Film Review: The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez

Eleven years after Marines killed an American teenager near the US-Mexico border, director Kieran Fitzgerald’s movie sifts through the details of the shooting.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In May 1997, a four-man Marine Corps team deployed to Redford, Texas, to monitor drug trafficking across the US-Mexico border. For three days, it hoped to make a major bust, but saw little suspicious activity. “In a way, we were there for nothing,” recalls one of the Marines. The patrol’s stupor was interrupted on May 20, 1997, when a local 18-year-old named Esequiel Hernández, who was grazing his goats near the Marines’ post, lifted his rifle and squeezed off two shots. The Marines tracked him for 20 minutes before shooting him once, killing him.

Hernández’s death inspired The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the somber 2005 movie directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones narrates The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, which airs on pbs‘s POV on July 8. It meticulously sifts through the sketchy details surrounding the real shooting. The Marines claimed they’d fired in self-defense, but director Kieran Fitzgerald discovers that Hernández, who’d been carrying a rifle to scare away dogs, had been too far away to see the hunkered-down, camouflaged patrol, much less take aim at it. The three Marines interviewed in the film now reveal doubts about why they opened fire. One says his only concrete memory of the shooting is “seeing Hernández with his feet flying up in the air.” A Texas grand jury declined to indict the team’s commanding officer for murder, in part due to military pressure not to subject soldiers to state laws.

Eleven years later, Hernández’s death illustrates how the war on drugs and the militarization of the border have only added to the sense of foreboding along the Rio Grande. After the shooting, a local historian recalls, “Every time a helicopter went by, the mothers would run out and pull their children in because they thought they were going to be killed.” And the mindset that led to an American high school student being mistaken for an armed and dangerous smuggler seems to persist. As Colonel John McGee, the head of the law-enforcement task force that assisted the Marine patrols, explains, “When we detect someone coming across the border, we can’t tell if it’s an immigrant or a drug smuggler or a terrorist, and it doesn’t really matter.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate