This might as
well be where a Republican vote in a presidential election in the “blue” state
of Washington belongs, although the same thing could be said for a
Democratic vote in Alabama:
Today I want to
look at another movie, and not the Demi Moore film The Substance, which I watched this past weekend, and have to say
that despite its high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I think that is a visceral
reaction to the audacity of the filmmakers to make a film that is based on a
ridiculous premise but is full of “social commentary” on “fame” and “passing
beauty”—and gives new “meaning” to terms like “over the top,” “lack of subtly,”
and “gross,” particularly the absurd ending which makes the blood “bath” finale
in Carrie look like a shower from a
rusty pipe. The film is certainly full of “it,” whatever that is, and mostly to
do with the director’s self-obsessed politics. Nevertheless, if you want to
“experience” a film, it is difficult to keep your eyes off this nonsense.
This year’s
election, however, has to do with reality, and given the fact that if his
Madison Square Garden rally is any indication, Donald Trump believes that his
“best shot” at winning the election is to repeat the theme of racist lies about
immigrants who—like Jews were in Nazi Germany—are the scapegoats for every
problem faced by “ordinary” people, obfuscating the reality that his
deportation, tax and tariff “plans” he
offers will not only help those of his own “class” get richer, but insure that
“ordinary” people get poorer and can only look to a future less economically
and financially stable.
Mark Cuban suggested that Democrats should have countered this
narrative with this image from the Elian Gonzalez saga, putting an inhuman face
on Trump’s deportation schemes:
Films today have
been accused of either ignoring Hispanic characters, or portraying them in
stereotypical ways. Take for example films by the Coen Brothers. They have been accused
of anti-Semitism, but what is not seemingly understood is that their stereotyping of
Hispanics is far worse. In The Big Lebowski,
the one Hispanic character is a sexual pervert; in No Country For Old Men, they are either killers or criminals; and
in the remake of True Grit, they
can’t even let the children alone, portraying them as animal abusers, as if
they were just “born” that way.
What are people
supposed to believe, if people are “strangers” to them and they have only these
media tropes and images of “vermin” on the border to go on? There have been a
few attempts to “educate” people about these people’s stories at the “source,” like Gregory Navas’ El Norte, which I
looked at here 1
and Alex Cox’s Highway Patrolman,
which I looked at here 2 . A
few films, like Under Fire and Salvador, have tried to dramatize the
political and social upheavals in which the U.S. government generally took the side against the impoverished masses and for the oppressive elites, who promised “stability”
for American business interests.
Here I am
going to look at John Sayles 1997 film Men With Guns. Sayles has stated that the film was not meant to
indict any specific country, and that it could apply to any number of countries
in Latin America, although mainly those which were most subject to U.S.
“interest.” The plot was inspired by the story of a real-life doctor in
Guatemala whose students were sent out into the countryside as part of an
international health program to provide medical care for indigenous people, and
most ended-up being killed by government troops.
The connection
with Guatemala seems obvious, however. That country suffered through a 35-year
civil war instigated by the U.S. in 1954 when the Eisenhower administration
backed a military coup against the democratically-elected government merely because it recognized the legitimacy
of the national communist party, and the subsequent U.S.-armed and supported
regimes were accused of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of indigenous
Mayans. Although “peace” was achieved in 1996, it hasn’t changed the social,
political or economic status inside the country. Poverty stands at 55 percent of
the total population, and 79 percent of indigenous Maya.
But unlike in El
Salvador, it is not U.S.-bred street gangs and “presidents” with authoritarian
impulses that have devastated lives, but the corporate gangs that do not want
to enter the modern world, and operates unscathed with payoffs to government
and judicial officials. According to Insight
Crime,
Corporations now represent Guatemala’s oligarchy, and this is where old
surnames from the end of the 19th century are mixed with the modern families that
emerged with the industrialization policies of the 1950s. These entities, which
also control some 90 percent of the banking sector, represent around 10 percent
of Guatemala's gross domestic product, but their power has been translated into
control over mass media, the hiring of lobbying firms in the United States and
Europe, the organization of private security and intelligence, or espionage,
offices, as well as extensive influence in the court system and the federal
government.
The current
president, Bernardo Arévalo, was elected on the promise of battling corruption
in the country, but he first had to thwart efforts to invalidate his election
from charges of election fraud led by Guatemala’s version of Texas AG Ken Paxton and Florida judge Aileen
Cannon—Consuela Porras, the country’s “independent” attorney general, herself
in the pay of the corporate oligarchs. She has been busy “investigating”
political reformers, according to an AP
story:
Guatemala’s Attorney General Consuelo Porras has been criticized and
sanctioned by countries around the world for allegedly obstructing corruption
investigations and using her power to persecute political opponents, but the
country is effectively stuck with her, according to a legal analysis published
Tuesday.
Since President Bernardo Arévalo’s election last year, Porras has
pursued his Seed Movement party, alleging wrongdoing in how it gathered the
necessary signatures to establish itself. Her investigators raided the party
offices, seized and opened ballot boxes and sought multiple times to have his
immunity lifted.
Arévalo has said Porras is protecting powerful and corrupt interests in
Guatemala who fear his promise to root out corruption. He has called for her
resignation. But Guatemalan lawmakers have created an untouchable attorney
general without any feasible legal mechanism to remove her, according to the
study by Stanford Law School and Cyrus R. Vance Center for International
Justice.
All this has
happened since a peace accord was signed between the government and rebels in
1996. Earlier this year, The Progressive
observed that the promises of “reform” and justice for the common people has been mostly on paper:
On December 29, 1996, there was widespread hope that the signing of “The Accord for a Firm
and Lasting Peace” (known simply as “the peace accords”) which
ended Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal armed conflict would remedy the
systemic structural issues that had caused the war. But twenty-seven years
later, that hope seems far away. Guatemalans found themselves marking the
anniversary of the end of the war amid significant unrest: the return of
systemic corruption, rollbacks of the measures of the peace accords, the
closure of institutions formed to respond to victims, the release of military
officials accused of war crimes, the ever-present threat of a blanket amnesty
for those accused of committing war crimes, and far-right attempts to derail
the results of the 2023 presidential elections.
Sayles’ film
provides at least what appears to be an “insider’s” view on the ground prior to
“peace.” Men With Guns follows the
journey of a doctor at retirement age who is about to go on a vacation, Dr.
Fuentes (Federico Luppi), who believes the government propaganda that
everything is “normal” in the country, and that stories of human rights abuses
and violence in the countryside are just “rumors” and lies, and he believes
that the medical students he trained are doing “good” for the rural people they
were sent out to help.
The film begins
with a scene in which an indigenous woman is talking about the “city people” and
the man who claimed he could put his hand on you and know what your sickness
is—not by “magic,” but by “science.” But the city people don’t get sick like
“we do” because they are “different”:
Cut to a scene
in a modern doctor’s office, where Dr. Fuentes, a recent widower, is talking to
who appears to be a military officer, who tells him that the “common people” who
watch soap operas love “drama,” which is why you can’t believe all of the
“rumors” about bad things happening outside the city, made-up stories by the “reds”:
Dr. Fuentes is
surprised to learn that the officer still has soldiers looking for guerilla
fighters in the mountains, and he is told that he is “like a child,” and the
world is a “savage place.” Later he is in a restaurant with his daughter and
her husband, where he suggests that he might spend his vacation
finding out how his former students are doing. His son-in-law tells him the
medical program his students were trained under was only instituted to satisfy
the “gringos” making trouble from outside the country, but Dr. Fuentes insists
that the program was a good idea. But he is confronted with the reality that he
has not heard from or seen them in years.
But the doctor
still insists that the program had merit. Next we a couple of affluent women
talking about how the more expensive wine is, the sharper the pain in the
kidneys. They note that the doctor doesn’t “look so good”:
Dr. Fuentes is
seen walking down a street, deep in thought, past graffiti on a wall that
should tell him that all is not well in the world he has largely been insulated
from:
At home, he
remembers his teaching days, when he told his students that medical “technology”
can “win” the battle against not just bacteria, but ignorance, and their job
would be not just to cure illnesses, but to fight this “ignorance.”
We will eventually
learn what happened to people who applied that particular advice. He looks at a photograph
of the students he trained to go out to serve the people whose only previous
encounter with “modern” medicine was the effect of bullets fired by the “men
with guns”:
While in a
market where we see one of the “men with guns”…
…Dr. Fuentes
catches sight of a face familiar to him…
…one of his
former students, Bravo (Roberto Sosa, who we saw as Pedro, the idealistic Highway Patrolman in a corrupted world).
He doesn’t want to speak to his teacher, and he boards a bus to escape. Dr.
Fuentes follows the bus in his car, to a more shady-looking neighborhood, where
Bravo seems to be operating a black market operation. He tells the doctor that
he is “finished” with the “program,” that he was “luckier” than one of the
other students because he had been “warned”:
Dr. Feuntes is
confused. A warning about what? Bravo won’t say exactly, but observes the
doctor's ignorance about what is happening in the country. But he runs a
“pharmacy” now at “popular prices,” so his training didn’t all go to waste. A
couple of tough-looking characters arrive at the “pharmacy,” and Bravo tells
the doctor he should leave because this town isn’t a safe place to be at night:
Dr. Fuentes
decides that instead of going to the beach, he’s going to find his student
doctors. He can’t believe that it was all a “waste,” and that his “legacy” was
not to help people, but to send idealistic young doctors to their destruction:
Out in the
middle of nowhere, the doctor seems to be lost. He asks a man where he is, it
must have a name. He is told that “we” are “salt people” and we just live here, it has no “name.” But there is nothing here, the confused doctor says,
and he is told that of course he can’t see anything from his car:
Stopping at a
roadside diner, Dr. Fuentes encounters two American tourists. Andrew and
Harriet (Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody):
They have heard
stories about fighting going on of these parts, and bad things happening to people, like having their hands cut off. The doctor assures them that those stories
are not true here, and that it happens in “other countries.” However, what he
is less certain about is what “fajitas” are:
Dr. Fuentes
first stop is a “town” where one of his students was supposed to be. He is
confused because there are no roads leading to the place, and is pointed in the
right direction by a farmer:
He has to
navigate through a sugar cane field…
…and arrives at
a small village where when the people see him, they go back into their homes to hide:
He calls out for
help, and an old woman finally responds to him, asking him why he is here. Dr.
Fuentes identifies his trade, and she says “good” because the doctor they had is
dead:
Unhappy to hear
this news, Dr. Fuentes wants to know how…
…and is told
that “they” killed him. Who killed him? The “men with guns” he is told, burned
alive with gasoline along with three other men by soldiers. The young doctor
who had not been warned in time was killed just because “they” didn’t “like
him.” They had guns and we didn’t. Dr. Fuentes asks why she is talking to him
and the other will not; they don’t know him, and anyways, she doesn’t care if she dies,
since she is blind and all of her children were killed by the “men with guns”:
It doesn’t
matter if they are white or Indian, she says; when an Indian puts on a
uniform, he becomes, or acts, “white.” She tells the doctor that it is unsafe for him to
be seen there by the men with guns, and should leave now. He insists on knowing
what happened to his student, who he says was a “good doctor.” He is told that
he wasn’t, because so many of his “patients” are dead.
Dr. Fuentes
returns to his car, only to find that it has been broken into, and his
expensive camera stolen:
He encounters
the Americans again, who tell them about what they have been reading in a book,
about the Mayans who killed thousands of people and threw their hearts into a
well as a sacrifice to the gods. Dr. Fuentes insists that this was not true,
that this is what the Aztecs in Mexico did, not the indigenous people here:
There is a brief
flashback to the student doctor he has just learned was killed…
…and on the
terrace he listens to a woman reading from a tourist brochure: “There is a
place where the air is like caress, where gentle waters flow, a place where
your burdens are lifted from your shoulders, on wings of peace.”
Dr. Fuentes
wonders where this “heaven, this safe harbor is.” Once he learns that what he
thinks he knows, or what has been told in the safety of the city, is all an
illusion, this will be the only worthwhile purpose of this journey of
disillusionment.
His next stop is
a police station, where he is told that it is only a “rumor” that his student
and the others were killed by soldiers, it must have been the guerillas. The
officer insists on seeing the doctor’s identification; he might be a newspaper
reporter who will tell lies about what is going on here.
Dr. Fuentes is
advised not to travel to the next stop on his itinerary, filled with guerillas,
bandits, and deserters, and the Indians trust no one who is “white.” The doctor
is certain another of his students is still there, he won’t be dissuaded. Naturally,
the “bandits” think nothing of stealing the hubcaps from his car right outside
the police station:
The doctor
discovers that the next “town” isn’t right next to the road…
…just a few
shacks up on top of a hill, belonging to coffee growers:
When he identifies
himself, a young woman seeks medical attention for her baby, and he tries to
explain to her that the baby is not “sick” but suffering from malnutrition, and needs solid food:
He doesn’t
understand why they don’t eat “real food,” and is told by a boy named Conejo
that they have to sell coffee to buy food, and coffee prices are low. They have
no food to eat:
Conejo, who is a
bit of a hustler, bargains with the doctor for a few coins and some food to
show him where the student is now:
Traveling
through the fields…
…he is shown
what appears to be a boneyard of human remains. One of them, he is told, was
the student he is looking for:
Could this be
him?
The boy admits
the student was a “good” doctor because he fixed his broken wrist, but the
other villagers did not like him because he wasn’t “one of them.” He was killed
by the army, because they also didn’t like him, and they had all been taken
here to watch him and others be killed as a “warning.” Conejo tells the doctor
he will show him his next destination, because he will just get lost, and that
he will be killed by men hiding away who have now discovered he is alone. There
are no hotels around here, but he knows a place where he can stay for the
night:
Dr. Fuentes is
taken to what used to be the local school, now abandoned. After the teacher
“disappeared,” the army used it for their own version of “education,” in which
Conejo admits he was forced to be an “assistant,” cleaning-up after “class”:
The people taken
there were interrogated by torture, using the medical instruments of Dr.
Fuentes’s own student:
Those who didn’t
“learn” were killed, and those who at least were not killed "graduated."
They start early to the next village. There is no “path”
there because the residents don’t want to be found. There is a cutaway to the
Indian woman seen at the beginning of the film, and she may be speaking about
Conejo. The boy has a mother, but she will not look at him because he was the
product of a rape by soldiers and he was just something she pushed out of
herself. He is like a dog, who picks up the scraps left by “real” people. He is
not “bad,” because dogs are neither good nor bad, they are just “dogs”:
They arrive at
the next village, which appears to be abandoned. Conejo says he only told the
doctor he would help him find where the village was, not that there would be
any people there. They have either been killed by the soldiers, or they are
hiding in the banana trees around them:
It is obvious
that the next student the doctor is looking for is likely dead too. They return
to his car, where they find that its tires have been stolen:
Through the
clearing they encounter another man, named Domingo, whose ragged shirt
indicates he must be a deserter from the army:
He doesn’t know
anything about the stolen tires, but threatening them with a gun, he does take
all of the doctor’s and Conejo's money, and becomes an unwelcome “guest” on their journey.
Dr. Fuentes and Conejo discuss the situation; the boy notes that when a soldier
loses his rifle, his captain assumes he is a “spy” and has him executed.
Domingo has no rifle, so he must be fleeing for his life:
Dr. Fuentes says
that is “stupid,” but Conejo says that is how “discipline” is enforced.
Domingo, who has disappeared, returns with a vehicle that he has obviously
stolen, and has been shot and badly wounded in the process. He tells Conejo
to remove its tires and put them on the doctor’s vehicle:
Dr. Fuentes
performs a perfunctory “operation” on Domingo to remove the bullet…
…and in the
morning, still not trusting the doctor, gives Conejo a “test shot” of the drug
he is take for the pain:
He obviously
knows what he is doing, and admits that he was a medic in the army. They have
to stop on a bridge to give Conejo an opportunity to relieve himself of the
side effects of the drug he did not need to take…
…and later while
the Domingo is asleep, the doctor finds that he has been holding them at
gunpoint with no bullets:
They arrive in a
town that looks more “modern” than the other locations the doctor has found
himself in, taking the opportunity to buy food with the money Domingo took from him. He also hopes to find another of his students:
Something is
immediately amiss, because in a market stall Dr. Fuentes finds medical tools
that were obviously stolen, or “found.” Unless the vendor tells him where the
student doctor is, he will inform the police; he is told where he “used” to
have an office, but he is no longer there.
While Domingo
hides from a soldier…
…Dr. Fuentes discovers
what is left of the clinic that his former students ran:
It is now a
barbershop:
The barber tells
him that his student was killed by the guerillas because he treated soldiers.
What if he had not treated soldiers? The man in the barber chair laughs and says
nobody refuses the “men with guns.” Then they would have killed him too.
Unknown to Dr.
Fuentes, Domingo has used some of his money to send Conejo on an errand to buy
three bullets for his gun. Back on the road, Domingo reveals himself to have a
political conscience, observing that “the rich use the army to push the Indians off the
good land so they will starve to death. So they pick their coffee and they come
back with their pitiful wages, and those leeches suck them dry”:
They encounter a
hitchhiker…
…and Domingo
tells the doctor to continue past him, but Dr. Fuentes ignores the gun pointed
at him because he thinks it isn’t loaded, and we find that Domingo isn’t really
the “tough guy” he pretends to be; he’s not a natural-born “killer.” The man
they pick up identifies himself as a priest, or an “ex” priest who has “lost
his way”:
They stop for
awhile, and Dr. Fuentes admits to the priest, Padre Portillo, that he feels his
life has been revealed to be a failure, he should have warned his students of
the danger. The priest tries to comfort him; he couldn’t have known what was
happening outside the city:
While the doctor
is relieving himself next to tree whose bark has been cut, we encounter a face
we’ve seen before, David Villapando, identified here as only the “Gum Man,” and
who was Enrique in El Norte. His is
the only smiling face we see in this film:
He makes his
living removing sap from the gum trees. He and his partner live wherever the
work is. They ask the doctor to tell them stories, because they have no
television out here:
The doctor has
no story to tell, but the priest has one, a “ghost story.” It’s a story about
priest whose courage in his faith had been tested and he failed, realizing he was a
coward who hid when the soldiers came looking for him, likely because he was suspected of preaching "liberation theology"…
…who told the
Indians that since they had allowed the priest to escape they would be punished
unless they picked out six villagers to “volunteered’ to be killed in his
place.
The priest was
too cowardly to give himself up to save the innocent, and later emerged from
his hideout and abandoned the villagers…
…while those
selected as a “reminder” lay in their graves:
Later, the doctor looks
at the photograph of his former students; aside from Bravo, only two could
still be alive:
Domingo has
asked the priest to “absolve” him of his sins, but the priest insists he no
longer has the power or credibility to do so. Back on the road, they pass an
army truck with soldiers; seeing them, it brings back a memory of Domingo’s
“initiation” into the army:
They have gotten past the soldiers, but there is an army checkpoint ahead:
One of them has
to give themselves up, or else they will not be allowed to pass. The priest,
who cannot live with what he has done, decides to give a “wrong answer” and
allows himself to be taken into custody, telling Domingo as he leaves that he
now “absolves” him:
They arrive in
another village, this one occupied by the army, in which a man lying dead co-mingles with children playing:
A soldier tells
Dr. Fuentes that the soldiers are there because they don’t trust the Indians;
they’ll help the guerillas because they as afraid of them as they are of the
soldiers. They are afraid of “everything.” He also provides the reason why
his students were probably killed: an “educated” person would have no reason to
be out here, except to “help” the guerillas.
A doctor only
shows up at the village every three months, and since Dr. Fuentes has a doctor’s
bag, the people assume he is the next one, and form a line waiting to be examined and “cured.”
He employs Domingo as his “assistant,” since he is already under “suspicion”
for being a “driver” who isn’t driving; Dr. Fuentes tells the soldier that he
was relieving himself in the forest when he was bit by a snake, a reason that the
soldier accepts as true, since Domingo has been holding his arm, wounded by the
gunshot.
Domingo does
have some medical knowledge, revealing that he recognizes a child has ulcers in
her mouth. He admits that while in the army he treated soldiers for skin
rashes, dysentery—and when there was no doctor around performed rudimentary “surgery”
to remove bullets. Sometimes they died, sometimes they didn’t—especially since
they had little medicine to treat them with, since the officers stole medicine
and sold it:
Conejo arrives
to tell them that the people here were from the next village on Dr. Fuentes’
itinerary, that they are now refugees after their village was burned by the
soldiers. The student doctor that Dr. Fuentes hoped would be there is also
dead.
A young woman is
in line, Graciela, who does not speak. Her mother says she hasn’t spoken for two
years since she was raped by soldiers:
Dr. Fuentes tells
Domingo that she is not sick, her condition is psychological. But Domingo knows
these people, and that any “medicine,” even if it doesn’t actually do anything
physically, may at least have a “psychological” effect if the patient believes
it will “cure” them. He digs through the doctor’s bag and finds some pills,
which he gives to the girl:
The doctor is told
by the soldier he should go back to the capital, since there were guerillas
operating in the area; one of them stole a tourist’s car (actually it was the
army deserter, Domingo). What happened to the priest? You shouldn’t pick up “strangers.”
On the road, the
encounter Graciela, who wants to join them in their quest for the “promised
land”—or at least out of the refugee camp:
We should be
charging bus fare, says Domingo. He notes that while she appears scared of
them, she is more scared of the soldiers after what they did to her. They arrive
in what is left of another village; it is just another village where everyone
is “dead” or gone. There is talk about some magical place hidden away where
everything is peaceful, called Cerca del Cielo ("Close to Heaven"). Domingo says it doesn’t exist,
because when he was still in the army they looked for it, but never found it:
While everyone
is asleep, Graciela, having surmised that there was no “hope” now for her,
takes Domingo’s gun…
…and intends to
end her life with it:
Dr. Fuentes
takes the gun from her, still believing the gun to be unloaded. He jokingly
points the gun at Domingo and then tosses it back to him, which Domingo feels
lucky it didn’t go off in his belly:
They continue
on their journey…
…and before them
is a hill. Could this be where that “magical” place is hidden?
They climb up
the hill, and by this time we realize that Dr. Fuentes heart is starting to
give out on him from all this exertion:
\
Domingo, who is
walking behind Graciela, has another flashback to something he cannot live with
that was part of what was “expected” of him as a soldier (probably to keep him
quiet about what soldiers did to the Indians), and evidently convinced him to
become a deserter:
The troupe
encounters the Americans, who are exploring ancient ruins. They have read the
history books and seem to know more about this than anyone else. These Americans seem “obsessed” with the
stories about blood sacrifices at these sites. They also mention that their
vehicle was stolen at gunpoint by a man, just like in the movies, and was found
by police without its tires. Harriet is concerned about the doctor’s loss of
breath, but he says it is nothing:
Andrew seems to
think that there is some kind of “meaning” to the conflicts going on this part
of the world, and that it seems more “peaceful”:
What he doesn’t
realize is that the “men with guns” leave American tourists alone, and stay
hidden from sight. Conejo mentions that he once worked at ancient site, and was
paid more tips from the tourists if his stories about the place were more
lurid:
Meanwhile, a
couple of guerillas have detained Domingo, but is released on the word of the
doctor:
That night they
encounter two more guerillas, who seem to be just “normal” people with normal
interests. They ask the doctor, who has at least lived in a city, about what different
flavors of ice cream are being sold, and imagine what flavors they would
choose:
In the morning
they are back climbing the hill…
…where they
encounter another gathering of people. Is this the rumored place of “peace”:
No, an old man
says, this is the place where “rumors” go to die, and that the last student the
doctor is looking for is not there. They don’t grow food here, because it can
be seen from the sky that people are here, and the army will find them:
Dr. Fuentes
appears to be having a medical crisis…
…and they
realize that he has died. Conejo now wants the money Domingo took from him, but
he is ignored:
A young girl appears,
dressed in the same outfit as the woman seen earlier in the film. She needs a
doctor, because her mother stepped on a land mine and needs the metal removed from
her leg. She points at the medical bag on the ground:
Graciela tries
to hand the bag to Domingo, who at first refuses it since he isn’t a real
doctor…
…but then relents,
realizing that he is now Dr. Fuentes’ last live “student," and this will mean his own "redemption":
Graciela still
believes, however, in that peaceful place…
…and wonders if
it is on top of that next hill:
Many people believed that place was
actually to be found in “El Norte.” Trump, of course, wants to make this their "hell."
