The film is divided into six chapters, with the first two focusing on the kidnappings and murders of countless women in the Mexican cities of Juarez and Ecatepec. From there, the film reveals that these abductions go further; journalists, union leaders, social justice activists and priests are among the many victims of cartel-related violence. The most damning parts of the documentary come when the federal and state governments’ involvement in these atrocities is revealed.

An audience favourite, Elie’s beautifully shot and original film has won numerous awards including the FACT:AWARD at CPH:DOX 2019, Grand Prize for Best Canadian Feature at Montreal International Documentary Festival 2018 and Audience Award & Special Mention at FICUNAM 2019.

The screening (duration: 152′) will be followed by a short Q&A with the director, moderated by award-winning filmmaker James Jones.

Speakers

Julien Elie made his film debut in 2002 with The Last Meal, his first documentary about the death penalty in Texas. Several years later, after many travels in Mexico, he decided to do a film about the surge of violence in this country. Dark Suns is his first film in fifteen years.

Join us for a screening of The Ransom followed by a Q&A with film director Rémi Lainé in conversation with former chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Colin Freeman.

The Ransom dives into the secret system of Kidnap & Ransom, designed by major insurance companies in response to the 30,000 kidnappings committed every year around the world. International insurance companies have created kidnap & ransom, ultra-confidential contracts that are experiencing an unprecedented boom. Following a pending case in Venezuela, The Ransom, filmed in Africa, Europe and the USA, features insurers, negotiators and ex-hostages who speak out for the first time.

With exclusive access to leading hostage recovery agents, The Ransom reveals the cat and mouse games employed to bring a hostage out alive.

By following a few central characters in this interconnected world – often expressing themselves for the first time – The Ransom questions the price of one man’s life and reveals the impact of this vast global organisation on countries with a heightened risk of kidnapping such as Venezuela or Somalia. By emphasising prevention and increasing protection devices, aren’t we just increasing the vulnerability of those who don’t have the means to protect themselves?

“and the price of a man’s life has been determined by the price of things” (Saint-Just)

Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist, according to international press freedom groups. An increasing number of journalists in Mexico are freelance and working without the backing of a media outlet. This can further increase the risks that they face, especially when working in conflict areas and contribute to an already precarious labor situation.

FFR is an international organisation founded by freelance journalists that works to improve the safety and labor conditions of freelancers, especially those who work in conflict zones without the backing of a media outlet. Due to the situation freelance journalists find themselves in, the Frontline Club will be starting a chapter of FFR in Mexico to create a support network and provide solidarity.

The event will feature two documentaries about journalism in Mexico and will be followed by a discussion with local and international journalists about the situation for freelance journalists in Mexico and the work of Frontline Freelance Register. El Paso, is a documentary that tells the story of Mexican journalists who fled in exile to Texas after receiving threats in Mexico, related to their work. Death in Veracruz is a mini documentary produced by AJ+ that shows the daily life of Mexican Photo journalist Félix Márquez and Jorge Sánchez, the son of assassinated journalist Moisés Sánchez in Medellín, Veracruz.

More information here: http://www.centroculturadigital.mx/actividad/Frontline-y-Freelance-Periodistas-en-Riesgo-H1qFaSARW

Run Time: 18:00 – 21:00 hours

Sarah Giaziri – Frontline Freelance Register
Andalusia Knoll– Frontline Freelance Register
Mónica González – Periodistas de a Pie
Rodrigo Cruz – Documentary Photographer

The Sorrows of Mexico is a collection of essays from the leading writer-journalists of Mexico, each one concentrating on a single issue among the many which afflict their country. So – in the words of Lydia Cacho, Anabel Hernández, Juan Villoro, Diego Enrique Osorno, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati – this will be a crucial testimony and proof of the bravest voices in a country which needs this courage to denounce the depth and range of corruption and violence.

The contribution of each writer consists of a new essay along with passages of previously untranslated text. We will be joined by two of the book’s contributors, Anabel Hernandez and Lydia Cacho, who will discuss their experiences as female journalists working in one of the most hostile environments for human rights reporting.

Chair:

Ricardo Gonzalez: Ricardo is the Global Protection Officer at Article 19’s offices in Mexico. Article 19 as a charity campaigns for freedom of expression wherever it is threatened and champions freedom of information and pluralism in the media. 9 journalists lost their lives in Mexico in 2016, making it the third deadliest country for journalists to work in. This reflects the staggering lack of protection journalists are provided with. With offices in Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Mexico, Tunisia, Senegal and the UK, Ricardo and Article 19 work on improving these efforts.

Speakers:

Lydia Cacho is a Mexican journalist, author and a feminist activist against violence. Ms. Cacho herself has been imprisoned for her work and has put her life on the line on behalf of women and children in Mexico. As a consequence of her unwavering defense of human rights and journalistic freedom, her own life has been repeatedly threatened. Despite these dangers, she continues to champion the advancement of human rights.

Anabel Hernández is one of the most important journalists in Mexico. She bravely confronted narcotic gangs and state corruption often at a great risk to herself and her family. She is the author of many books including Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers; La IRA de Mexico: Siete Voces Contra La Impunidad and most recently La Verdadera Noche de Iguala: La Historia Que El Gobierno Quiso Ocultar, an investigation into the disappearance of students in Iguala.

The Academy Award-nominated film, the title of which translates to ‘assassin’, tells the story of the inextricably linked worlds of US law enforcement agencies and Mexican drug cartels. 

Sicario follows FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who leads an Arizona-based kidnap response unit. After she and her team lead a successful raid on a cartel hideout, Macer is recruited to work with an inter-agency special ops team led by CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).

Alongside Graver’s partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), Macer and the Delta Force team launch operations to capture the main narco-cartel players in the city of Juárez. She quickly learns how blurred the lines are in the USA’s inglorious war with Mexican cross-border drug cartels.

Jolin began by praising Sicario’s cinematography, describing it as a “slow-burning fuse, a mix of horror and sci-fi.” He said: “I’m a sucker for an effective score and beautiful cinematography – and that film has both.

“It posits this extreme reaction to dealing with the war on drugs. It takes you into a morally alien world. And the cinematography makes you feel like you’re in another world. When I came out I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what is wrong or right anymore’,” he said.

Vulliamy, who has worked extensively in South and Central America as a reporter for the Guardian, has visited Juárez frequently. One of the film’s opening sequences depicts decapitated corpses hanging from a bridge in the city – a scene which confronted Vulliamy during a recent trip.

But Vulliamy rejected the film’s depiction of the “darkness” of the city. “I’m actually one of the few people who still goes there for my holidays,” he said. “The more I spend time there the brighter its gets, and the decency of people grows more infectious and wonderful.”

Vulliamy said that that the war on drugs is “the first truly 21st century war.” He added: “It is our society that is irrevocably dependent on cocaine and it is our banks that keep accommodating the cartels by laundering their money. It is a totally post-modern, post-political war that is about nothing.”

Vulliamy praised Sicario for showing that the war on drugs in Mexico “is the future” and that in the murky war, “order is the best thing we can hope for.”

He said: “What you see in the film is the CIA putting people back into Mexico who are the only people who can run the system.

“The instruments of state need people like Chapo Gúzman [the recently recaptured cartel leader] on their side and that’s why they keep letting him out of jail, because he can keep the pax mafiosa.”

At the screening of Sicario at @frontlineclub. A tough game between reality and morality. pic.twitter.com/mEj2BjYUyZ

— Federica De Caria (@FedericaAntea) February 5, 2016

However, Vulliamy criticised the film for failing to depict the lives of real Mexicans. “I can’t understand why Hollywood can’t make a film about Mexico that is actually about Mexicans.

“Our sense of Juárez is nil. There’s no sense of poverty, and no real attempt to go there. It’s still Rambo.”

But Jolin defended Sicario’s focus, commenting that “the film is putting Americans at the heart of it and saying, ‘we can be just as bad as them’.”

Au audience member asked why the US government does not push for the legalisation of hard drugs.

Jolin said legalisation was the right path, but that politicians would never dare advocating it because it would lose them votes. Vulliamy suggested that “it would be great for Greenwich Village and on university campuses,” but that poverty-stricken areas of South America where the drugs are produced would not be improved.

“It’s not going to make anything worse. I just don’t think it’s the answer,” he said.

This screening will be followed by a discussion with journalist Ed Vulliamy and Dan Jolin of Empire Magazine.

After rising through the ranks of her male-dominated profession, idealistic FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) receives a top assignment. Recruited by mysterious government official Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), Kate joins a task force for the escalating war against drugs. Led by the intense and shadowy Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), the team travels back-and-forth across the U.S.-Mexican border, using one cartel boss (Bernardo Saracino) to flush out a bigger one (Julio Cesar Cedillo).

Sicario was nominated for 3 BAFTA Film Awards, as well as the Palm d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Ed Vulliamy is a writer for The Guardian and The Observer. In 2013, he won the award for literary reporting named after the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński for his book Amexica: War Along the Borderline, a vivid dissection of the violent US-Mexico ‘war on drugs’.

Dan Jolin is Features Editor of Empire magazine, the world’s biggest movie magazine. He has been working in film journalism since 1997.

Directed by: Dennis Villeneuve
Country: United States
Year: 2015
Runtime: 120′
Rating: R

On Thursday 12 November, award-winning reporter Sandra Rodríguez Nieto spoke with author and journalist for the Observer and the Guardian Ed Vulliamy about life and death in Juarez, the Mexican murder capital of the world.

The evening at the Frontline Club began with a touching dedication to a close friend and colleague of Rodríguez‘s, Arnando Rodriguez, “who was brutally and horribly murdered… He became a symbol of our profession at its most noble.”

Rodríguez cited the murder as a turning point for her: “After Armando got killed, it was just the opposite reaction to fear [for her colleagues at El Diario]. We were committed to keep on writing, to honour him.”

Death became a part of Rodríguez and her colleagues’ everyday conversations while working as a crime reporter for El Diario de Juárez. “We started to share our last wills: ‘If I get killed, don’t let anybody open my coffin’.”

In her latest book, The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father and His Sister: Life and Death in Juarez, Rodríguez uses 16-year-old Vicente’s murder of his entire family to highlight how a culture of impunity has destabilised Mexican society.

Rodríguez said: “Vicente might be a sociopath but he convinced two other kids from different backgrounds to help him… and that killing a family was totally easy. When I asked him why, his answer was a revelation for me: ‘Because this is Juarez; this is Mexico’.”

The culture of impunity in Juarez, and Mexico as a whole, is a topic that dominated much of the discussion. Rodríguez was adamant that “we have not just a problem of violence but of impunity, sending the message that killing is easy… and these kids are internalising this environment. A whole generation of kids in Mexico believe that murder is basically legal.”

Rodríguez made clear the extent of corruption in Mexico. She noted that “there is no single institution that you can trust… Not the police, not the army, not the judiciary.”

She expressed her deep belief that a lack of prosecution for crimes is central to the continuation of violence: “If a state doesn’t prosecute crime, it’s sending the message that human life isn’t worth it and that’s the tragedy of the country.”

She also highlighted the multi-layered and interweaving nexus of corruption in Mexico. “Corruption doesn’t start with the bottom of society, it starts at the top and spreads to the bottom.” When she questioned the state attorney in Juarez about an FBI indictment in which eleven out of twenty  cartel members were found to be former police officers, he told her: ”I don’t prosecute organised crime – it’s not my business.”

You can’t sustain a society where.. you work you don’t make money, you get killed nobody cares but that’s Mexico.” @frontlineclub — Molly (@mollykathleenv) November 12, 2015

But Vulliamy also noted the hypocrisy present in much of the discourse on Mexico. “I always get wary of sitting in London talking about endemic corruption in Mexico. HSBC was caught laundering money and none of them went to jail either.”

Rodríguez also pointed out the injustice of the divide between neighbouring El Paso, Texas, and Juarez: “One is the safest place in the US, the other is the murder capital of the world.“ This is because “when narcos in El Paso want to kill, they do it in Juarez.”

When questioned about legalisation, Rodríguez strongly criticised the war on drugs. “The first killer in Mexico is diabetes caused by the consumption of sugar… That’s the drug that’s killing Mexican people.”

She continued: “I want to challenge the narrative of the war on drugs. It’s obviously not working… the prohibition is totally wrong.”

Following an audience question on the role of community solidarity and development, Rodríguez sounded a note of hope. “Juarez is full of grassroots movements. Juarez surprised the country by the level of organisation among the people.”

Among the audience was Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who said: “Frontline performs a fantastic service of giving voice to journalists who are reporting what many are afraid to. Sandra Rodríguez is one of many who does this. We need to get out there what happens when governments fail to deal with the deep corruption of both banking and narco trafficking.”

One Mexican audience member was moved to tears when thanking Rodríguez for her valuable work in exposing the endemic corruption and violence in her country: “You and good journalism: that’s the solution. We will change Mexico with people like you.”

Ciudad Juárez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua just across the border from El Paso, Texas has a reputation as the most murderous city in the world.

At the age of sixteen, Vicente Leon Chavez, along with two of his high school friends murdered his mother, his father, and his little sister. Through this inexplicable triple murder, journalist Sandra Rodríguez Nieto has sought to explore the culture of extreme violence that has developed in Juárez. Her in-depth investigation offers an insight into the thought process of the three young boys, the fabric of the city they grew up in and the drug cartels that wage war in its streets.

We are pleased to welcome Sandra Rodríguez Nieto to the Frontline Club in conversation with Ed Vulliamy, writer for the Guardian and Observer. They will be discussing the poverty, deep levels of corruption, incapacitated government institutions and US meddling that have combined to create an explosion of violence in Juárez.

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto has won international plaudits for her reportage in Mexico, including the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, the Reporteros Del Mundo award from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo for outstanding work in a conflict zone, and the Los Angeles Times Media Hero list for reporting in one of the most dangerous cities on earth. In 2012, she published La Fábrica del Crimen (The Crime Factory) and this year The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father and His Sister: Life and Death in Juarez.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

On Friday 4 September, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of Cartel Land, a fearless and revealing documentary that portrays the violent influence of Mexican drug cartels and the vigilante groups fighting to end their reign of terror. The screening was followed by a Q&A with the film’s director Matthew Heineman.

Cartel Land takes place in the border state of Arizona in the USA, and in the Mexican state of Michoácan. The latter has been overrun by a number of cartels, including the brutal Knights Templar, who have taken advantage of high level corruption and an absence of legitimate state presence in order to take control with increasingly violent tactics.

The film follows Dr José Manuel Mireles, who Heineman described as “the single most interesting man I’ve ever been around,” and his newly-formed Autodefensas: a rapidly growing group of armed civilians who are determined to force out the cartels and bring peace back to their towns. Just across the US-Mexico border in Arizona is Tim “Nailer” Foley, who leads a group of armed patriot vigilantes in patrolling the border. While Foley’s original intentions were based on a staunch anti-immigration ideology, his motives expanded to include the defence of the US border against Mexican cartels.

The film was very well received by the audience, with many keen to learn more about Heineman‘s experience of working in the notoriously-violent state of Michoácan. The filmmaker told the audience that he had no experience of working in conflict prior to Cartel Land; his previous film focused on healthcare in the US. While there was a constant threat of witnessing a violent confrontation in Arizona, this never materialised. In contrast, the violence in Mexico was “visceral, it was real”:

“I’m not a war reporter… so it was terrifying. I’d never been in a place where there was gunfire going off, I’d never been in a place where people were being tortured, so I had no idea where this film would lead me.”

The film vividly portrays the extent to which gunfire has become commonplace in cartel-led towns across Mexico. This is not dampened by the presence of the Autodefensas, who are themselves heavily armed. As the movement grows, the corruption, acts of intimidation and misuse of power that they claim to be fighting also begin to appear and spread within their own group.

@mheineman premiered his #sundance #winner #documentary at the @frontlineclub and it was #amazing #london #journali… pic.twitter.com/M5Pcy0GG5o

— Annabelle Azade (@AnnabelleAzade) September 4, 2015

An audience member asked whether Heineman was hopeful that the situation in Michoácan would improve. He responded that, despite the Mexican government implementing new measures of reform and legitimising the Autodefensas as a state force, the situation has worsened. “The violence has continued, kidnappings have continued. The thing that everyone feared all along, revenge and anarchy, has played out.”

Heineman told Frontline Club audience members that while he considers himself an “eternal optimist,” he doesn’t view the situation with hope. Mexican government institutions continue to fail to “provide basic safety and security for their citizens.” Heineman extended this criticism to Mexico as a whole, “especially at the local level… [there is] direct collusion between cartels and local government. We see that all throughout Mexico. But the biggest thing is us, is Americans: we’re funding this war through our consumption of drugs.”

In terms of the filming process on the ground, Heineman explained that he had intended to spend two weeks filming in Mexico, but ended up staying for nine months. As a result, he was able to develop close relationships with many high-level Autodefensas leaders.

“They were risking their lives and dying fighting for what they believed in and we were tagging along with them, so I think there was a level of respect that came with that.”

Heineman recounted one particular incident in which his lengthy commitment to the project resulted in astounding access. As detailed in the opening and closing sequences of the film, Heineman gained accesses to an outdoor operation producing meth, where ‘cookers’ openly admit that profits from the sale of the drugs feed directly into the Autodefensas.

Cartel Land is currently showing in cinemas across the UK. More information can be found on the film’s website.

In this double Sundance winner, Matthew Heineman takes us deep into the world of Mexican drug cartels by embedding himself with two vigilante groups on either side of the US-Mexico border.

In Arizona’s Altar Valley — a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley — Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran, heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon, whose goal is to halt Mexico’s drug wars from seeping across the border. Meanwhile, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” shepherds a citizen uprising against the Knights Templar, the violent drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years.

Heineman repeatedly places himself in harm’s way, filming the chaos as Mireles’ vigilante group begins taking over towns – in the process adapting many of the violent tactics of the drug lords they’re trying to overpower. A visceral journey into North America’s heart of darkness, Cartel Land is a chilling meditation on the breakdown of order and the borderline where life trumps law.

Director: Matthew Heineman
Country: USA/Mexico
Running time: 98′
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