If you have 90 minutes and love documentaries, you might want to check out Narco Cultura. It's on Netflix and is a powerful, visually stunning, and sobering look at the drug cartel wars in and around Juarez.
This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in awhile. It's certainly the best one I've seen on the drug wars in Mexico. The film is directed by Shaul Schwarz, an award-winning Israeli photojournalist. This is his debut film and it really makes a mark. The scenes are just stunning. Schwarz and his crew capture the grinding, dusty poverty along the US-Mexico border. They also show you communities and families who are destroyed by all the chaos and killing.
Ironically, they also show you people whose fortunes are tied to different cartels. Most of the documentary follows a young guy living in Los Angeles who is an aspiring "narcocorrido" singer. "Narcocorrido" is a type of Mexican folklore music that tells the stories of drug cartel outlaws.
It sounds quite similar to norteno, a type of folklore music that I grew up hearing a lot as a kid in Cathedral City, CA. Up until I was 12, I lived in a small apartment complex across the street from this big Mexican church. I'd stay awake at night and hear the booming sounds of accordions and people singing through my bedroom windows. Sometimes the music would reverberate against the windows and feel like an earthquake. And then, I'd hear people blaring it out of their car windows. The music would quickly come into aural focus and then fade away into broken notes as cars raced down the block.
I had no idea what people were singing about, but loved the sounds of accordions and the passionate singing. (I later learned that lots of songs were about 19th century battles between the US and Mexico). Musically, narcocorrido sounds like traditional norteno, but the content is a lot different. Narcocorrido music tells the outlaw stories of executions, beheadings, massacres, and other extreme violence committed by the cartels. The rise of this genre only seems to further glorify the lives of cartel members, who exert enormous power over people living in war zones like Juarez.
Although the entire documentary is great, I was particularly struck by one scene where Schwarz and his crew interview a member of the Sinaloa Cartel. They go into a prison near Juarez and talk to a guy who tells them about torture. He describes how he and his crew beat a guy with baseball bats and then hammered nails into his hands and limbs.
Much of this interview reminds me of scenes from Randol Contreras' "Stick Up Kids," an incredible urban ethnography about South Bronx drug robbers. In one chapter Contreras interviews young men from his neighborhood and gets them talking about burning and mutilating drug dealers. This book isn't for the feint of heart, but it's an important study of young Dominican men whose lives are destroyed by the drug game.
But, unlike Contreras' stories--which highlight the sometimes sadistic pleasure that people get from torturing others--Schwarz's interview leaves you with a different picture. The interviewee describes the lingering trauma that he felt during and after his torture. He talks about being scared while torturing his rival. He also explains how his higher-ups would see any sign of weakness as a sign that he was useless. So, to hide this (and protect himself), he became super violent and beat this poor guy's head to a pulp. Afterwards, he couldn't sleep for a week. He felt regret. More than anything, this interview helped humanize hitmen and agents of cartels who are also victims in their own right. We see these men at the mercy of organized cartels that have a stranglehold on places like Juarez.
Anyways, Narco Cultura is an excellent documentary. It helps put some faces on a drug war that sometimes feels surreal. It also got me thinking a lot about the human toll of drug wars. Here are some sobering facts. Juarez is a city of approximately 1.3 million residents. In 2011, there were nearly 2,000 people murdered. This means that the murder rate was 148 per 100,000 residents. It had the 2nd highest murder rate in the world that year. This was 2.5 times higher than the murder rate of New Orleans (58 per 100,00) which was the murder capital of the US.
This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in awhile. It's certainly the best one I've seen on the drug wars in Mexico. The film is directed by Shaul Schwarz, an award-winning Israeli photojournalist. This is his debut film and it really makes a mark. The scenes are just stunning. Schwarz and his crew capture the grinding, dusty poverty along the US-Mexico border. They also show you communities and families who are destroyed by all the chaos and killing.
It sounds quite similar to norteno, a type of folklore music that I grew up hearing a lot as a kid in Cathedral City, CA. Up until I was 12, I lived in a small apartment complex across the street from this big Mexican church. I'd stay awake at night and hear the booming sounds of accordions and people singing through my bedroom windows. Sometimes the music would reverberate against the windows and feel like an earthquake. And then, I'd hear people blaring it out of their car windows. The music would quickly come into aural focus and then fade away into broken notes as cars raced down the block.
I had no idea what people were singing about, but loved the sounds of accordions and the passionate singing. (I later learned that lots of songs were about 19th century battles between the US and Mexico). Musically, narcocorrido sounds like traditional norteno, but the content is a lot different. Narcocorrido music tells the outlaw stories of executions, beheadings, massacres, and other extreme violence committed by the cartels. The rise of this genre only seems to further glorify the lives of cartel members, who exert enormous power over people living in war zones like Juarez.
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| A bloody crime scene in Juarez |
Although the entire documentary is great, I was particularly struck by one scene where Schwarz and his crew interview a member of the Sinaloa Cartel. They go into a prison near Juarez and talk to a guy who tells them about torture. He describes how he and his crew beat a guy with baseball bats and then hammered nails into his hands and limbs.
Much of this interview reminds me of scenes from Randol Contreras' "Stick Up Kids," an incredible urban ethnography about South Bronx drug robbers. In one chapter Contreras interviews young men from his neighborhood and gets them talking about burning and mutilating drug dealers. This book isn't for the feint of heart, but it's an important study of young Dominican men whose lives are destroyed by the drug game.
But, unlike Contreras' stories--which highlight the sometimes sadistic pleasure that people get from torturing others--Schwarz's interview leaves you with a different picture. The interviewee describes the lingering trauma that he felt during and after his torture. He talks about being scared while torturing his rival. He also explains how his higher-ups would see any sign of weakness as a sign that he was useless. So, to hide this (and protect himself), he became super violent and beat this poor guy's head to a pulp. Afterwards, he couldn't sleep for a week. He felt regret. More than anything, this interview helped humanize hitmen and agents of cartels who are also victims in their own right. We see these men at the mercy of organized cartels that have a stranglehold on places like Juarez.
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