Sicario

The 2015 release of the Netflix series Narcos and the feature crime thriller Sicario brought the war on drugs onto screens across the US. Both of these productions tell the story of the drug war from the perspective of US police. Narcos is narrated from the perspective of a DEA Agent in Colombia who doesn’t speak Spanish. Sicario is narrated primarily through the experience of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), the only woman agent in the film.

Sicario, which was released in October 2015, opens with an FBI raid on a house in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. The wartime tactics of militarized special forces are on display as agents crawl down off a ridge and blow through the front door of the house. A shootout exposes fake walls, leading investigators to 42 bodies, standing up, their heads in plastic bags. Police out searching the backyard trigger a grenade, rigged to kill anyone poking around in the shed.

Despite the overblown military tactics of police, we are quickly shown that the SWAT style house raid bears fruit. This even though in real life SWAT tactics and house raids are increasingly coming under criticism for violence, especially against communities of color.

In this way, the opening scene sets up a key dynamic maintained throughout the film, which sways between presenting police on both sides of the Mexico-US border as out of control, paramilitarized, torture-using, mafia-esque groups engaged in the drug war, and then justifying these extreme police tactics as the only methods able to enforce peace in the borderlands.

Before a proper investigation is carried out, police officials suggest that the people responsible for the killings are members of the Sonora Cartel. This reflects a too-real tendency by police and media to blame acts of violence on cartel figures before any work is done to establish whether or not that is the case. There is no further work done in Sicario to establish that in fact a cartel was responsible for the murders, rather, as in real life, we are asked to trust police when they tell us that only organized crime could be capable of such massacres.

Viewers see the first scene through the eyes of Macer, the young FBI agent who participates in the raid. Scenes of Macer alone, rinsing blood from her hair in the shower or looking at her swollen face in the mirror, punctuate the film, opening up her personal experience of trauma as she sinks deeper into the war on drugs.

Following the raid, Macer volunteers to take part in a Joint Interagency Task Force, whose job is supposedly to take down the bosses behind the house of horrors in Chandler. Her boss is to be Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a CIA agent whose beach-ready footwear and casual, gum-chewing demeanor suggest a corruption of police work from the outset. Graver quips that the goal of the Joint Task Force is to ‘dramatically overreact’ in order to sow chaos within the Sonora Cartel.

The film then cuts to what is supposed to be Nogales, Mexico (all of the Mexico scenes were actually shot in the Federal District – a careful viewer will note Mexico City’s trademark green and white pesero buses and red and yellow taxi cabs in various scenes), where a young boy wakes his father, a state police officer, and asks to play football. Needless to say the father is a corrupt cop, and though we don’t know much about the young family, theirs is not a happy outcome.

Before we know it we’re back in the US with Macer and Graver, who travel to El Paso for a briefing before conducting an illegal kidnapping of a suspected Sonora Cartel affiliate in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here we meet the CIA’s bird-dog Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), who accidentally reveals his own trauma to Macer when he wakes up with a start during the flight over.

Present at the briefing are US Marshals, Texas police, CIA agents, Graver, Alejandro, Macer, and veterans of the war in Afghanistan. The veterans in particular are repeatedly presented as being borderline paramilitaries, a group of uncouth, unshaven men who shoot first and ask later. The agent carrying out the briefing warns the people assembled that ‘anywhere along the way, anyone not in this room is a potential shooter.’

For those who have kept tabs the drug war in Mexico, or US wars elsewhere, this scene echoes real-life precedents. In 2014, it was revealed that US Marshals were dressing as Mexican marines in order to take part in raids south of the border. The suggestion that anyone they come across in Mexico is a potential shooter and thus guilty until proven innocent also has roots in US military doctrine. Documents obtained by The Intercept in 2015 ‘show that the military designated people it killed in targeted [drone] strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike’ (Scahill, 2015).

Macer is suspicious of the cross border mission, and as the US convoy crosses the border with Federal Police escorts, rolling past handball courts and an unlikely midday display of disfigured bodies hung along the very route taken by the convoy, we are again shown a police operation that appears overblown. Seen from Macer’s eyes, with doom violins droning in the background, the Ciudad Juarez, which is referred to as ‘the beast’ by US agents, is scary, with visible poverty, groups of dark men gathered on corners, and concrete houses with black water tanks perched on their rooftops. But when the view shifts to the outside and we see the convoy pass, it is they that look like a frightening invading army.

The Mexico segment ends with a shootout between US agents and racially profiled, tattooed men we are led to believe are gang members, on the border bridge on the way back to El Paso. Again, we are asked to trust police that their victims were deserving of their own extrajudicial assassination.

In an interview in Variety magazine, Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan stated that he wanted to try and communicate how who he calls the architects of the drug trade use ‘… violence to control a populace — that’s what they do. And it isn’t just killing. It’s killing and mutilating, displaying — it’s terrorism, essentially, except it’s not to achieve a political goal, it’s to make money.’ It is thus that the graphic violence attributed (without investigation) to drug cartels is positioned as condemnable violence, whereas the deaths provoked by US forces themselves are seen as a necessary consequence of the drug war.

Back in the US, Macer is shaken. She smokes her first cigarette, another device the film returns from here on to illustrate her increasing levels of traumatization. She is invited up on to the roof at the El Paso army base to watch the fireworks in Juarez as grenades and firefights light up the night on the other side of the border. This also has a historic precedent, as people in El Paso set up stands in order to watch the Battle of Ciudad Juarez in 1911. There were even popcorn vendors back then.

A scene suggesting the use of torture, carried out by Alejandro with the blessing of Graver and others, ensues. Regardless of Macer’s meek protest, Sicario’s narrative swings away from a critical portrayal of US tactics back to favoring extreme and often blatantly illegal police activity. At the end of the Juarez scene, the target is captured and returned to the US, and the killings on the bridge are justified, as it appeared that all suspects were armed. We are again led to trust that members of the Joint Task Force led by Graver and Alejandro know best, even if we may not agree with their means.

This is the same message that the US government deploys in the drug war, as does the government of Mexico: trust in us, the ends will justify the means. This message has served as a cornerstone of official discourse, as violence throughout Mexico has escalated drastically since former President Felipe Calderón declared a war on organized crime and narcotrafficking in December 2006. Since then, the homicide rate in Mexico has doubled compared to the 10 years previous, and the number of people officially disappeared in the country has climbed to over 50,000, with 27,000 of the cases of disappearance coming in the past nine years.

But Sicario doesn’t give broader context about the US role in the increasingly bloody war in Mexico. Rather, we are led to believe that surgical intrusions by tactical forces into Mexico are appropriate to take down the heads of drug organizations and to restore peace.

Macer’s health continues degrade as she survives a rape attempt when she is used as bait by her bosses to net a corrupt Pheonix policeman. Towards the end of the film, Macer questions the tactics of US special forces and threatens to out Alejandro’s role as an operative for another cartel. She is threatened with death and forced into silence by her own colleague. By now she’s covered in bruises, and smoking cigarettes from her own pack.

Sicario, which has a handful of Oscar nominations including one for best cinematography, spins an enticing and visually compelling yarn about the drug war in Mexico and its impacts on the borderlands. At certain points, it feels like a weighty and critical film, with allegations of police involvement in drug trafficking on both sides of the border.

Even as Sicario repeatedly exposes state forces as killers, there is a constant return to the legitimacy of militarized police action as the only solution to the gore of the drug war. The film hides the broader role of state forces as perpetrators of violence in Mexico, and the US role, through the Merida Initiative and other programs. It also hides how violence is effected against civilians who are neither police nor so called cartel bosses, relying instead on self defense or on a vendetta motive for killings, presenting the dead as consistently involved in criminal activity.

In this way, the film stays safely within official narratives about the drug war, offering little insight into the deeper and more socially disperse causes and impacts of US drug policy in the region.