An aggrieved member of the militia punched one of them repeatedly through tears, he demanded to know what had been done with the remains of his uncles. It made them happy.” Heineman filmed the Autodefensas closing in on El Chaneque and Caballo in a shootout. They cut their head, their hands, their legs-everything-into pieces. After that, they came in with four more people. A woman told Heineman that she had seen the men kill her husband and other members of the Autodefensas: “First, they burned my husband with a blowtorch while he was alive. When he arrived, the Autodefensas had tracked down two Knights Templar assassins, known as El Chaneque and Caballo, men allegedly responsible for the kinds of barbaric atrocities now standard in cartel culture. He took a camera, called his fixer-a local journalist-and headed back to Los Reyes. As Heineman and his crew boarded a plane home, he was struck by the feeling that they were missing something. “I wanted to know what happens when government institutions fail and citizens feel like they have to take the law into their own hands.” He hoped to emancipate the drug-war story from the headlines, and avoid telling it, as so often happens, through talking-head interviews with experts and officials.Įarly visits to the region yielded little: he scored a meeting with Mireles and followed the Autodefensas as they took over a town called Los Reyes, but nothing much seemed to happen cinematically. “The minute I read that article, I knew I wanted to create a parallel story of vigilantes on both sides of the border,” Heineman told me. In June, 2013, as Heineman was setting out to document citizen militias in Arizona, his father sent him an article about the leader of the Autodefensas, a charismatic doctor named José Manuel Mireles.
DRUG WARS THE CAMARENA STORY MOVIE FREE
Said to be composed of bricklayers, fishermen, lumberjacks, and other working-class types, the Autodefensas, a citizen militia, were making progress in their efforts to free Michoacán from the control of the Knights Templar, the area’s operating cartel. For three weeks, they’d worked twenty-hour days, trying to capture footage of the Autodefensas. Matthew Heineman, a thirty-two-year-old American filmmaker, was at the airport in Michoacán, the war-torn Mexican state west of Mexico City, when he had second thoughts about returning home. The current DVD release features a heavily edited version that runs only 130 minutes.The documentary “Cartel Land,” a winner at Sundance, has been released in the United States and Mexico. DVD releaseĪll three parts originally ran for four hours. network news footage of the real Camarena incident in '85, the dramatic scenes in Drug Wars are never anything less than convincing - just as good propaganda should be".
Craig MacInnis, in his review for the Toronto Star, wrote, "Interspersed with U.S. Some interesting camera work to be sure, including the video bits and some heightened use of slow motion, but the miniseries' chief strength is its grit, its anger". In his review for USA Today, Matt Roush wrote, "For a Michael Mann production, there's surprisingly little flash to Drug Wars. Especially effective is Benicio del Toro as the young, illiterate and flaky Rafael Caro-Quintero". O'Connor wrote, "Perhaps not surprisingly, these amoral entrepreneurs provide some of the film's juicier roles.
In his review for The New York Times, John J. In a somewhat interesting reversal of roles, in Drug Wars actors Miguel Ferrer and Steven Bauer both play DEA agents while Benicio del Toro and Eddie Velez play drug traffickers in Traffic, Ferrer and Bauer both play drug traffickers, while del Toro and Velez play a Mexican federal narcotics agent and a DEA agent. Fact-based story of undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena (Bauer) who, while stationed in Guadalajara, uncovered a massive marijuana operation in Northern Mexico that led to his death and a remarkable investigation of corruption within the Mexican government.Īt least four of the principal actors in Drug Wars: The Camarena Story later starred in the Academy Award-winning film Traffic, a film that also deals with the subject of the ongoing drug trade between the United States and Mexico.
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