict and survivor of child abuse, has redeemed his life by dedicating it to a noble cause. Mireles, a dedicated local doctor, mobilized his village with determination, passionate rhetoric, and personal charisma. His efforts are heroic, and for a while successful, but he is ultimately brought down by his own personal flaws, as well as by the system.

Interconnected corruption

That system, unmasked by Heineman, is one wherein everyone is corrupt — not only the drug cartels (obviously), but also the Mexican government and ultimately the vigilante groups themselves. Moreover, they are all interconnected. “At first, I thought I was telling a simple story,” says Heineman. “Over time I realized it was far more complicated. The lines between good and evil became more and more blurred. That provoked me to keep going down there, into those dark corners.”

In the opening and closing shots of Cartel Land, we watch dealers mixing methadone in a large vat off the back of a truck, at night in a pitch-black desert. How does a filmmaker get a shot like that? “They trusted me,” Heineman said, speaking of cartel and vigilante groups alike. The word “trust” has an ironic meaning in that strange world.

“It was a frightening film to make,” confessed Heineman, who couldn’t communicate with his family for months at a time. “It had an impact on me and my family. I’m not a war reporter. I’ve never been in a situation like it before — in the middle of shoot-outs on a dark desert night, witnessing torture — but that’s where the story led me, and I felt a responsibility to bear witness.”