‘A gripping film about the pervasiveness of drug culture and corruption in Mexico’  EMPIRE

Mexico’s biggest film star, Gael Garcia Bernal, has said that it is necessary to speak about the violence that is occurring in his country through films such as MISS BALA (“Miss Bullet”). “We have the active responsibility to show what is happening so that this isn’t a natural thing, something common.”

MISS BALA tells the story of Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a young aspiring beauty queen who finds her dream turned against her when she unwillingly gets involved with a criminal group at war in today’s lawless Mexico.

The confrontation among criminal organizations and between these groups and the security forces has taken more than 40,000 lives in Mexico since December 2006. “Films like this terrorize me and make me want to do things to change (the situation),” said Garcia Bernal, who defended the role of the film in “speaking about the nightmare of terror (prevailing in Mexico) through a visual language.”

The seed for MISS BALA was planted on December 24, 2008 when producer Pablo Cruz came across a newspaper story abut a beautiful woman accused of being involved with a drug cartel. Sensing that this fragment of a story could be expanded into a gripping film, Cruz telephoned director Gerardo Naranjo to ask if he’d read the story; Naranjo, too, had read the story and been struck by it, and both agreed it could be translated to the movie screen.

“The woman in the newspaper clipping had a face that screamed ‘get me out of here,’” Cruz recalls, “and her appearance didn’t fit with the reality she was living. She had an innocent face of sorrow and despair.”

In the year 2000, for the first time since the Mexican Revolution, the opposition party won the presidential election in Mexico. The euphoria brought on by this victory blinded the population from realizing that just as the reigning political party was exiting, a new force was gaining strength. A force that was making pacts between government officials and drug lords to ensure the flow of drug trafficking. This is a business that generates between 15 and 40 billion dollars annually.

By 2006, the year in which Felipe Calderon took office, the degree of violence in the country reached alarming levels. Human heads rolled into bars accompanied by threatening messages and dismembered bodies appeared in public places every day. It was under Calderon that, for the first time, the government decided to stand up against the drug cartels, unleashing a wave of violence that has to date killed over 30,000 people, surpassing the casualties of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Today, these crime organizations control much of the country, giving way to massive migration. Such is the case in Ciudad Juárez, where it was registered that 200,000 citizens fled because of the violence in the city.

Government agencies have no choice but to collaborate with these crime groups, resistance only leads to more violence. In 2010 alone, 12 municipal presidents and the leading candidate for governor of the state of Tamaulipas were murdered. The salaries of state and local police forces paid to help fight the war on drugs is no match for the hefty bribes and intimidating scare tactics employed by the drug cartels.

The driving forces behind the epidemic of drug trafficking in Mexico are social issues including widespread poverty and a lack of education among the population. Both facilitate the recruitment of an army by the cartels. Today, it is estimated that over 50 million people in Mexico live on less than US$2 a day. There are 30 million people over the age of 15 who do not have basic reading, writing and math skills. It is estimated that in Mexico there are over three million working children of whom 30% are under the age of 14. 

“This is our response to the current situation in Mexico; we want the rest of the world to know what’s happening here,” says Cruz. Co-writer Mauricio Katz adds: “Our central goal was to tell a critically important story, and make a film that matters, without preaching.”