Last year, the Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo released a crackling art-house thriller,“Miss Bala,” about an aspiring beauty queen who becomes embroiled in the violent drug cartels of Tijuana. The premise of a willowy innocent caught in the crossfire had all the hallmarks of a telenovela, and some critics groused that the film was implausible. But in the real-life maelstrom of Mexico’s drug war, a certain gaudy surrealism is not unusual. In fact, Naranjo had based the film on an actual incident, in 2008, in which a pageant winner from Sinaloa was arrested in the company of a gaggle of cartel strongmen. (She said that she had been kidnapped by her boyfriend, a member of the Juárez cartel.)

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But if art imitated life in “Miss Bala,” life gained the upper hand again last month, when another beauty queen from Sinaloa, twenty-two-year-old Maria Susana Flores Gamez, was caught by a bullet during a shootout between cartel hit men and Mexican troops. This time, the story had an extraordinary twist: an AK-47 was recovered near Flores’s body, and she had gunpowder residue on her fingers. According to a federal prosecutor handling the case, she fired at the soldiers before she died. This Miss Sinaloa didn’t just fall in with the assassins, the allegation goes—she was one of them.

Welcome to the inherent looniness of the drug war. It has actually been a good year for Mexico, in at least one respect: the murder rate dropped precipitously along some stretches of the border. (Though whether this can be attributed to the kill-or-capture campaign of outgoing President Felipe Calderón is not at all clear. The largest cartel, the Sinaloa, vanquished a number of challengers during this period, and black-market monopolies are often more peaceful than the alternative.) But it was a colorful year as well, due to the systematic, try-anything-once eclecticism of the smugglers, and the antic game of Tom-and-Jerry escalation that they tend to play with law enforcement on both sides of the border.

1. On the Fence

“Show me a fifty-foot fence and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder,” a drug warrior once told me, and the cartels have long excelled at so-rudimentary-they’re-obvious methods of pushing product across the border. In this instance, a group of smugglers near Yuma, Arizona, tried to drive a Jeep right over the fence. “Ramps!” you can almost hear them saying beforehand. “We could use ramps!” If you could inscribe the Quixotic essence of the drug war in a single image, the photograph above might very well be it.

2. The Best Parking Spot in Nogales

Not all smuggling methods are so rudimentary. On East International Street in downtown Nogales, Arizona, authorities recently discovered what may have been the most valuable parking spot in the country. Most of the time, it looked like a regular spot some fifty feet from the border. But occasionally, a van would pull into the spot and a camouflaged plug would open in the concrete underneath, revealing a hole that was ten inches in diameter. That apparently innocuous parking space was the terminus of a narrow tunnel that began in an abandoned hotel in Mexico and ran underneath the border. While the van appeared to idle in the spot, smugglers would feed parcels of marijuana up from the hole in the ground through a similar hole in the bottom of the van; using this method, they could smuggle a million dollars’ worth of weed into the country in forty minutes. Then the plug would be replaced with a hydraulic jack, the van would roll away, and the space would become available. (This is a bit of a cheat, in that the story originally broke in 2011, but it got its fullest exploration in a terrific feature in Businessweek this year.)

3. The Narco Backers of the “Passion of the Christ” Prequel

It’s always a little surprising to reflect on the religiosity of contemporary narcos, in light of the more or less non-stop mortal sins that the profession entails. But I was especially surprised to learn that when Hollywood producers began the process of developing a prequel to Mel Gibson’s hugely successful 2004 film, “The Passion of the Christ,” one of the chief investors was an alleged narcotraficante named Jorge Vásquez Sánchez. After Sánchez was arrested in Chicago, in 2010, and pleaded guilty to extortion and other crimes, it emerged that, through some spectacularly ill-advised loans, the producers had come to owe him a ten-per-cent stake of any future profits from the film. The project, “Mary, Mother of Christ,” was well on its way to production, and had attracted the megapastor Joel Osteen as a producer, before the identity of the unsavory backer was revealed this year. A spokesman from Osteen’s church said that the pastor had no inkling of Sánchez’s involvement. Somehow, I believe him. (The film, which stars Ben Kingsley, is due out next year. Because Sánchez forfeited his stake in the production to the federal government, we are all, in a sense, now investors in the film.)

4. The Knights Templar Play Dressup

Actually, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the cartels would have their eyes on Hollywood: a morbid theatricality is a persistent feature of narco culture. Earlier this year, during a routine patrol of a town in Michoacán, the Mexican Army discovered a training ground that belonged to the Knights Templar, a slightly zany offshoot of the already zany cartel known as La Familia Michoacana (about which William Finnegan wrote in 2010). When they searched the site, the soldiers discovered a hundred and twenty hard plastic helmets—a special order, it appeared, as each featured a plunging nose guard like those worn by the twelfth-century Christian order from which the cartel takes its name. The headgear apparently featured in the cartel’s initiation rites.

5. But the Kid Is Not My Son

In June, authorities made an exciting announcement: the Mexican Navy had captured the son of the fugitive drug baron Joaquín (Chapo) Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. At a press conference, officials presented a dark-eyed, baby-faced young man in a Polo shirt and a bulletproof vest and said that he was Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar. Chapo is a maddeningly elusive figure, so capturing one of his immediate relatives would represent a significant coup. But almost immediately, a lawyer for the Guzmán family announced that, in fact, this was not Chapo’s son. Then a woman named Elodia León, who had no apparent relation to Chapo, came forward to say that the young man in custody was her son, that his name was Felix Beltran, and that he was a twenty-three-year-old car dealer. It was a tremendous embarrassment for the Calderón administration, and a reminder of the obstacles that authorities on both sides of the border face: in the fog of the drug war, sometimes you don’t even realize you’ve captured the wrong guy until his mother comes forward to tell you.

6. Lazcano Delicti

Of course, sometimes that fog works in the other way, too. In October, the Mexican Navy killed several suspected members of the Zetas outside a baseball game in Coahuila. When they examined the bodies of the dead, they discovered that one of the men they had killed was no mere Zeta gunman, but Heriberto Lazcano, the founder and head of the cartel, whose gentle demeanor had earned him the affectionate sobriquet “The Executioner.” After making this discovery, they rushed to the funeral parlor where the corpses had been sent, only to discover that during the night, a band of masked Zetas had stormed the place and made off with the body. So Mexican officials were forced to take credit for the kill, but without producing the body, a scenario that would spawn Hoffa-like conspiracy theories even in the best of times, never mind in the final months of a Calderón administration that was desperate to show results in its offensive on the cartels. (As it happens, Lazcano had already constructed a tasteful mausoleum for himself, though, as of this writing, his body has not turned up there.)