Vice Magazine has created a truly fascinating documentary on the Mexican drug cartels, the Mormons who live in northern Mexico, and the state of near constant war between them. Many of the Mormons interviewed in the documentary are either close or distant relatives of Mitt Romney, whose family fled the USA to avoid prosecution for polygamy. Many Mormon polygamists settled in Mexico to be able to live as polygamists without fear of arrest. Mitt’s father George was born in Mexico and immigrated to the US. Mitt Romney is himself a first-generation American.

While the fact that Romney’s family moved to Mexico to be polygamists should be a relevant part of his biography as a presidential candidate, his religion and his family’s dubious legal history have not been issues in neither the Republican primary nor the general election.

The Vice documentary is one of the best made for the web documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s a really excellent piece of journalism and a fascinating look at a brutally violent conflict, one driven by a bizarre two-way trafficking of drugs into the US and guns into Mexico. The Mormon families in the documentary come across as very sympathetic in their fight against the cartels, so don’t assume that just because a liberal outlet is telling the story of Mitt Romney’s Mexican polygamist family history that it reflects poorly on him. In fact, the only thing that reflects poorly on Romney in this video is his opposition to sane immigration and drug policies which would diminish the risk his family in Mexico faces on a daily basis.