Cartel Land Analysis

The problem of drugs coming over into the United States from Mexico is not new, but it is serious and in spite of many efforts by American law enforcement and border authorities, it continues day after day. This paper reviews the problem from several perspectives and brings to light attempts the U.S. has made to stop drug trafficking on our border with Mexico. The biggest issue regarding border security is the power of the drug cartels, and the majority of emphasis in this paper is directed towards the cartels.

The movie not only gives us a glimpse to the potential evil and manipulative people of the world, but also helps us to understand that sometimes violence is necessary. When actions are so terrible, so negative, and so extreme that people lose sight of right and wrong, and learn to accept the unacceptable, death is the only real verdict for some. V let England know that people

Immigration is a complex and multifaceted issue that faces the US. In his film, Sin Nombre (2009), director Cary Fukunaga aims to juxtaposition the issue of immigration with the issue of gang violence in Mexico, and show the difficulties immigrants face by giving his audience an insider’s perspective into the experience of immigrating to the United States from Honduras. He does this through a variety of characters; most notably Willie and Sayra. Fukunaga did extensive research on life in the Mara Salvatrucha gang and the process of immigrating to America, in order to make his film realistic and authentic. The result is a movie that not only shows immigration in a way that evokes empathy and enforces the humanity of immigrants in the viewer’s mind, but also gives the viewer a look into the realities of being in a gang. Through the use of strong characters, powerful dialogue and vivid imagery, Fukunaga uses pathos to put a human face to the issue of immigration, logos to inform and give his audience context about the issues the film addresses, and ethos to establish his credibility and make the film believable.

My initial reaction to the film was of utter shock at the brutally raw reality of the film. Upon reflection and commentary from other sources, the film’s simple yet vastly effective filmmaking techniques of developing the explicit and implicit meaning of the film. The explicit meaning, as

Due to drugs-related gang violence since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón entered office, more than 100,000 people have been killed (CNN Library, 2017). Among the major Mexican cartels - Los Zetas Cartel, Gulf Cartel, La and La Familia Michoacana, the Sinaloa Cartel is the most dominant drug trafficking organization in Mexico with an increasing presence in the United States. Roughly 80% of illegal substances like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana are supplied by the Sinaloa Cartel (Woody, 2016). There have been several attempts of increased pressure from both the U.S. and Mexican governments to disrupt drug trafficking organizations and this has led to significant instability and violence escalating into a national security crisis.

In 2011 Sony Pictures launched “Colombiana”, a movie that according to the official synopsis presents a young woman who has grown up to be an assassin after witnessing the murder of her parents as a child. This movie does not even mention Colombia in any context and was shot in Mexico, Chicago and France (Salazar, 2011). Television and films are a clear example that supports the trend founded in the research, producers have focus in portray Colombia as a brand for crime and violence, leading to shape an obscure collective public opinion. Despite the tremendous progress in recent decades, producers have embraced a criminal commercial strategy to portray Colombia without taking in consideration the social impact, economic decline and tourism

Subsequently, Toño is granted a re-trial. Throughout the film, several disturbing things are revealed about Mexico’s police, judges and prosecutors. First, an anonymous police officer comments about police in Mexico exaggerating or making up charges for

“Tick, Tick, Tick…BOOM!” One of the most lethal and disastrous bombs our world obtains, corruption. A fist of an orange and blood-red flame punches its way out of the shell, smoke and varicolored fire rushing out, while the corpses of innocent lives, lay on the cold-stone ground helplessly, paying the insolent price of conformity. For every tick of the bomb, a defenseless and innocent life is sacrificed. There is only a transient amount of time we have to defuse the bomb, until it explodes, obliterating society as whole. In Catch 22, Joseph Heller unveils the idea of corruption in war and military systems and how one must never conform to flawed ideas and rules because if we are against any type of moral, idea, or rule, and we sit back, observing the issue, nothing in this world will ever change, allowing corruption to consume us, bit by bit, just like a bomb.

In the documentary War of Drugs, we learned about how the U.S is taking on the problem of drugs in our country. It shows the police raiding cities with drug problems all over their streets. The own Chief of the police department calls their actions “questionable”, because it requires snooping and sneaking on their citizens. We also saw how the war on drugs is being fought in Columbia by spraying it with pesticide. This documentary was interesting to me. I had no idea that America was spraying Columbia’s coca fields. Also it was nice to see how it shared both opinions about whether or not the war on drugs was working.

In Juarez, Mexico, there is no law; the drug cartels hold all the power, and they use it to control every facet of society, not only to extort the citizens, but also to impose their will, which they achieve with brutal public savagery. In the mid-to-late 1900s, areas like Juarez were rare, but now, cities like it are on the rise and something must be done. To provide some context, 2006, the year of Felipe Calderon’s election, marked the beginning of Mexico’s ineffectual war on drugs (Buchenau). Since then, almost nothing has changed, and cartels still enjoy shocking impunity, resulting from their deep penetration of Mexican society. The Mexican drug war has affected Mexico’s poor and middle-class severely, causing them to live in constant fear of cartels more powerful than the Mexican government itself, and making violence, extortion, and kidnapping commonplace. These problems have the potential to spill over into the southern United States, which acts as a pathway for drug smugglers to transport their products to satiate America’s enormous drug demand. To combat this, Mexico and the United States, usually acting in spite of the other, have tried to reform the justice system and end the drug violence, but, up to this point, their efforts have been largely ineffective: some progress has been made, but not enough to really disrupt the cartels and return

Drug cartels, in reality, are just as bad as they appear on film. Authorities estimate that between eighteen and thirty-nine billion dollars are brought in from drug sales to the United States each year (Keefe). It is also estimated that the war on drugs has caused over 50,000 deaths in Mexico alone since 2006 (Keefe). Deaths are often overlooked because they are not compiled by thousands at once, but gradually over a large area. Other illegal activity such as kidnapping and oil theft have came about from the cartel (Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations: Source and Scope of the Violence). All three films, Miss Bala, Maria Full of Grace, and Traffic give similar accounts to the way the cartel takes people’s lives, only in different areas of the drug moving process.

The behavior in this document is inhumane and not natural. “Why do people watch James Bond? To see action. Why do people watch films about Nazis? To see power and sadism! We can do that! We can make something even more sadistic than... more sadistic than what you see in movies about Nazis. Sure I can. Because there is never been a movie where heads get chopped off - except in fiction, but that is different - because I did it in real life!” Anwar think making a film of killing would intrigue people and they would enjoy watching it. But, in the documentary there so much pain and suffrage, we usually do not see crimes these deadly and brutal in film. This documentary has no boundaries when it comes to the level of what should be allowed on

Since the year Mexico declared war on the cartels there has been thousands of deaths every year, “More than 85,000 people have been killed in Mexico since former President Felipe Calderon launched his military initiative against the cartels in 2006, according to Reuters” (Green house, 2015). Many innocent people have been killed and are still getting killed by these drug dealers. The cartels have taken over what used to be Mexico’s culture and have created a new culture, the “narco culture”. Individuals who live in states such as: Sinaloa Michoacán and Tijuana have become used to the everyday violence that they see in their neighborhoods, in parks or just outside a grocery store. The violence that is happening every day in those states has

It was then they approached her bedroom door where she was asleep in her bed when one of them had grabbed her after putting a blindfold on her, she screams and her father and brother come into her bedroom all she could hear was fighting and suddenly she was being carried away kicking and trying to fight back. When they had enough of her fighting back one of them knocked her out while the other two started to start to attack the village people screaming but

The 2015 film Cartel Land was directed by Matthew Heineman and is a documentary about two groups that are fighting the same Cartels in order to protect their communities. The film focuses on the struggles some Mexicans face within their communities and how Americans have to defend their communities from cartels trying to bring both drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. It portrays both sides of the dilemma and the actions that these groups take in order to prevent the cartels from succeeding with their plans.