Cartel Land Essay

The drug war in Mexico has been an everlasting crisis that has not been resolved just yet. In the documentary, “Cartel Land”, it goes deeper than what you hear on the surface. Many people do not even have an idea close to what is happening in Mexico. Directed by Matthew Heineman, he gathered the idea from the Arizona Border Recon in a Rolling Stone article. He also received an article on Jose Manuel Mireles and the Autodefensas in Michoacán. The director found this interesting and wanted to capture what happens on both sides of the border when government institutions fall. The Knights of Templar reigned over multiple cities, and while the government stood by, the ordinary citizens took it into their own hands to put a stop to it. The drug war …show more content…
Heineman starts out the documentary among some of the meth cooks within the cartel. One of the cooks is speaking about the cartel and what they are doing. He goes on to say that they know what they are doing is harmful. The way of life in Mexico will not allow them to achieve what they want by working normal jobs. After being exposed to the profit of distributing drugs they do not want to go back to their original way of life. The cartel makes tremendous amounts of money off of the drugs they make and sell. Their main buyer is none other than clients in the United States. The cartel knows they are causing harm to the people they sell to, and it is not going away anytime soon according to them, “as long as God allows us to make meth, we will make meth” (Cartel Land). Members of the cartel are living lives they could not before joining the cartel. The infrastructure of Mexico is extremely unstable and the typical way of living is near poverty. The cartel is fueled by this terrible standard of living compared to the wealth. The documentary focuses on the …show more content…
Foley is a military veteran who started his own paramilitary group to attack drug smugglers in an abandoned stretch called Cocaine Alley, south of Tucson. The U.S. Border Patrol is outnumbered in that area, basically left to the smugglers to enter as they please. Foley and his team are trying to stop them from entering and bringing the drug war to the U.S. Foley does not think the government is doing enough to keep the illegals from entering the U.S., potentially bringing the drug war into the country. In the documentary, Foley notices Mireles’ work on the television, commenting that he approves somebody is taking a stand. Throughout the documentary, it shows Foley and his team patrolling Cocaine Alley and trying to deter the smugglers from that