Birds of Passage, co-directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, is only one of many screen epics about the drug war and South America. But this film, made by and with Colombians, differs from the Hollywood and prevailing conservative narrative about cartels and the illegal drug trade.
Besides providing a rationale for building the Great Wall of Trump, the drug trade and its Latin American connection have inspired many American movies, documentaries, and TV dramas, all blood-soaked with action-packed gangland violence. Examples include 1983’s feature Scarface starring Al Pacino (“Say hello to my little friend!”), the 1984-1989 NBC series Miami Vice, 2006’s nonfiction Cocaine Cowboys, the 2008-2013 AMC series Breaking Bad, and the 2015 doc Cartel Land.
Americans in these shows are often framed in terms of consumption, but also involved in drug manufacturing and distribution, like Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Clint Eastwood’s character in 2018’s The Mule. They are also frequently cast as law enforcement — from undercover detectives Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) of Miami Vice to DEA agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) in Breaking Bad. Characters in the latter category are typically dedicated good guys fighting those bad hombres who bring drugs across the border.
A handful of hard-hitting Hollywood productions have taken a bleaker look at the US government operatives in Latin America’s narco wars. The Gary Webb biopic Kill the Messenger, FX series Snowfall, and the 2017 film American Made, starring Tom Cruise as a drug-running pilot, implicate the CIA in cocaine trafficking to fund its covert dirty wars in Central America.
Birds of Passage takes place in Colombia from 1968 to 1980, during the so-called “Bonanza Marimbera,” which Guerra describes in press notes as “the first ‘boom’ of what would eventually become the international drug trade.”
But in Birds, it’s not the CIA triggering the lucrative and violent marijuana industry, it’s the Peace Corps!
In the film, volunteers of the so-called “Velvet Glove of Imperialism” initiate and trigger the drug trade by buying marijuana from poor Colombian natives. The gringos’ demand unleashes a new growth industry as tribal people seek to supply the Americanos with weed in exchange for Yankee dollars.
Peace Corps members are also shown propagating explicitly anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda, even as they sow the destructive seeds of the free enterprise system via the drug trade.
Although today many US states have legalized marijuana, Birds is set during a time when marijuana was lumped in with dangerous narcotics, such as heroin and coke. The film depicts how growing, selling, and ultimately fighting over ganja set the stage for trafficking hard drugs like crystal meth, giving rise to hardcore cartels and gangsters.
Birds also shows how the Yankee-introduced weed trade impacted indigenous South Americans, completely upending the traditional way of life of the Wayúu, a tribal people living in northern Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula, who are the movie’s main focus. Gallego and Guerra dramatize this culture clash, shot on location in Colombia with a cast and crew that includes members of the tribe.
In the film, customs quickly collide with cash: Zaida (Bogota-born Natalie Reyes, who co-stars in the upcoming Terminator reboot) plays the daughter of Ursula (stage veteran Carmiña Martínez, who’s from La Guajira, in her screen debut), a shaman, matriarch, and keeper of Wayúu ways. Ursula tries to navigate the tricky waters stirred up by the alijuna (“outsiders”). In keeping with Wayúu ritual, Zaida has a sort of coming-out party called La Yonna that parallels The Godfather’s opening marriage ceremony. At this indigenous debutante’s ball, the pretty teenager is wooed by Rapayet (Jose Acosta, who has Wayúu ancestry)—but his desire to wed Zaida is stymied when he can’t afford to pay the dowry tribal tradition demands.
Rapayet’s response is to provide the Peace Corp counterculture types with marijuana, making enough money to buy the animals, necklaces, and other accoutrements needed to marry Zaida. He goes on to head a narco empire, which puts him on a collision course with other tribesmen.
Things go swiftly wrong when Rapayet and his non-Wayúu Colombian right-hand man Moisés (Jhon Narváez) have a business dispute with the American pilots of three small planes at a landing strip. Rapayet advocates a peaceful resolution, but his lieutenant Moisés chooses to shoot the flyers. (By the way, the light aircraft show just how ineffective a physical wall would be in preventing the flow of drugs into the United States.)
Rapayet is divided by his desire to be powerful and his fidelity to his culture. As his wealth increases, the drug lords’ shacks give way to chateaus. But a narco war spirals out of control, pitting clan against rival clan, relative against relative. As greed, violence, and corruption consume Colombia, age-old Wayúu customs and codes of conduct fall by the wayside.
Birds plays out like a classical five-act Greek tragedy; onscreen, an indigenous shepherd introduces each act with a song. Vividly shot on 35mm film by cinematographer David Gallego, the film has a Neo-Realist style with Magical Realist flourishes.
As with the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, which Gallego produced and Guerra directed (and which became the first Colombian film ever to receive an Oscar nomination), Birds is told from the indigenous people’s perspective. Gallego, in an interview with the Latino online outlet Remezcla, said she made Birds in response to the glorification of criminals, as in Escobar: Paradise Lost and Loving Pablo.
“Tourists come to Colombia with shirts of Escobar, and it’s like an insult to us,” Gallego said. “We were not satisfied with the representation given to drug trafficking in Colombia.”
In the film’s press notes, Gallego elaborated: “What we’ve seen is that all these movies and series act as apologists for major criminals. Pablo Escobar, who carried out one of the worst genocides of our history, is suddenly seen as a superhero thanks to a show like Narcos. These stories have been told in gangster films since Scarface and on TV since Miami Vice. These productions often show Colombians as terrorists.”
Birds, Guerra added, “is not about turning criminals into heroes, but exploring what savage, untamed capitalism has done to our soul, to the spirit of our people.”
Blame it on the Peace Corps.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and he co-authored The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, now in its third edition. This originally appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019
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