Go behind the lens of POV documentary Kingdom of Shadows.
POV: Tell us what Kingdom of Shadows is about.
Bernardo Ruiz You know Kingdom of Shadows is really about three people. It's about three people who've been harmed by this thing we call the drug war as it relates to the U.S. and Mexico. So in the film you meet Don Henry Ford, who's a former smuggler in Texas, was smuggling at the height of Reagan's Just Say No era. You meet Oscar Hagelsieb who is a former undercover, former border patrol and a high-ranking Homeland Security investigator, who knows the drug trade on the Texas-Mexico quite intimately. And the third person you meet in the film is Sister Consuelo Morales who is a human rights defender and activist who had been pushing her state government in, in the state of Nuevo Leon on the border with Texas to do something about these disappearances and crimes, human rights abuses against people in her community.
So taken together, it's really a portrait of how this conflict, the U.S.-Mexico narco conflict has impacted the lives of people that don't normally get to occupy the center of a story. It's about the kind of, the terrible harm that's been visited on people from three very different walks of life.
POV: The characters you introduce are very different characters. As you describe they are witnesses to this tragedy on the border. What binds them? Is there a common experience that they are having, that you are trying to draw out?
Ruiz: Yeah, for me you know these, the three people who are at the heart of the film, it's almost as if they're residents of another country, you know that's neither Mexico nor the U.S. They're in their own kind of separate kingdom. These are people whose lives have been touched by a kind of very deep tragedy, but who have this very unique perspective on it. You know they're all able to reflect on this experience.
They can provide a kind of testimony of the front lines of this, this conflict. But I think as often you know really misunderstood and, and despite many attempts I think in a lot of, a lot of media around the narco conflict, the humanity is really removed from the people at the center of it. I mean we discussed it a little bit when I brought Reportero here, but you know so much of cable coverage with regards to the narco conflict is you know hyper-sensationalized, very little context if any. It's just bodies in the street, you know. It's a kind of vulture journalism, a kind of rubber-necking journalism.
And, and to me, what has always had more power and a kind of ability to inform is to spend some time with people, to understand their stories. I think these three people have a kind of unique ability to process their personal stories but also give us a kind of glimpse of the bigger picture.
Unfortunately that bigger picture isn't one of harm, it's really one of kind of disastrous consequences. And so what you have is really a story of three people who despite some very serious harm, are resilient. I wouldn't say that the film has a Pollyanna-ish view about the future, it's just that these three people continue with their lives despite the harm that's been visited upon them.
POV: Tell about how the drug trade changed over years.
Ruiz: So in the mid-1980s when Don was smuggling, he was dealing with a few organized crime groups, but primarily with the Juarez cartel, led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes who was the, called the "Lord of the skies." There've been telenovelas made about him, people also called him the boss of bosses.
But it was a very traditional family organized around family structures and family ties. Along the lines of what we think of as U.S. stories about the mafia. It was a very traditional kind of the Italian mafia, a traditional kind of organized crime group. And you know over time a number of different factors you know basically put pressure on that the old structure to create a kind of more fragmented structure.
One of them is interdiction efforts in the Caribbean and Colombia, begin to push the trade further up into Mexico. And Oscar Hagelsieb in the film speaks pretty eloquently about that, that shift when you know Mexican organized crime groups and smugglers went from being the kind of middlemen and the mules to kind of being the bosses and controlling more of the trade. So you saw more lucrative trade and thus more competition. With the weakening of Colombian organized crime groups you begin to see more players within the Mexican system.
But also you know after 2000 you, you know ironically you had this opening. You had an opposition party get elected in Mexico for the first time after 70 years. And that kind of traditional system of patronage broke down. So it began more of a free-for-all. If you were going to pay a bribe as an organized crime figure you know you didn't know exactly which channels to go to. It basically created an opening, a more chaotic environment, in which to do business. By 2006 you have a president who declares a frontal war on organized crime groups and you know many Mexico watchers and many organized crime researchers who would say just basically turned into a free-for-all. By 2008 you have a level of violence, what people call high impact violence, violence that is often used to send a message to an organized crime group or to a government entity. The likes of which really Mexico had not seen before. And that's when we began to see a lot of kind of sensationalized you know coverage from the U.S. and internationally. And it's something that unfortunately hasn't, hasn't down. So yeah, the film really kind of chronicles that shift from the era of the Juarez cartel the era of the Zetas, who are former military who defected en masse into organized crime.
POV: What do you hope an audience will take from this film?
Ruiz: I feel like the U.S.-Mexico relationship which is actually a really vital one to the U.S., it gets really short-shrift in the kind of press and in journalism and in storytelling. Mexico is the third largest trading partner of the U.S. I mean it's like ten percent of the U.S. population or more can trace its heritage to Mexico. There's this kind of love-hate relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.
I feel like this film is a step or part of a canon of work that's trying to look at that relationship in a more complex way. We're obviously in an era where the U.S.-Mexico border or the people who cross that border are either vilified or reduced to stereotypes for one reason or another for political purposes. So I think what I'm after is moving beyond those kind of simple tropes and trying to deepen these stories and the people at the center of these stories as a way to have a kind of different kind of conversation, a kind of more thoughtful and more informed conversation.
And I think you know these three people are unique in some senses, but they're also typical of many communities, that just don't ever get the kind of storytelling attention that I think they deserve.