Cults, American Xenophobia and Outsiders in Borderland (2007)

America’s never had a rosy image of Mexico, seeing it either from a flawed economic perspective— assuming everyone south of the border is poor— or from a social perspective tainted by nationalist rhetoric and poor media sources that present the entire country as a playground for drug cartels. No surprise that with the current racist occupant of the White House, there’s a renewed wave of anti-Mexican sentiment sweeping the country. What the President of the United States and his followers don’t seem to grasp is that the actual criminals in Mexico predominantly prey on their fellow citizens. The sad part is Americans aren’t overly concerned with Mexican victims. It takes someone white and American to be affected before people in the U.S. feel compelled to worry about crime across the border.

Borderland (2007) is a fictionalized story about Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, an infamous cult leader, drug dealer, and serial killer. Adolfo preyed upon Mexicans, sometimes even within his own cult, whether it was keeping them hooked on drugs to line his and his associates’ pockets, or murdering them to feed his nganga— an iron cauldron used in the Palo Mayombe practice for divination— with blood sacrifices. He killed for nearly three years, amassing a confirmed body count of twenty-three people, though the actual number is estimated as being far beyond that. It wasn’t until he murdered a 21-year-old American college student named Mark Kilroy that the full force of the law came down upon him and his followers. What Borderland does so effectively is portray the negative American perspective on Mexico in its protagonists— three young American men preparing to head off to college— before having them run into a villainous character based closely on Constanzo. The ultimate irony being that, for all the xenophobic, racist talk from white characters, Constanzo himself was not Mexican— he was an American.

Adolfo was born in Miami, Florida during 1962. His mother, Delia Aurora Gonzalez del Valle, was a Cuban immigrant. She moved them for a while to Puerto Rico after her first husband died, returning to Miami again in 1972. He was baptized a Catholic while also learning Vodou on trips with his mother to Haiti. His mother was a practitioner of Palo Mayombe. She believed her son was psychic, supposedly having predicted the 1981 attempt to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan. As a teenager, Adolfo also became friends with a Haitian priest in Miami, from whom he learned more about Palo Mayombe, and also how to deal drugs and con people for money— perhaps the most significant formative experience of the young man’s life.

Adolfo would later move to Mexico City as an adult. He made money as a tarot card reader for a time. He eventually started using magic to extort people for money and got close with various drug dealers and hitmen, as well as corrupt policemen and members of bourgeois Mexican society. One crime family, run by brothers Elio and Ovidio Hernandez, gave half ownership of their drug operation to Adolfo in return for his protection using Palo Mayombe rituals. He would bring together a varied cult of people later dubbed the Narcosatanists. His followers called him Papa, or El Padrino, which is English for Godfather, and they worshipped him.

Constanzo became somewhat untouchable in Mexico, due to his high society and narcotics connections. Borderland opens with a scene depicting two rogue policemen trying to take the cult down, only for one of them to be brutally killed in front of his partner. This epitomizes that sense of being untouchable, yet the real story was more devious. Constanzo convinced his followers they were all protected by the magic he conjured from his nganga. He told the cult they were invincible, in a literal sense. In the opening scene of the film, a cultist tells the cops: “Your bullets can’t hurt us.” This is based on one of Constanzo’s followers, Serafin Hernandez, whom police tailed to Rancho Santa Elena where Constanzo and his cult operated in Matamoros— Hernandez drove through a police roadblock without stopping because he believed what El Padrino told them, that they were not just invincible, they were invisible. Hernandez was genuinely shocked to find the police behind him when he got to the ranch, then dared them to shoot him because he was sure the bullets would bounce off him.

The grip Constanzo held over people in Mexico was not because of magic, it was due to his expertise as a conman. After police raided the ranch— during which Constanzo died— they found journals kept by the cult leader. Some of them documented people paying as much as $40,000 for “magical services” rendered over the course of three years. Many Mexican smugglers originally came from a peasant background, meaning they were often raised in an environment which fostered belief in folk tales and Brujería. This left them susceptible to the exploitation of Adolfo. Although his followers were comprised of all social demographics, his main source of income was the cartel— drug dealers make more than enough money not to be considered working class. The target of his murderous magic were often his own followers, family members of rival drug dealers, or more vulnerable people like Raul Esquivel, a crossdresser and former lover of another cult member. On top of the murders themselves, corpses, or just dismembered body parts, were sometimes dumped— like those of Esquivel— in public for people to find, spreading terror across Mexico City.

The tragic perspective about Mexican victims versus the one American victim in Constanzo’s trail of human sacrifice is hammered home by the casually racist and xenophobic attitude towards Mexico in the film’s white American protagonists. Early in Borderland, one of the Americans, Henry (played by Jake Muxworthy), lays out a decidedly Republican worldview and nearly every instance of his dialogue in the screenplay furthers it. He chastises one of his friends for sounding slightly progressive by saying: “What are you going to do next, buy a Volvo and join the Democratic Party?” He goes on to refer to America as “over-regulated” but doesn’t see Mexico as a land of freedom, rather he sees it through a racist lens as a place to indulge in “animal urges.” His friend Ed (played by Brian Presley), portrayed as a somewhat less xenophobic American, isn’t exactly what you’d call progressive. Ed stops a guy from roughing up a female bartender by saying she’s “no pro,” implying a misogynistic conception of women who do sex work. Nevertheless, he hooks up with the bartender and, because she lives in Matamoros, he’s automatically scared she could have AIDS. Ed might not be a card carrying Republican, but he wouldn’t have trouble fitting in with red state voters.

In a scene at the police station, Henry and Ed search for Phil after his disappearance. Henry sees a religious shrine and quips: “Welcome to the Third World.” Ironic, given his Young Republican-like attitude, supporting a party that loves maintaining a close relationship between church and state. Henry’s similarly frustrated at a lack of English-speaking cops in a predominantly Spanish-speaking country when, in America, people who can’t speak English are treated with disdain by Conservatives. These various moments are all part of the mindset that America is at the world’s centre. It’s this exact mentality that helped feed real life apathy in the face of Constanzo’s crimes. Mexican police weren’t able, or overly willing, to track down a murderer of drug dealers and crossdressers. Soon as Kilroy— a white, Christian American— went missing authorities felt pressure to throw the full force of the law at tracking down Constanzo and his cult. Kilroy’s parents passed out thousands of Missing Person leaflets and offered a $15,000 reward for any information about their son’s whereabouts. America’s Most Wanted broadcast Kilroy’s disappearance across America. Mark’s parents got U.S. politicians involved. In the end, despite all the effort due to Kilroy becoming a victim of Constanzo’s, the case’s big break came from an unrelated anti-drug operation along the border conducted in a joint effort by the U.S. and Mexico.

Nothing happened to Adolfo for years. The people he killed were considered inconsequential by Mexican society. He killed from 1986 until 1989. In March of ‘89, he became unsatisfied with a recent Mexican victim’s lack of reaction to the horror they were experiencing during the sacrifice ritual. So he ordered “an Anglo” be brought to him, and his followers went out looking for a white American. Serafin and others went driving around Matamoros. They came upon a drunk young man stumbling in the street. Mark Kilroy, a U.S. college student on Spring Break, quickly found himself in danger. Soon he was handcuffed with his face wrapped in duct tape. Men put him in the back of a truck and took him towards Rancho Santa Elena. This event, and the events which followed, make up the main plot of Borderland. The character partly based on Kilroy, Phil (played by Boy Meets World alumnus Rider Strong), is abducted off the streets and taken to the ranch. There, he meets Santillan (played by Beto Cuevas)— closely based on Constanzo— and comes to a grisly end. Similar to the real Kilroy, Phil is kept alive for a while, tied and left in the heat. In the film, an American cult member (played by Sean Astin) looks after Phil, giving him a little food and water, though he proves to be as psychotic as the others. In reality, Kilroy was given egg, bread, and water by a Mexican farmer working at the ranch where the cult operated. The irony is that the fictional American is part of the cult’s evil, whereas the actual Mexican farmer was not and only worked at the ranch. Constanzo was American, which people often ignore, so this depiction of an American character taking part in the cult’s activities is another instance where the film makes a point of distinguishing who’s actually part of the violence versus who’s wrongfully assumed the culprit.

Apart from that, these acts of kindness were few and far between for the actual victim. Kilroy, like Phil in the film, wound up hacked to death by a machete. His brain was put into the nganga for Constanzo’s use in ritual divination. Months later, the ranch was raided by police. Just over a dozen cult members were eventually taken into custody. Not Adolfo— he ordered one of his followers, a hitman known as El Duby, to shoot him and his lover to death with a machine gun. Fourteen followers received anywhere between thirty-five to sixty-seven years in prison for multiple murders, including drug and weapons offences to boot, and two were never caught. Borderland has its Adolfo-inspired character die at the hands of a rogue policeman. In reality, Constanzo avoided any and all persecution through cowardice and an act of what amounts to suicide, allowing those left behind to take his blame.

Borderland ends with the last living American character escaping a violent confrontation with Constanzo’s cult. On-screen text tells the viewer about fifty bodies dug up at the ranch and other details closely mirroring the actual case. The film doesn’t touch on the aftermath of Kilroy’s murder outside of the action-filled finale. Although it also doesn’t explore Constanzo as an outsider in Mexico either, the racist attitudes of the white American characters still illustrates the ways in which Mexican victims, or Mexicans in general, are disregarded as unimportant— like living south of the U.S. border automatically resigns them to living amongst crime and violence. The full extent of this aspect in the screenplay might be lost on those who know nothing about Constanzo or his crimes. All the same, the Conservative U.S. ethos of Borderland’s main characters is enough to make obvious part of what the film attempts to do. It might seem their xenophobic concerns are justified after they fall into the cult’s hands. Yet there’s obvious intent on the part of the filmmakers— from the racist pre-MAGA rhetoric of Phil, and to a lesser extent Ed, to the American cult member playing a part in sacrificing a fellow American— to show how assumptions about Mexico played a significant part in Constanzo’s story.