I caught Narco Cultura at Cinema Village this week; the only other people in the audience were two friends of the film’s composer Jeremy Turner, and a couple of homeless bag ladies camping out. It’s sad that no one sees these great films that play at Cinema Village.

There’s a ton a documentaries made these days, most addressing good topics, but even the critically lauded ones are usually mediocre and underwhelming. In contrast, I found Narco Culture devastating and deeply thought provoking, despite certain gripes I had concerning topics and issues the film decided to not broach. It is absolutely a must-see for every American.

Narco Culture is a film about the effect, on Mexicans and Americans, of what it sees as a culture of narcotics arising in the last 10 years from the Mexican drug trade. It features two parallel narratives. The first concerns the town of Juarez, Mexico (a kind of sister city to El Paso) which is ground-zero in the carnage of the so-called Mexican “drug war”, and a microcosm of what’s happening all over Mexico. It follows a fellow in the criminal investigations unit, which cleans up the bodies from the thousands of murders each year in Juarez (to compare: New York City had 156 homicides last year with a population eight times as big as Juarez.) Of course these crimes are not prosecuted, because doing so would be a good way to get killed immediately; instead, they merely catalog the endless crime information, and try their best to stay alive. And by the way, the murders in Juarez are not like American shootings – we’re talking live beheadings, people hacked into 17 pieces with an ax, bodies burned straight through to a black cinder, a field full of heads, that kind of shit.

The parallel narrative concerns the so-called “Narco singers,” a new genera of music that is basically mariachi music (like you’d hear in a Mexican restaurant,) but with lyrics that glorify cartel violence, and glorify the various personages within the cartels as anti-establishment heroes. It follows a Mexican-American narco singer who appears on stage wearing a real bazooka, and who longs to go to Culiacan, Mexico (the home of the biggest cartel) so he can lend a more direct authenticity to his lyrics by seeing his heroes up close and personal. The emphasis is on the growing popularity of this music, both in Mexico and the U.S., and the warped idolization of criminal activity it supposedly encourages in the young.

So the film is mostly a juxtaposition of the ineffable grief and sadness of ordinary Mexicans as their friends and family are slaughtered daily, with the commercial crassness of a music industry celebrating the perpetrators of the crimes. But at one point a journalist is interviewed who briefly broadens the intellectual scope of the film, mentioning that the whole narco culture phenomenon shows just how completely defeated Mexicans are as a  people and as a society; the criminal investigator later echoes this sentiment, asking if Mexican society is irreversibly dying?

This made me extremely sad, and a bit aggravated at the documentary, because it has nothing to say about this fundamental question: why is Mexican society so defeated? In fact, Narco Cultura is implicitly pushing disinformation on this topic. The film blames the cartels for all the violence, and gives the government a pass as merely “ineffective.” The reality in Mexico is that the government, the cartels, and the banking industry all work closely together for their mutual enrichment; in a way they are different limbs of the same ruling class of elites. The “drug war” referred to in the film was in fact a broad militarization of Mexican society, which started (not coincidentally) right after the election of 2006 had to be stolen to prevent the impending election of a Hugo Chavez-like reformer (Andrés Manuel López Obrador.) This sparked huge protests, the largest in Mexico’s history, when the people realized they’d been fucked over. Within this militarization, the cartels are free to operate pretty much as they did before. It’s all about terror and suppression of political dissent among the vast Mexican poor, and the mass murders and human right abuses are as much from the army as they are from violence arising from competing cartels. The reason the narco-singers are catching on in Mexico is an unfortunate warping of the anger the public feels toward the government.

Further, the power of this criminal, ruling block was made possible in large part by NAFTA and neoliberal privatization and liquidation of national assets. In fact, the United States DEA issued a report that drug trafficking was going to explode if NAFTA was implemented, but Bill Clinton pushed it through regardless. NAFTA destroyed traditional agriculture in Mexico, and drove millions off the land and into desperate urban poverty. And privatization / deregulation freed the banking industry to become an unrestricted money laundering machine for the cartels (they could not become this powerful without the ability to process all that money.) In this equation lies the destruction of Mexican society: it’s just like any other Latin American society that lets itself be run by the United States for the exclusive benefit of billionaires on both sides of the border.

At the end of the day, Narco Cultura is a wonderful and interesting view into people’s suffering from the drug war, but it is maddeningly silent on the real forces perpetuating this suffering. An American seeing this movie might never get past the superficial sentiment that drugs are “evil”, and the Mexican government should commit more troops to its “war”. And they might assume the United States is a kind of powerless victim in all this, which is absurdly false. If the United States really wanted to solve the “drug problem”, both the violence and the substance dependence aspects, it would decriminalize all drugs, and make them available medically, which would eliminate the insane lucrativeness of the business, and simultaneously construct a social system that could support rehabilitation of addicted people. Every American should read this report, on Portugal’s successful decriminalization of drugs: this is the model to end the cycle of violence.

So I definitely recommend that you see Narco Cultura, but please don’t stop there in educating yourself about the real causes of this narco culture, about the so-called “drug war” and its real aims and beneficiaries, and about real solutions for a more hopeful future.