Traffic
So that’s where Alejandro came from. The Juarez cartel and him go way back. He got the baseball field for kids at last. I prefer the other film named Trafic
This is a Reagan-era treatise on the drug world, even though the protagonist rejects the War on Drugs explicitly. He requires people that work on treatment on the task force.
It’s also a profoundly racist unintentional period piece; while there’s some modicum of exploration of the Mexican side of the drug trade, the black inner city dealer is a generic boogeyman with no characterisation. The cold, calculating sicario is gay and this is how he is caught in San Diego and brought back to Mexico: this is mentioned as a character flaw. A similar point is made by the banter between the DEA cops.
This glorifies the DEA as incorruptible people fighting a just war, while Mexico is total anarchy, all the police either corrupt, some working directly for the cartels. The pitiful children being affected are the sons and daughters of high level public servants, doctors, judges.
Not even a passing mention is made to the working class children getting killed by the increased violent policing (the same inner city black people that act as a backdrop), the mass incarceration resulting from zero tolerance policies, three strikes and you are jailed, and the like.
[This is what happens when they settle in (government)](Sicario){:.inner-link}:
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.