Educational Media Reviews Online

The proxy U.S./Soviet Union Cold War worldwide – often anything but cold – probably knew no more tragic a venue than Guatemala in the 1980s. Two hundred thousand people were killed in the ten-year civil conflict beginning in 1976 that raged between an oppressive right-wing military regime supported by the U.S. and a guerrilla movement bent on land reform and native rights. The stage for that war was itself set by the overthrow in 1954, with acknowledged C.I.A. help, of the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz. A further catalyst may well have been the growing awareness of injustices – e.g., 2% of the population owning 80% of the land, etc. – that took hold among the native Mayans following the devastating earthquake that struck the region in 1976. (President Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the war in 1999.) For a detailed documentary account of the conflict and its outcome you would have to turn elsewhere. The present film rather chooses to tell parts of the story in the personal encounters, as it were, between the filmmakers and a charismatic guerrilla leader, Wenceslao Armira, alias Juan Carlos, over a twenty-five year period. They first meet in 1976 when the filmmakers come to Guatemala to make a documentary on long-term rural development. Juan Carlos is an illiterate peasant farmer who, with the help of a private U.S. aid organization, World Neighbors, learns efficient farming, then to read, then becomes a teacher, then a community leader, then – when the government begins to murder reformers – a guerrilla leader. (Towards the end of his life, he will also become a Mayan priest.) Still photographs and documentary footage tell the story of the relationship, and include a clandestine shoot of Juan Carlos in Mexico City in 1984 in which he explains guerrilla objectives. The film’s tragic centerpiece is an account of the murder of Wenceslao’s two children by government death squads. Despite warnings by his wife that he was putting his children at risk by joining the guerrillas, Wenceslao does, and his children become guerrilla couriers. Screenwriter/co-director/narrator Heather MacAndrew includes in the film cheerful photos of her own happy grown son to underscore (as if you had to) the wrenching anguish of a parent losing a child. This is a very moving film, as a story involving the deaths of children must always be. But it neither seeks to tell the whole story or tell the part it does tell with noticeable objectivity. Still, the story it does tell is important – and cries to be told.