Neo-nazis pushed film maker to the limit
AWARD-WINNING documentary-maker Mariana van Zeller has interviewed a range of hardened crooks across the globe, from drug dealers to people traffickers to online dating scammers.
But she said her scariest moment was coming face to face with neo-nazis plotting a race war.
Mariana said she almost pulled the plug on her interview with an American white supremacist in her latest series of Trafficked.
She also said a rise in the neonazi groups, uncovered during the pandemic, has now become a global threat and it left her scared.
She now wants viewers to tune in to the documentary so they can also become aware.
In the second season of Trafficked, beginning tomorrow on National Geographic, Mariana, 45, works her way inside a range of black markets or global trafficking networks, from back street plastic surgeons, to illegal fishing and
‘Black markets rose in pandemic’
romance scammers. She found men are often overlooked as victims of romance scams, as they are too ashamed to talk about it.
For her investigation into white supremacists Portuguese-born Mariana travelled to Ukraine, where many neo-nazis have joined militia to fight the Russians.
She said: “The white supremacy episode quite frankly was really hard and scary for me.
“Every subject I approach and every person I interview I always try to do with a lot of empathy. I tell people I am not here to judge – I am here to understand why.
“Without understanding the why or the root causes of these black markets, we are never going to fix them or change anything.
“But with white supremacy, when you’re sitting across the table from an American Nazi who is inciting violence and talking about how he wants a race war, it’s really hard not to stand up and leave.”
She added: “White supremacy and white supremacist attacks are growing all over the world.
“We discovered in our investigation that the people committing these attacks are connected to this
wider global network of white supremacy. They operate very much like a trafficking network but instead of putting guns in people’s hands or drugs in people’s bodies they are putting hateful ideas in people’s minds.”
The 10-part season was recorded during the pandemic.
Mariana explained: “We realised pretty early on that because of the pandemic there had been an explosion in black markets.
“Not just the ones we already knew – such as guns and drugs – but new ones as well. Some rose because of the pandemic, like romance scammers where they exploited the loneliness we were all feeling during the pandemic.”
She spent weeks interviewing victims, all women, before going to West Africa, the epicentre of online dating cons.
However, it was only when she met the con artists that she found it was usually men posing as
women to trick other men in the rich west. She said: “Once we arrived in Ghana and started meeting some of these scammers, seeing them actively scam, we realised a lot of them were scamming men and many said it was actually easier to scam men.
“That was really shocking, I was not expecting it.”
She did not know why men did not report they were victims, but added: “I think there is a shame component to a man admitting that he was scammed.
“Because not only was he scammed into believing that this person was the woman of their dreams but then finding ‘she’ was actually a man, I think it was a hard pill to swallow for many.”
But unlike the neo-nazis she met, many perpetrators – from romance scammers to crystal meth producers – were victims too.
She said she hoped one of the messages Trafficked sent out and
viewers got was “that the majority of the times these people that we consider the bad guys – the criminals, the outlaws, the traffickers – are a lot more like us than we would like to admit.
“They are mothers, they are fathers, they are our neighbours, they are people with dreams and aspirations and goals just like us.
“But in the vast majority of times, not always, it really is a lack of opportunity and inequality that sees people fall into a life of crime.
“That’s really important because without understanding that, and calling it what it is, you are never going to be able to make any changes or prevent black markets from existing.”
The first episode – Meth Super Highway – looks at the production and smuggling of crystal meth into the United States.