I've been following the story of Michiacan's Autodefensas almost from the moment they began popping up in the news. This is is a bad documentary.
Good first, the footage is really amazing. It's one thing to do interviews and capture some funerals, bloody sceneries, etc. It's another to capture several firefights. Props to the crew for their courage.
That's about it. I've heard the director during an interview say something along the lines of "By the end I realized there weren't any good people in this battle". And it's completely understandable how the viewer can arrive at that conclusion just from watching the doc.
The reality is so much more complex than the director portrays and I don't know if he's simple minded or if it's done in bad faith to create a more shocking story. The rise of the autodefensas is fundamentally a story of a government that did a terrible job of defending its citizens against organized crime. In their desperation to rid their cities of cartel activity some municipalities in Michoacán gave their support to a rival cartel which displaces the original, splits in two, and after the smoke clears stations itself in these municipalities as the Caballeros Templarios cartel. They charged quotas on all exchanges and properties, controlled the markets and supply, charged kids to go to school, killed people over police reports... Cornered by their desperation and tactical misfires, civilians took up arms. Farmers, teachers, lemon pickers, doctors. People who were completely untrained in combat. Those were the autodefensas, and their sole purpose was to remove the Templarios. Some municipalities made awful choices. Others like Hipólito Mora's La Ruana are as heroic a modern day tale as you'll find. Their eventual crumbling, lapses of judgment, anger, paranoia, disorder, corruption, should not come as a surprise.
The documentary offers a very shallow skimming of this context. It promises to do a fair take of this initially, and only the filmmakers could answer why they decided to ultimately share a narrative of what they see as monstrosities committed on all sides, as if there were a moral equivalence between the cartels and the autodefensas. This is insultingly simplistic. I'll end with a shoutout to the comically misguided juxtaposition they tried to pull between the border vigilantes fighting a near nonexistent problem and the autodefensas.
Good first, the footage is really amazing. It's one thing to do interviews and capture some funerals, bloody sceneries, etc. It's another to capture several firefights. Props to the crew for their courage.
That's about it. I've heard the director during an interview say something along the lines of "By the end I realized there weren't any good people in this battle". And it's completely understandable how the viewer can arrive at that conclusion just from watching the doc.
The reality is so much more complex than the director portrays and I don't know if he's simple minded or if it's done in bad faith to create a more shocking story. The rise of the autodefensas is fundamentally a story of a government that did a terrible job of defending its citizens against organized crime. In their desperation to rid their cities of cartel activity some municipalities in Michoacán gave their support to a rival cartel which displaces the original, splits in two, and after the smoke clears stations itself in these municipalities as the Caballeros Templarios cartel. They charged quotas on all exchanges and properties, controlled the markets and supply, charged kids to go to school, killed people over police reports... Cornered by their desperation and tactical misfires, civilians took up arms. Farmers, teachers, lemon pickers, doctors. People who were completely untrained in combat. Those were the autodefensas, and their sole purpose was to remove the Templarios. Some municipalities made awful choices. Others like Hipólito Mora's La Ruana are as heroic a modern day tale as you'll find. Their eventual crumbling, lapses of judgment, anger, paranoia, disorder, corruption, should not come as a surprise.
The documentary offers a very shallow skimming of this context. It promises to do a fair take of this initially, and only the filmmakers could answer why they decided to ultimately share a narrative of what they see as monstrosities committed on all sides, as if there were a moral equivalence between the cartels and the autodefensas. This is insultingly simplistic. I'll end with a shoutout to the comically misguided juxtaposition they tried to pull between the border vigilantes fighting a near nonexistent problem and the autodefensas.