Documentary Follows Guatemalan Journalist Who Went Undercover to Expose Genocide

For greater than six years, Guatemalan-French director and producer Anaïs Taracena documented, collected footage, performed interviews and researched the repressive regime of Seventies Guatemala. El Silencio del Topo (“Silence of the Mole”) is Taracena’s debut function movie, a melancholy documentary that bridges the nation’s erased previous with the current.

El Silencio facilities the story of Elías Barahona, a journalist who infiltrated the federal government because the press secretary for inside minister Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz. Barahona scheduled interviews, press conferences, and hid info from the general public for one of many males chargeable for Guatemala’s inside battle, which is estimated to have killed or disappeared greater than 200,000 folks and displaced 1.5 million Guatemalans. His colleagues thought-about him a traitor for a few years not figuring out that for Barahona, this was an undercover project. Barahona would finally flee Guatemala along with his two daughters in the course of the night time and expose the atrocities to the world.

Taracena interweaves never-before-seen photographs of the mass genocide (largely as a result of many had been destroyed by the Guatemalan authorities of the time) with interviews of survivors and Barahona’s personal daughter. Taracena narrates the movie with unhappy poetic phrases as a result of “to have the ability to inform it, you must make cracks on the partitions of silence in a rustic the place [fear is still felt].”

El Silencio del Topo places you head to head with the fact of genocide and doesn’t allow you to look away — a reminder of the facility of journalism. The viewers will get a uncooked and generally painful account of those that lived beneath the reign of terror and the remnants left behind.

Towards the top of the movie, the viewers is launched to the son of Barahona’s former shut good friend and fellow journalist Marco Antonio Cacao Muñoz, also referred to as Maco Cacao. Cacao was brutally murdered in 1980 for upholding the reality about authorities violence in his information radio studies. His son shares a observe he present in his father’s agenda that encapsulates the facility wrestle confronted by Guatemalans.

– Maco Cacao

The documentary has been screened at a mess of festivals, starting from the Worldwide Movie Competition of Human Rights in Switzerland to Palestine Cinema Days in historic Palestine, and has gained greater than 20 awards since its 2021 screening premier in Guatemala. The movie is headed to the thirty ninth version of the Chicago Latino Film Festival this month with the subsequent screening scheduled for April 19.

The next is an interview with Taracena that has been flippantly edited for readability.

Jocelyn Martinez-Rosales: Generally throughout the movie, it’s onerous to differentiate the current from the previous. Was {that a} alternative intentionally made within the cinematographic language of El Silencio del Topo?

Anaïs Taracena: The aesthetic and in addition narrative choices had been the fruit of exactly that investigation. I had some clear concepts: I wished Guatemala Metropolis, the downtown space, to be very current as a result of that’s the place Elías labored.

Generally the language could be very timeless. You don’t know what period you’re in and you continue to really feel that weight of the previous, lots, and it is vitally refined. It’s as a lot in folks’s our bodies as it’s within the partitions.

I additionally knew that I wished to work on the sunshine and darkish areas a bit. I wished to work with archives, however the choices had been additionally labored on later within the investigation — for instance, with Carla Molina, who’s the director of pictures. We discuss lots. In some locations we had little time to movie. Or we filmed landmarks and we actually wished locations to speak, too. Generally we had a day or little or no time to movie the locations, and in that sense, Carla, who is excellent, contributed a really cinematographic eye.

Elías Barahona’s story could be very spectacular and I’m wondering about its recognition in Guatemala. Do folks know his story?

My technology and the newer generations don’t know this story. I had no thought who Elías was, proper? Elías was a college professor in Guatemala, so the scholars who had been his, kind of, knew a bit of about his historical past with out so many particulars. However actually, since we started exhibiting the movie in Guatemala, the general public was very shocked as a result of they didn’t know that story. Even folks of Elías’s technology, who did know his story, didn’t realize it in such element. It had all the time held an ambiguity of what had transpired.

How did you come throughout Elías given that you simply point out that he wasn’t very well-known?

I met him by means of his brother, David Barahona. The primary time I made a brief movie known as De Tripas Corazón, it’s a quite simple quick movie that I filmed and edited alone. I filmed Elías’s brother, David, who handed away, too. He lived in Paris and had arrived as a political refugee in 1983. I made a decision I wished to work on the subject of exile and it has all the time been a subject that pursuits me on account of my household’s personal historical past.

David knew my household from once I was little and he all the time talked to me about Elías; he informed me, “It’s important to meet my brother.” He gave me a brief novel that Elías had written. Once I arrived in Guatemala on the finish of 2011, I contacted Elías and Elías already knew who I used to be by means of his brother, proper? So I introduced him a VHS tape that had been shared with me, a two-minute interview with Elías. Elías had by no means seen it. That they had filmed him within the ‘80s, and I take advantage of that interview within the documentary. For me it was very hanging, as a result of that second is the place a friendship with Elías started.

At that second, I had neither the intention nor any concept that it was going to be a documentary. In a manner, life was guiding me in the direction of that. I really feel that the story got here to me with nice pressure and I don’t know learn how to clarify it as a result of after Elías dies, I movie him on this trial as a result of he asks me to movie him, and Elías dies two weeks later. And it was after the demise of Elías that I actually determined to start out making the documentary.

I really feel that generally life led me to that. It’s like when a narrative involves you, it falls on you and it’s all very difficult. Elías was now not right here, there have been no photographs. It was a really delicate challenge since you nonetheless can’t speak about counterintelligence in Guatemala, not but. It’s not essentially a subject that individuals need to speak about. However I felt a really deep want. I mentioned no, I’ve to do it, I’ve to research and I knew that Elías wished that story to be informed and Elías had all the time considered movie as a technique to do it.

I believe that wherever he’s, I really feel that he’s very, very glad.

You point out that you’ve got a private reference to exile, and exile is a standard theme all through the movie as a result of not solely does Elías reside in exile for a few years, however hundreds of Guatemalans had been pressured to reside in exile throughout the nation’s civil battle. How did you expertise exile and did which have any affect within the documentary?

I wouldn’t have the identical story that many different folks in Guatemala have. I grew up in Costa Rica; in Mexico, too. My expertise with exile was not understanding why my dad couldn’t go to Guatemala, as a result of I acquired to know Guatemala for the primary time with my mother, however my dad couldn’t enter. Then my mother and father separated and in Guatemala there was an settlement simply earlier than the peace was signed, permitting refugees and political exiles to return with out fearing that one thing would occur to them. After which my dad got here again in 1995, and after [that], effectively, I’d go to my dad every year.

My first understanding of Guatemala was by means of exile. In different phrases, we acquired along with Guatemalan households, each in Mexico and Costa Rica, and in addition in Central America. You all the time hear in regards to the political state of affairs and I keep in mind that once I was little, I requested my dad why he couldn’t return and he informed me it was due to the navy. I didn’t fairly perceive, but it surely was all the time there.

I used to be on the 1996 signing of the Peace Accords in Parque Central de Ciudad de Guatemala. My dad had already been capable of come again. It was one of many issues that has impacted me essentially the most in my life — to be current in that crowd of hundreds and hundreds of individuals. When peace was signed, it was an immense feeling. I had simply turned 12 years outdated, however you could possibly really feel a bittersweet feeling. A happiness for the signing, however a latent ache for the variety of deaths.

Now, I’ve lived in Guatemala for 10 years. … And I really feel that the story of Elías additionally reaches me by means of attempting to grasp that exile and attempting to grasp the nation. Elías additionally lived in exile. So I really feel that this is the reason I got here to that story and I really feel that in a sure manner, it’s why Elías additionally felt numerous belief.