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:
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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."
