Weekend find - San Miguel Narcangel

If you had not heard, Mexico, like much of Latin America, is celebrating the bicentenial of its fight for independence from Spain this year. Fireworks! Giant inflatable Miguel Hidalgos! Mexican flags mailed to every household in the city! A five day weekend! An animated tale of the war of independence (which I really want to see, for cheese factors, if nothing else - look at her smirk)!


But, also, this movie


tag line - 'Mexico 2010 - Nothing to Celebrate'

Made by Luis Estrada, a Mexican film maker who proposes this as the final installment in a satiric trilogy about corruption, vacancy, and circular hopelessness in contemporary Mexico, this particular piece concerns the impossibility of the drug war and the drug trade in the north of the country. Extremely violent, taking Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers as inspiration, the movie is an overblown, semi-sarcastic, definitely uncomfortable, sometimes caricature of narco culture in the small towns and ranches of the vast spaces between the northern border and the larger cities of the center of the country.

Watched at home, without the context of its intended audience, this film might come across as a gross exaggeration, distasteful and ill-conceived. Yet, in a movie theater full of Mexicans exposed daily to the 'Nota Roja' sections of newspapers full of blood and gore and gruesome death, listening to them laugh as you cover your eyes, it becomes something entirely different. It is a movie made by someone who knows exactly how and when to elicit a laugh for maximum discomfort. A director and screenwriter who sprinkle criticism of law enforcement and politicians liberally throughout a piece that glamorizes and undermines simultaneously the riches that come from the drug trade.

Hardest, perhaps, to come to terms with as an outsider was the readiness of the audience to agree with particular criticisms of the rule of law, of characters who try to turn to justice rather than violence, of even the attempt to dismantle the drug trade. This is where it becomes inevitable. There is no commitment to Calderon's war against the cartels; it is just that - Calderon's war. Not the country's. And to become an informant, to approach the police, to turn in a murderer or act as a witness for the prosecution is not an option, let alone a heroic act. And, not living through it, built as it is upon a long history of political oligarchy and quiet, pervasive corruption that made any such honesty impossible.