Hollywood and the hourglass war: cinematic images of drug cartels and conflict on the US-Mexican border

ABSTRACT This paper examines the cinema of the US-Mexican border in the context of an escalating drug war. It looks at movies released since the early 1980s and argues that Hollywood has supplied a large number of cinematic images of the ‘war on drugs’ that has more helped shape wider political and strategic debates. Using insights from strategic analysis, this paper seeks to show how cinema has represented the conflict between drug cartels, the Mexican state as well as various US security agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and DEA. The paper explores how these cinematic depictions straddle national boundaries and have evolved from being an extension of the western border genre in the 1980s into a more recent phase of action and war movies.