I heard one prominent critic complaining after the Cannes premiere of “Miss Bala” that some of Naranjo’s plot twists were implausible, to which I say: Give me a break. First of all, while “Miss Bala” strives for a naturalistic feeling and pulls facts from some recent headlines on some recent criminal history, it’s a bullet-riddled downhill thrill ride about a would-be beauty queen and a drug lord, not “The Bicycle Thief.” Second of all, Naranjo’s point is that almost nothing is implausible in the upside-down borderlands of Tijuana, where Mexican sovereignty is almost meaningless and it’s impossible to identify a clear line between cops and criminals.

A canny and stylish director who was trained in the United States and has worked on both sides of the border, Naranjo has already made a couple of film-festival favorites (“DramaMex” and “I’m Gonna Explode”) and is likely to reach international fame with “Miss Bala.” (Hardcore indie-film aficionados may also know him as the depressed, Chaplin-esque costar of Azazel Jacobs’ “The GoodTimesKid.”) This is the odyssey of leggy, likable Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive 23-year-old with dreams of stardom who leaves her home on the outskirts of Tijuana one day in hopes of auditioning for the Miss Baja pageant. (The film’s title is a play on words; “bala” is Spanish for bullet.) By the end of the film she actually makes it to the pageant stage, in a heartbreaking, tour-de-force scene that sums up all the points Naranjo is trying to make about the tragic dysfunction of Mexican society and is technically brilliant to boot.

“Miss Bala” belongs to that subset of film noir where a normal person takes one step off the straight and narrow path and winds up on the highway to hell. Simply by walking into the wrong nightclub, Laura comes face to face with a notorious narcotraficante named Lino (Noe Hernández) in a situation where he’s already killed a crapload of other people and could easily decide to kill her. He doesn’t, maybe because she’s cute and maybe because she could be useful, but mostly for the hell of it, and then we’re off to the races. If Sigman’s Laura remains an overly innocent cipher throughout, purely focused on survival, Lino is deftly handled; Hernández plays him as a working-class guy made good, with a sentimental streak and a sense of humor, whose business success involves lots and lots of murders.

Over the next few days Laura witnesses numerous bloody shootouts between Lino’s gang and various Mexican and American law enforcement agencies, smuggles guns and weapons across the border, seduces a police commander and tries on several expensive dresses. She tries to get away from Lino periodically, but maybe not as hard as she might — her father and little brother are in danger, and after all there’s a beauty pageant to compete in. Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, “Miss Bala” is a knockout. While Naranjo invites Mexicans to take a long, hard look in the mirror when it comes to assigning blame for their screwed-up society, he also makes clear that without the Yankee appetite for cheap drugs and cheap labor, none of this would be happening.

“Miss Bala” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and opens Jan. 27 in Boston, Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

Sorry, what’s our DEA doing this time?

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Yes, but how do the feds decide which cartels to launder money for? Should the government really be picking “winners and losers” when it comes to Mexican drug cartels?

An expensive boondoggle like the ongoing war on drugs has its own nutty logic that may not make much sense to outsiders. Outsiders, for example, might think that laundering “a lot” of money for cartels in order to eventually follow that money to someone in a position of authority is a huge waste of time and resources that only makes the deadly gangs even stronger. But the agencies waging the war don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for opinions along those lines.

When Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez told a colleague that legalizing marijuana would probably lessen violence in Mexico, his colleague reported Gonzalez to their bosses, and Gonzalez was fired.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

Gonzalez is now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the ACLU has filed a suit on his behalf.

But LEAP’s membership drives are slightly handicapped by the fact that law enforcement agencies see any sort of skepticism regarding the efficacy and morality of the drug war as dangerous and, apparently, unpatriotic. “We all know the drug war is a bad joke,” an unidentified police officer told the Times. “But we also know that you’ll never get promoted if you’re seen as soft on drugs”

Its this institutional unwillingness to question the mission that leads to the DEA “combating” drug cartels by laundering their money and selling them weapons. Drug war logic means rural Oregon Washington needs a million dollars in federal grants going to a a “task force” that busts small-time dealers and raids houses of medicinal marijuana users with paramilitary weaponry and tactics. Does that seems extreme and wasteful? What are you, some kind of unpatriotic hippie?

A much more useful approach was laid out by the journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann in “U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic,” which he published in 1943 during World War II. Lippmann spoke of “the order of power,” that is, the relationships among the handful of great military and economic powers that matter the most. In his view of history, American foreign policy has always been defined by America’s relations with other great powers: first Britain and France, and later Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

To this might be added a corollary: America’s relationship with Mexico, the other populous nation in North America and one with which, along with Canada, the U.S. shares a 2,000-mile border. Quite apart from the importance of good bilateral relations, American friendship and partnership with a stable, prosperous Mexico is critical to U.S. foreign policy.

Since the 1840s, European great powers have hoped to tie down the U.S. on its southern border. Britain sought to keep the republic of Texas out of the United States, in order to pursue a divide-and-rule strategy in North America. During the American Civil War, France’s dictator Louis Napoleon imposed an Austrian prince, Maximilian, as puppet ruler in a short-lived attempt to turn Mexico into a French colony. In the years preceding World War I, Imperial Germany and the U.S. engaged in a kind of cold war in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. The Zimmerman Telegram, in which the German government promised to support Mexico’s attempt to recapture territories lost to the U.S., increased American public support for U.S. intervention against Germany. Franklin Roosevelt’s euphemistically named “Good Neighbor” policy of appeasing repressive dictatorships in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere succeeded in dissuading any Latin American countries from becoming allies of the Axis powers. Later during the Cold War the Soviets found allies in Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere but Mexico remained neutral.

For American strategic thinkers, the ultimate nightmares have long been an alliance between a foreign great power rival and a hostile Mexico, or chaos in Mexico exploited by America’s enemies. For the foreseeable future, only China, which is still far from being a superpower, has the potential to become a serious military rival of the U.S., as Britain, France, Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union were in earlier generations. It follows that relationships among the U.S., China and Mexico are much more important to the future of American strategy than the outcome of the Arab Spring or the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the success or failure of Russia to regain influence in Central Asia or whether the United Kingdom splits up because of Scottish secession. And far more important than the fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are problems more for their neighbors — China, India, Russia, Iran — than for us.

What makes the China Question and the Mexican Question today particularly difficult is the existence of a high degree of economic and demographic integration among those countries and the U.S. Thanks to successful Chinese policies of pressuring multinationals to transfer production to its territory, much of the U.S. industrial base is integrated with China’s factory system. The American and Mexican labor markets are deeply integrated, thanks to legal and illegal immigration as well as trade.

This means that thinking about the U.S.-China relationship and the U.S.-Mexican relationship in simple-minded military terms cannot work.  For example, while a hostile China might be militarily balanced in various ways, it makes no sense to talk about “containing” China geographically. The containment of the Soviet Union worked because the Soviet empire (as distinct from Russia itself) included the populations and economies of its East European colonies. The Cold War ended when the Red Army withdrew from the former empire in Eastern Europe.

But China, like America, is a continental nation-state whose power resources are almost entirely internal. In deriving its military potential from its large internal population and domestic economy, China is like the United States, although less favored with resources. Encircling China with U.S. bases in Australia, Vietnam and northeast Asia will not cripple it but may provoke it.

The excessive militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border would also be a mistake. Ever since the U.S. annexed Texas, California and the Southwest in the Mexican-American War, the smuggling of contraband and human beings has been a profitable trade along la Frontera — so profitable that local officials, in return for payoffs, have turned a blind eye for generations. Today’s Mexican drug cartels are no different in kind from the tequileros who smuggled alcohol across the border during America’s misguided experiment with Prohibition in the 1920s. The repeal of Prohibition dried up much of that business. The legalization of less dangerous drugs like marijuana would reduce, though not eliminate, the border drug trade and the attendant violence.

While border fencing in some areas and beefed-up Border Patrol units make sense, illegal immigration can be checked much more easily on the demand side, by prosecuting American employers of illegal immigrants, than on the supply side, by turning the border into a fortified combat zone. Comparisons between national border fences and the Berlin Wall are nonsense; the former seek to keep unwanted foreign natioanls out, the latter was built to keep citizens from escaping. Even so, for diplomatic reasons it is probably not prudent to create an Iron Curtain between the U.S. and one of the two countries in the world that are most important to America.

America’s foreign policy planners need to think carefully as well about the bilateral relations between China and Mexico, whether collaborative or competitive. China and Mexico, as developing countries reliant on trade for growth, are also competitors.  The relationship between China, which may surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and Mexico, which like the U.S. has one of the world’s largest populations as well as a large market and abundant resources, is significant in itself. In addition to the Chinese Question and the Mexican Question as viewed by America, then, there is the Sino-Mexican question.

Many proponents of NAFTA back in the 1990s hoped that the treaty would encourage American-based multinationals to offshore production to Mexico, rather than to China or other remote countries, spurring Mexican growth and reducing poverty and illegal immigration. That didn’t happen. But in the event of a serious Sino-American trade war the U.S. might seek to bring back some of the manufacturing it has lost to Mexico and other North American countries as well as the U.S. itself, generating new industrial growth and its spillover effects on both sides of the border.

And then there is energy. To everyone’s surprise, fracking technology has greatly expanded recoverable reserves of oil and natural gas, in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S. In light of the continued marginal role of renewable energy worldwide, North America has the potential to become even more important in global fossil fuel energy markets. Here there is potential for collaboration among the U.S. and Mexico, as well as Canada — but also competition, if Asian and European powers pit the energy-exporting nations of North America against one another.

These are issues that have not received enough attention from the officials, academics and journalists who debate foreign policy, distracted as they have been, first by misguided American wars in the Middle East and South Asia and more recently by the global economic crisis. To make matters worse, in American public debate complex questions have to be reduced to shouting matches over illegal immigration or trade among demagogic nativists on one side and open-borders, one-world libertarian and leftist utopians on the other.

The future of America will depend to a considerable degree on developments in China and Mexico. But we Americans cannot settle on the right answers until we start asking the right questions.

Some would say this proves that better law enforcement is all Mexico needs to end the drug-cartel violence currently drenching its northern states in blood. Or maybe, as Grillo suggests, it merely shows that when the cartels and their associates want to kill someone in El Paso, they first take their victim across the border where, chances are, the murder will never be properly investigated.

Whatever the case, the contrast suggests why the rampant carnage in Mexico’s border states seldom makes the front page in the U.S.; it seems far away, despite being right next door. However, cables made available by WikiLeaks indicate that American officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are worried that the cartels are taking on aspects of an “insurgency,” which could make them a threat to the Mexican government. Narco tactics now include car bombs, videotaped executions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and many, many attacks on policemen, soldiers, federal officials and elected leaders (one mayor was stoned to death on the main street of his own town) — all startlingly reminiscent of militant and terrorist campaigns prosecuted elsewhere on the planet.

Grillo is a Briton living in Mexico City who has been reporting on Latin America for a decade. “El Narco” lays out the history of drug smuggling in the region over the past 100 years or so, and then homes in on the rise of the Northern Mexican cartels during the 2000s. This flourishing was partly a result of U.S.-aided crackdowns on the Colombian cocaine industry, a phenomenon described by the “balloon theory”: If you squeeze the drug trade in one area, it pops up someplace else. But Grillo also believes that the fall in 2000 of the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a one-party oligarchy that ruled Mexico for over 70 years) led to the kind of organized-crime free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Drug smuggling is so lucrative and Mexican police and soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption has always been a feature of the landscape. But there’s stable corruption — where everyone knows who’s in charge and who must be paid — and unstable corruption, in which the power structure becomes uncertain and ambitious criminals see the opportunity to increase their slice of the action. The cartel violence in Mexico centers around clashes between rival syndicates (each with its own set of bought officials), who vie for key cross-border routes, called “plazas,” while fighting off the relatively weak efforts of law enforcement to crack down. The result is a crazy, upside-down world that often sees state police (on the local cartel’s payroll) battling federal officers (who may or may not belong to another mob).

In the late 1990s, an ambitious drug lord in the town of Nuevo Laredo hired a former special-forces commander to assemble a militia of men with similar experience. They became the Zetas, a brutal, but well-organized team of enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. The cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas, then felt powerful enough to take the unusual step of fighting back when the federal government came to arrest him, becoming, as Grillo puts it, “the first narco insurgent.” Cárdenas lost, but not before what was once a cops-and-robbers conflict had become militarized. The cartels now have automatic weapons, grenade launchers and explosives, and no compunction about using them when innocent bystanders are around. It’s estimated that the current drug wars have claimed 35,000 lives.

The cartels have also spawned their own culture: the famous narcocorridos (ballads about gangsters and their exploits, often commissioned by the subject himself for a handsome fee), a low-budget video industry cranking out titles like “Me Chingaron Los Gringos” (“The Gringos Fucked Me”) and a clothing style called “buchones,” which, Grillo writes, “mixes urban and rural, traditional and modern. Buchones like cowboy hats and ostrich-skin boots, but also sneakers and brightly colored baseball caps.”

The narcos even have their own flavors of quasi-Catholic folk religion, with such patron saints as Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin Mary, and a possibly apocryphal early-20th-century outlaw named Jesus Malverde. (In one of the book’s rare funny moments, Jesus Malverde’s shrine keeper asks Grillo if his country has a similar Robin Hood figure, and Grillo explains that, actually, they have Robin Hood.) Strangest of all, the La Familia cartel embraced as its bible a book on “muscular Christianity” titled “Wild at Heart” (by an American writer once described as “the Robert Bly of evangelicalism”) — until, that is, the cartel’s leader wrote his own spiritual guidebook.

The strength of “El Narco” lies in its shoe-leather reporting; Grillo interviews everyone from a former cartel assassin to DEA agents to grieving families, snitches, pot and poppy farmers, illegal immigrants and gangbangers. He’s the sort of journalist who’ll pop into a plastic surgery clinic or taqueria if it turns up on a list of cartel-linked businesses, just to see what he can see. Writers this knowledgeable about the subject and with no particular ax to grind are rare because covering the cartels can be dangerous. Last fall, the main newspaper in Juarez, El Diario, published an open letter to cartel leaders (“the de facto authorities in this city”), titled “What Do You Want From Us?” in an effort to figure out whatever it was that caused several of their staffers to be killed. Lately, the Zetas have taken to hanging corpses labeled “Internet snitches” from railway overpasses.

So, perhaps top-notch writing is too much to hope for as well, though there are times when you want to shout, “Raise your hands and step away from the thesaurus!” Grillo’s many references to “severed craniums” had me baffled (do cartel thugs pack bone saws?) until I realized that he means “heads,” and unless Mexico is brimming with cheerful drug dealers, he’s got the word “sanguine” confused with “sanguinary.” At times, though, Grillo’s malaprops can be grimly amusing, as when he describes a gang who makes a practice of “devouring bodies in acid.” Not just narco killers, but cannibals with cast-iron stomachs!

Nevertheless, these are minor glitches, and a solid, comprehensive popular book on the current drug wars is much needed. Americans ought to be better informed about the cartels who are challenging Mexico’s government for supremacy in the border states. American citizens buy the drugs that fund the cartels’ reign of terror and American gun shops sell them the outrageously lethal weapons they use to enforce it. So far, the slaughter has barely lapped our own border, but it is nevertheless of our making. If more of us acknowledge this truth, then there’s a better (though still slim) chance that we can replace the failed War on Drugs with a more realistic and humane drug policy — and do it before that lapping becomes a flood.

The pop-top coin purses represent another key to my mother’s character: She despises waste and is gaga for any form of creative recycling. As the proprietor of the small folk art business she and my father started 30 years ago, she gravitates toward merchandise that represents a neat marriage of third-world ingenuity and sustainability: boxes crafted from pop cans, handbags woven of candy wrappers. A core belief ruled my parents’ life: make do and waste not. The subtext: Thrift is not only a necessity, but also an essential wellspring of creativity. They saw opportunism as a virtue and Mexico as a Mecca of thrift. My mother could accessorize with trash and my father could explore his favorite realm: street food. He was a devotee of the church of the whole pig and delighted in eating ingredients that might have been brushed to the wayside in a more prosperous country. “Now that’s creative,” he’d say, fishing a hairy pig’s ear from his bowl of pozole.

Mexico is a big country with a large professional class and a distinctly cosmopolitan upper crust, but my parents were more interested in the backwaters. We spent every winter exploring the mercados of obscure mountain villages. “Look! This guy is selling mattress ticks stuffed with plastic bags!” my mother would say, sounding like she was stumbling upon Botticelli’s Venus for the first time. “Mmm,” my dad would reply, his mouth full of iguana tamale.

At the time, I thought my parents were completely nuts. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the role thriftiness can play in creativity. I would never have discovered some of my favorite dishes if I hadn’t been missing a vital ingredient (say, cooking oil). Other favorites have resulted from my quest to use every part of an abundant ingredient (cooking with radish greens).

Living through this recession has made me grateful for my weird upbringing. My thriftiness has gone from standard (saving bacon grease) to slightly less standard (saving chicken drippings) to somewhat obsessive (attempting to make cat food out of ground table scraps). At times I’ve felt like a Depression-era housewife or a peasant, but something always happens to snap me away from identifying with either set too much. For instance, I doubt many Depression-era housewives were left to wonder: “Huh. What am I going to do with this leftover champagne?”

Celeste (purchaser of said champagne) and I are on our way back from mushroom hunting when we spot pale orange salmonberries and hit upon the answer. The champagne in question is Ballatore (which may explain why we didn’t finish the bottle). The answer to the question is wild berry champagne barbecue sauce. The overly sweet Ballatore will be the perfect foil for the slight bitterness of the salmonberries and the tartness of red huckleberries. We fight our way through the stickery thicket, plucking wet salmonberries from far-flung branches. When we have a cup of salmonberries, we move on to huckleberries, which we pop from shimmering fans of tiny leaves.

With the berry picking out of the way, it takes Celeste under 15 minutes to prepare the sauce. We leave it to sit while we burn hunks of firewood down to coal. A few hours later, we’re pulling dinner from the grill. Celeste’s execution is brilliant: juicy chicken drumsticks, skin glazed to tangy sweet perfection. A garden salad made with mustard greens, lettuce, baby kale, spinach, fresh dill and borage flowers complrments the berry-glazed chicken. The end result is a perfect summer meal that costs next to nothing (about $1.50 per person). Yes, there was a tremendous amount of work involved (gardening, foraging, standing by a hot grill), but I don’t factor in the cost of labor when it serves as a free form of entertainment.

If I’ve learned anything from a childhood in the backwaters of Mexico, it’s that being poor doesn’t need to mean being dreary. Part of my parents’ love for Mexico stemmed from a deep respect for the self-sufficient campesino, who could spin moments of pure delight from lives that were too hard for us to fathom. Poverty is not a virtue, but making the most of your resources can save you from a diet of cereal and water. So while I enjoy luxuries (cheap champagne) foreign to your average Mexican peasant, I still look to the south for inspiration and comfort. Champagne may not be an appropriate ingredient for a column on budget cooking, but for tonight I’ll take a cue from my mother’s playbook: appreciate the cards you’re dealt and use them wisely. Here’s to pop-top fashion and budget cooking with champagne.

Note: Thimbleberries or raspberries would be a good replacement for salmonberries in this recipe.