Carlos Bátiz declares himself a superfan of the Cruz Azul team since childhood. He always lived with the burden of understanding the weight of what cruzazulear implies, a colloquial verb meaning to fail, to mess up, or to lose a competitive advantage when victory was almost assured, especially in the final minutes. A neologism that arose from his beloved team and its six lost finals until it broke its longest title drought in 2021, after more than 23 years of waiting. However, when he learned that behind the sports aspect, behind the Álvarezes, the family that owned the team and the cement company that supported it, there was a story of power and corruption, he did not hesitate to bring to the cinema the story he considers a “mirror” of Mexico. Thus was born Azul oscuro, azul celeste, a documentary he co-directs with Carlos Carrera and which premiered this Saturday within the framework of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG).
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La Cooperativa La Cruz Azul was founded in 1881, in Hidalgo, its flagship factory, and has three other plants: in Oaxaca, Aguascalientes, and Puebla. Guillermo Álvarez, better known as Billy Álvarez, succeeded his father and led the conglomerate since 1988, two years after also becoming director of the football club of the same name. He was arrested in January 2025, accused of organized crime, money laundering, fraudulent administration, and tax fraud. The deep crisis and internal conflict in the cooperative drastically intensified around 2015, marking the beginning of a series of legal, financial, and control disputes.
However, the crisis publicly erupted in 2020 with the issuance of arrest warrants against Billy Álvarez for organized crime and money laundering, resulting in the takeover of the cooperative by new administrations and violent conflicts at the plants.
All this previous context reached Bátiz’s ears at a dinner with factory workers and suppliers. The details that were not reported in the media, he explains, were what pushed him to ask those present: “Will you give me a chance to make a film?”. The co-director, after the screening at the Cineteca de Guadalajara, says that at first they hesitated a little, due to that feeling of being uncomfortable or exposed. “There were people, right there, who very bravely said: ‘It’s time for people to know the truth and understand how things are, and that the cruzazuleada is something completely superficial’,” he recounts.
With the consent of some of the voices appearing in the documentary, Bátiz took the project to film director Carlos Carrera, whom he calls his mentor and partner. The filmmaker of El crimen del Padre Amaro also told him that he wasn’t interested in football and knew nothing about the sport, but when Bátiz told him about the background of the Álvarez family and the power conflicts behind it, he “went crazy,” he recounts.
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“He said: ‘Of course, if it’s a story where you’re going to talk about the ‘true crime’ that really exists in this company, of course I like it. Of course I’m in.’ Together we managed to put together all the interviews, convinced people, and were able to achieve this six-year work, the time it took us to put together this documentary,” Bátiz states.
Despite how tense the power struggle has been between the factions of Billy Álvarez and Víctor Velázquez, who currently commands the destiny of this business conglomerate after more than a decade of corporate warfare and which has accumulated 10 murdered people, Bátiz says that at no time did they feel intimidated or threatened by the work they carried out. “The most difficult part was being able to put together a coherent story from all the many stories that happen within the cooperative and how they also relate to the football team. Because one thing causes the other. The most difficult part was the assembly and being able to sustain everyone’s production,” he adds.
Bátiz is aware that it will be a “very controversial” film and that there will be people who won’t like it, depending on which side they identify with. But there’s also the football aspect involved, where, he believes, fans of other teams will want to express their opinions.
The co-director states that the public will discover many things that people know, but don’t know why. The film’s release in commercial cinemas is scheduled for May 28, and Bátiz concludes the interview with anticipation: “They will discover things that represent what Mexico is, what the country was like in the eighties, the nineties, the early two thousands. How corporate power associates with political power and subjugates workers and communities. And this, obviously, is reflected in the football team, which has unfairly been given a nickname or a verb. It’s a disgrace. It’s not a ‘cruzazuleada’. It’s the shit behind the ‘cruzazuleada’ and who caused it. Of course, 23 years without winning a championship; people mock that they’ve lost six, eight, nine finals and don’t win. But what about the people who got rich from that situation? And curiously, they leave and they win. It’s strange”.
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