Pamela Yates’s ‘Granito’ Revisits Guatemala (original) (raw)

Old Footage Haunts General and a Director

The scene in a Guatemalan Maya village in 1982; based in part on Ms. Yates's old footage, a Spanish court is prosecuting former junta members for genocide in attacks on Maya.Credit...Jean-Marie Simon

Sept. 9, 2011

AMERICAN filmgoers may not know what a “granito” is, but Pamela Yates’s new documentary of that name comes with a subtitle whose meaning could not be clearer: “How to Nail a Dictator.” The tyrant in question is Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, who for 17 bloody months in the early 1980s led a military junta in Guatemala, and the “granitos” are the many human-rights advocates, metaphorical grains of sand who, by working together, have now managed to bring him up on genocide charges in a Spanish court.

Unusually, those charges rely, in part, on evidence from Ms. Yates’s own work. But “Granito,” which opens on Wednesday , is more than just a guide to bringing a despot to justice It is also Ms. Yates’s personal reflection on the purpose and craft of documentary filmmaking, on more than 50 years of tumultuous history in Guatemala, and on how her own views on both those subjects have evolved.

“One of the big challenges of making ‘Granito’ was to be emotionally honest to the person I was” in the early 1980s, she said in an interview last month at her home in Brooklyn. “It made me think about what I thought back then, how I saw the world in black and white and two dimensionally, and what I think about the world now.”

“Granito” is thus both a companion to and a comment on Ms. Yates’s first feature-length film, “When the Mountains Tremble.” Shot nearly 30 years ago, at the height of General Ríos Montt’s rule, that documentary offers an unrivaled glimpse of Guatemala’s turmoil from the vantage point of both the military leaders and the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas trying to unseat them.

Image

In her new documentary, “Granito,” Pamela Yates looks back at the era of her first feature-length film, set in Guatemala in the early 1980s, when a military junta controlled the country.Credit...Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

“I continue to show ‘When the Mountains Tremble’ to my classes because it has a wonderful range of footage and really gives students the visuals on Guatemala,” said David Stoll, a Middlebury College anthropologist who has written extensively on the country. “Obviously it has a solidarity perspective that assumes the guerrillas represent the people, so it’s very limited in that respect. But filmmakers always have to simplify things, and she’s trying to get people interested in Guatemala, which is a good thing.”

To some extent Ms. Yates does not dispute such assessments. “I should have been more skeptical,” she said. “I thought the good guys would win, that the guerrilla movement and the civil society that supported it had right and the force of history on their side. But it was much more complicated than that, and that didn’t happen.” Instead, a peace accord, reached in 1996, has been followed by a series of largely ineffectual civilian leaders.

After “When the Mountains Tremble” was shown publicly for the first time in Guatemala in 2003, Ms. Yates was approached by a lawyer there who wondered if her outtakes might contain material incriminating General Ríos Montt, now 85, and other military leaders. It turned out that they did, most notably an interview with General Ríos Montt in which he boasts of his power, and that moment led to the making of “Granito,” which early on shows Ms. Yates going through old film canisters.

While General Ríos Montt remains in Guatemala, which has declined to extradite him, what she found is now being used in the genocide prosecution against him in Madrid.

“This is the first time that videographic evidence has been admitted in a Spanish court of law, so it establishes an important precedent,” said Almudena Bernabéu, a Spanish lawyer involved in the Ríos Montt case who is another of the “granitos” on whom Ms. Yates focuses. “By the very nature of human rights litigation, almost all evidence is indirect or circumstantial. So this is perhaps the most direct proof one could provide. We have a theory of command responsibility for the abuses, and he admits clearly that he is in control and that he knows what they are doing.”

Image

Members of the Caba family, working to bring to justice the perpetrators of a massacre in their village that year, appear in her new documentary, “Granito.”Credit...Dana Lixenberg

The key inspirational figure in “When the Mountains Tremble” was Rigoberta Menchú, the Maya-rights and peace advocate who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. But in the late 1990s her reputation was tarnished by evidence, presented in a book by Dr. Stoll and in reporting in The New York Times that many of the key episodes in her best-selling autobiography, “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” were either fabricated or exaggerated.

In “Granito” Ms. Menchú, who filed the original genocide complaint against General Ríos Montt, has a much diminished role, as one of nine featured human-rights defenders, another being Ms. Yates herself. This time far more attention is devoted to Fredy Peccerelli, 40, the director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, which since the mid-1990s has led efforts to exhume the mass graves of victims of Guatemala’s civil war.

That conflict, which began in 1960, six years after an American-organized coup toppled an elected president, lasted 36 years. At least 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed, more than 90 percent of them by government forces. But there is little awareness outside Guatemala of the extent of the violence, which is one reason Mr. Peccerelli welcomed Ms. Yates’s attention.

“We believe the story of what happened in Guatemala should be told, and that it’s our responsibility to tell that story and let the victims speak,” he said. “I’ve heard it referred to as a ‘forgotten war’ or ‘hidden war,’ and it does feel that way. It’s a story that hasn’t fully been told, but which can be told through the bones, so just about anyone who films it will be taking it to a new audience.”

Coincidentally Mr. Peccerelli saw “When the Mountains Tremble” when he was about 12 and living in New York in exile after his father, a lawyer, received death threats. That back story too helped him overcome what he calls the “Oh my God, I’m already so nervous” moment he experienced when Ms. Yates asked to film his testimony in the genocide proceedings against General Ríos Montt.

Image

Pamela Yates working in Guatemala on “When the Mountains Tremble” in 1982.Credit...Newton Thomas Sigel

“I was growing up trying to be a New Yorker, and that film was a big reality check for me,” he said. “It was tough to see that was going on while I was at Yankee games. So that might have been the initial seed.”

“Granito” has been shown at film festivals like Sundance and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and is making a commercial run in New York and Los Angeles to be eligible for Oscar consideration. The project also includes a series of shorter “educational module” films and the creation of a database of memories from the time of the conflict, part of what John Biaggi, director of the Human Rights Watch festival, calls “a meticulous strategy of outreach” on Ms. Yates’s part.

”What ‘Granito’ does so well is to focus on the people on the ground, the unsung heroes of the struggle for social justice,” Mr. Biaggi said. “It does a very strong job of humanizing their struggle and what it takes to make change in a country still embroiled in violence. Audiences find that compelling,” especially since “the film has a lot of hope built into it.”

As it happens, Guatemala will be holding the first round of a presidential election on Sunday. Ms. Menchú is running, as she did four years ago, but the leading candidate is Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general and former head of military intelligence who has been accused of human rights abuses. So the issues Ms. Yates raises in her two films could hardly be more timely, and she continues undaunted and optimistic.

“To really make a change takes a lifetime commitment,” she said. “In telling this story I wanted to send a love letter to the next generation of documentary filmmakers, that what you do can make a difference. Maybe not always in the way you thought or intended, but by transmitting a kernel of hope, by showing a way forward.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section

, Page

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Old Footage Haunts General And a Director. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT