Breaking the Guatemala Wall

SIPPING CAPPUCINO in a Greek restaurant, Pamela Yates and Tom Sigel look like an all-too-typical, yuppie couple enjoying a comfortable, Bostonian existence. Only when they start to talk, he more reticently but just as intensely as she, do they reveal the passion which has led them--by jeep, horseback and foot--throughout all of Central America.

Crimson: "Which format is a more effective medium for informing the moviegoer: documentary or fictionalized drama?"

Sigel: "The best documentaries incorporate the basic elements and principles of drama, just as the best narrative films often incorporate elements of reality. One of the reasons When The Mountains Tremble has been very successful is because it recognized certain fundamental principles of dramatic storytelling and applied them to a documentary format. I don't think people go to the movies to be educated, to get facts and figures; and to be honest. I don't think movies do that very well. What movies are good at is drawing people into another reality."

C: "What do you think of films like Missing and The Killing Fields?"

Y: "Missing, for example, is an extremely accurate film. I feel emotionally very close to that film because I was in Chile in that time and knew Charlie Harmon, the guy who was missing in Missing. It was an extremely effective film; probably extremely effective because the filmmakers did their documentary homework."

Y: "The Killing Fields is a very emotional film, but I think if you don't know the background of Cambodia, it's hard to understand exactly what's going on, who were the Khmer Rouge."

C: "Do you think there's bias in your work, as some critics have suggested?"

S: "Every piece of journalism I've ever read has been biased. It's biased because whoever comes to write something as a journalist brings with them a certain point of view. A journalist going into Guatemala is going into another culture. All we try to do in the film is tell the truth as we found it."

C: "Much of the film's success depends on the main character, Rigoberta Menchu. Where did you find her? What about her attracted you?"

Y: "We first met her when she came to speak in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. She was one of the representatives of Guatemalan opposition delegation. As documentary filmmakers, we know that the best way to reach an audience is through characters, people that they can identify with. We knew based on the material we had that we needed someone like her. We realized that she would be a good person because her life very closely mirrors and is a metaphor for Guatemalan society. What happened to her family, how she changed from a migrant worker to being a leader of the opposition is something that many Guatemalans have gone through."

C: "Why were you specifically interested in Guatemala?"

S: Well, we've done films in every country of Central America. At the time we went to do When The Mountains Tremble there had been no serious film on Guatemala. To this day there really is almost no film material on Guatemala. Yet the level of the war there was every bit as awful and as serious as the war in EI Salvador, and the United States was becoming involved. We wanted to break that wall of silence."

C: "Do you think the regime in Guatemala is the most brutal in Central America?"

Y: "I think so--I think so because the Guatemalan army is the most highly trained counter-insurgency force in the region. So over the years they've adapted these methods to try to put down the opposition. I personally think that it's the most brutal military dictatorship in the region.

C: "What's the motivation behind the people in charge? Is it strictly personal power, as in Orwell's 1984?"

S: "You have to understand that Guatemala is ruled by the military. What's made them different from the militaries in other dictatorships has been that this small group of officers have become players in the country's economy. They've begun to take over industry and agriculture and become no longer simply the protector of the dominant class, but have actually become part of the dominant class themselves. Through their repression or whatever means they use to maintain themselves, they're doing it very much to maintain the spoils of that power."

C: "Has there been any improvement in Guatemala over the last thirty years?"

S: "For one thing, thirty years ago the revolution in Cuba hadn't happened, the revolution in Nicaragua hadn't happened and the insurgency in EI Salvador hadn't gotten to the point it has now. Some of the same inequities still exist, but the historical context is very different. The opposition in Guatemala today are opposing the military on a whole different level. If and when they're ever victorious, it will be a far more profound change than they saw with the election of Aravenz [the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, deposed by a CIA coup in 1954].

C: "But can the revolutionaries be successful without the support of the U.S.?"

Y: "They did it in Vietnam, so there no reason they can't do it in Guatemala."