Fortunately, Cartel Land spends considerably more screen time in Mexico, where the real action is. Sick and tired of being intimidated, robbed, and murdered, a vigilante group called the Autodefensas, led by a middle-aged surgeon named José Manuel Mireles Valverde, has been driving the cartels out of the state of Michoacán, one city at a time. To say that Heineman has been granted remarkable access to their activities would be an understatement—more than once, his camera is present when gunfire breaks out, and he charges ahead anyway, intent on capturing whatever goes down. At the same time, however, the film is reticent about following up on what Mireles and his heavily armed followers do with cartel members they’ve captured alive. At one point, Mireles tells a subordinate to put someone “into the ground,” but nothing further is either shown or even mentioned; in another scene, the screams of men apparently being tortured can be heard, while the camera remains on a much more sedate interrogation.
Whatever one’s moral qualms regarding the Autodefensas—and Heineman makes a point of showing that Mireles, who’s married, has a penchant for using his celebrity to seduce much younger women—there’s no denying the engrossing nature of the footage shown here, or that the people involved are fighting for their own lives. So it’s not at all clear why Heineman also devotes a large chunk of Cartel Land to Tim “Nailer” Foley, an Arizona resident who heads up his own border patrol, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared an extremist group. Foley readily admits that his initial motivation was his perception that illegal aliens were preventing him from finding a job, and racist comments flow freely among his “staff.” The group claims that nobody else is lifting a finger to prevent the cartels from infiltrating America, but the stretch of the Arizona border they patrol is roughly a thousand miles from the nearest cartel activity. Cartel Land risks trivializing the Autodefensas’ genuine (if sometimes misguided and brutal) effort to take back Michoacán by juxtaposing them with a handful of American racists who’ve declared themselves the country’s last line of defense. All vigilante groups are not created equal; here, the nuances sometimes get lost.
