THE AMAZON PRODUCED MOVIE ‘GRINGO’ MAKES LIGHT OF THE KIDNAPPINGS AND SLAUGHTER IN MEXICO

How "Gringo" (2018) exploits and mocks the kidnapped and murdered in Mexico

By “J”

Borderland Beat
March 12, 2018

Violence gets inside you. It whispers and calls your name, slinking and edging its way through your dreams, your private moments, your refuges. I walk around with numbers in my head. 350 killings in Tijuana this year. I do the math. 4 killings a day. 4 family members on average. How many people impacted?

I run my hands over a 50 gallon blue drum. The kind that turn up with bodies stuffed inside. It feels rough, scarred. I wonder about those who die, those who kill, those left behind, and all who will die. I think existentially about the killings, and I think in moments. The moments before you are tortured. A single stylish nike trainer left outside the gym in Culiacan. The knots tying the noose, to be wrapped around her neck. The blood left behind after executions in a Tijuana neighborhood, staining the hard concrete, soap and hot water swirling atop the aftermath of carnage.

'Gringo', produced by Amazon Studios opened last Friday. I have only seen the preview, which washed over me in waves of disgust and a kind of sadness. I will say upfront I will not see this movie, but I will describe the basic outline. A corporation in the US has patented a form of marijuana based medicine, which at some point involved doing business in Mexico, with what is referred to generically and quite inaccurately, as "The Cartel" in the preview.

Bare with me, as we proceed into the depths of the inane. The US based corporation sends a representative to Mexico, (the exact locale is not given in the preview, that I could tell) who is struggling with finances, and therefore, the movie implies desperate enough to go. He is the movie trope overeager and unlucky businessman, who will no doubt prevail, in the movies climax.

He is kidnapped for murky reasons, having to do with the marijuana patent, and the movie is about the wacky and hilarious premise of kidnapping and murder, complete with snarling and tan suited "Mexican cartel members", car chases, explosions, and plenty of automatic gunfire. There is a possible love interest in the form of actress Amanda Seyfried.

People will sit in darkened theaters, order wine and beer, plates of food, laughing at the misadventures in Mexico, and the hilarity of brutal violence and killing. They will smirk and grin, and walk away. Enjoy a car chase and the sounds of AK-47's booming from the sound system. I doubt many will love the movie, but they won't hate it's very premise the way I do.

I wonder, if the audience, or the actors, producers, directors, would participate the same, if they read ZETA Tijuana for a month? Or AFN? Or our blog, here? Or maybe a week. I believe 10 were killed in Tijuana yesterday. Career opportunities! Such a fun script! We really had a lot of fun on set, they would say. Isn't their problem. Isn't their concern, or more accurately isn't their families, loved ones, friends, husbands kidnapped, tortured, executed in the street.

Not only that, but in typical fashion, the movie has painted a narrative that US citizens are the main targets of kidnapping in Mexico, which has never been true. The real victims are mostly unseen and unheard, disappeared in mass graves across the country, from Veracruz to Guerrero. They find bones, families spend their last, and their lives devoted to recovering remains of those who were taken. They sometimes find them. Human remains in a ranch outside Tijuana. An abanonded mine shaft in Iguala. They may appear in the streets, painted and naked, in the beds of trucks or thrown from bridges.

These are victims of kidnapping, for which there are no cute rescues or explosion filled escapes, just a grim death, and a void left in the hearts of family. It is a reflection of who these people are, I suppose. I won't shame their character or attack them personally, I don't know them. I know some must be talented and smart people. Yet, all I think is, this is what you have chosen to do with your life and time, privilege and opportunity?

Will they donate profits to organizations to provide resources to victims in Mexico? I don't know. Do you imagine whoever wrote the script or directed the movie has seen, up close, the kind of atrocities we have seen? The children massacred at birthday parties in Juarez. The 50 dismembered on Mothers Day near Monterrey in 2012. The 26 in Boca Del Rio in 2011. And those are the headlines off the top of my head. The endless killings and abductions, that happen everyday. That are happening right now.

No doubt they vacation in Jalisco, they all do, though they may not know the state. Tan in Punta Mita and Puerto Vallerta, not far from where 15 men were murdered in one day, over the weekend, in a brutal war for plazas of insurgents and dominant power. It doesn't bother me to make movies based on the sprawling drug wars in Mexico. The violence, the blood, the depravity, convoys of sicarios, executions and running gun fights. There are many stories to tell, and many that have never been told. They deserve to be. What they don't deserve, is to be used as a punchline, a laugh track, a cheap trick, in an empty, soulless movie.