After the initial elation of hearing that Peru's ex-President, Alberto Fujimori, was finally being extradited from Chile to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges,

it was shocking but not surprising to see the old thuggish tactics of Fujimori's supporters at work again: "El Ojo Que Llora" (The Eye That Cries), a memorial in Lima to the 70,000 people killed in Peru's war with Shining Path, was defaced with orange paint (the color of Fujimori's party) by a group of vandals. In recent years the memorial had become a gathering place to further peace and reconciliation, where the annual commemoration of the delivery of Peru's Truth & Reconciliation Commission Final Report (on August 29, 2003) is held. El Ojo Que Llora, created by artist Lika Mutal, is in the network of the International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience, in recognition of its profound significance as a bastion of the collective memory of a nation emerging from mass atrocities. See it in this video:

Of course the Fujimoristas felt threatened by the serene power of this memorial, it's 70,000 stones laid out in a labyrinth a constant reminder of the reign of terror and corruption that Peru lived during Fujimori's regime, as exemplified by politician Martha Chavez, one of Fujimori's staunchest supporters and allies, who declared that "With pleasure, I would have destroyed the memorial myself."

We sent the following letter to the Editor of The New York Times to critique their coverage of Fujimori's extradition to Peru and the historical narrative he successfully spun during his time in power and that persists to this day. Although the NY Times didn't publish it, we shared the letter with Mirko Lauer, one of Peru's foremost opinion makers, who did publish it in his column:

"To the Editor: It's a shame that in his article (Chile Returns Fujimori to Peru to Face Charges - 9/23/07) Simon Romero reinforces the historical narrative promoted by Alberto Fujimori that he was responsible for crushing the Shining Path movement in Peru. This is a distortion of the facts. In fact, as the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission concluded in its Final Report, the biggest blow to terrorism in Peru was the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmn, a capture that was executed without firing a shot after a 5-year police investigation that had started before Mr. Fujimori took power, led by Detective Benedicto Jimenez and his small counter-terrorism team, known as the GEIN (Special Intelligence Group). Mr. Fujimori preferred a military approach to terrorism which led to an increase in the Shining Path insurgency with car bombs exploding in Lima almost daily. Mr. Jimenez treated terrorism as a criminal problem that had to be solved through old fashioned detective work, and was disdained and underfunded by Mr. Fujimori. When the capture of Mr. Guzmán occurred on a Saturday night, Mr. Fujimori was on a weekend fishing trip, completely unaware of the operation, and raced back to Lima when he heard the news. Not wanting to be upstaged by Mr. Jimenez, Mr. Fujimori promptly dismissed him. -- Paco de Onís, Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy"

As we showed in our film State of Fear, Fujimori was a master manipulator of the media, and nothing makes it clearer than this video clip we edited showing footage shot with a hidden camera set up by Fujimori's spy chief and master of corruption, Vladimiro Montesinos. We call it "Latin America's First Media Dictator" - see for yourself:

• Posted by Paco
• 27-Sep-2007
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I met Rigoberta Menchú 25 years ago, when I was making my first feature length documentary "When the Mountains Tremble".

The film tells the story of war and social revolution in Guatemala and the struggle of the largely Indian peasantry against a legacy of state and foreign oppression. Tom Sigel (co-director) and I had been filming all sides in the war - the military forces, the guerrillas, and members of civil society. Rigoberta became the protagonist of the film and her personal story was the thread that wove "When the Mountains Tremble" together. She was in exile, and her Spanish was still spotty, but the film helped introduce her to the world and 10 years later she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now Rigoberta has broken new ground in her lifelong drive to transform Guatemala - she's the first Mayan woman to run for President! I was lucky to be in Guatemala with my filmmaking partners Peter and Paco when she launched her campaign last month with the Encuentro Por Guatemala party - it was an exhilarating feeling to see her waving to crowds from a flatbed truck, in the company of Nineth Montenegro — these are two outstanding women running on a platform of increased rights for poor and indigenous people, and an end to the drug-trafficking mafia that has turned Guatemala into a major transshipment point from Colombia to US markets.

Considering the violent power wielded by criminal drug gangs in Guatemala, this may seem like a quixotic quest, but I admire Rigoberta and Nineth's courageous campaign and wish them great success.

Speaking of quixotic quests, Rigoberta also spearheaded a drive to end impunity for top military leaders and police accused of perpetrating a counter-insurgency war and scorched-earth policy against Guatemalan civilians in the early 1980s. She did this by appealing to the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the same court that served the arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet in 1998 under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Under this same principle, the court accepted Rigoberta's argument and issued arrest warrants for the gravest violators on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including former president General Efraín Ríos Montt - tough legal battles lie ahead, but the simple fact that these arrest warrants are being upheld is a significant step towards bringing the perpetrators to account. Ríos Montt is also facing charges for crimes against humanity brought against him by the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), a tenacious group of human rights advocates that have to work behind double-security doors.

Peter and I decided to make a sequel to the original film because When the Mountains Tremble, and additional hours of "outs" that didn't make it into the final edit had been requested as filmic evidence in the genocide cases. The new film will include these new cases and Guatemala's ongoing transition to democracy and the rule of law, and ponder how a documentary film can make a difference. Here is the trailer to "When the Mountains Tremble":

But this new film will also incorporate When the Mountains Tremble, because 25 years later so many of the original participants in "When the Mountains Tremble" are still players in Guatemala's ongoing political/social drama.

We went to Guatemala recently to lay the groundwork for this new film and found Rigoberta stronger and more active than ever; I reconnected with Frank LaRue, the labor lawyer who for many years lived in exile, and now holds a cabinet position as the President's Human Rights Commissioner; I found former Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) leader Pablo Ceto training indigenous people on how to run for and assume elected positions in the highlands through his Fundación Maya. I wasn't able to meet again (yet) with former President General Efraín Ríos Montt, but saw "Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity" posters for him even as the city and countryside were plastered with his party's campaign slogans. He has maintained a strong power base all these years, and is running for a congressional seat that he will likely win, which under Guatemalan law would grant him immunity from prosecution. This tension between impunity and the rule of law runs high in Guatemala, and is epitomized by the parallel campaigns of Ros Montt and Rigoberta. This tension is also revealed in the extraordinary National Police archives unearthed by Guatemalan human rights activists, 80 million documents piled floor to ceiling in an abandoned building surrounded by a police-training base. Some of the people organizing this chaotic trove were formerly targets of the apparatus of state repression who may discover that the disappearance of their family members is detailed in the police documents.

Probably my most disarming discovery was to find "Rafael" (his nom de guerre), a former guerrilla in the squad that shot down the military helicopter I was riding in (and filming from) in 1982. As destiny would have it General Benedicto Lucas García, the feared head of the Guatemalan Armed Forces, was piloting the helicopter.

Due to our emergency landing and the near death experience we shared, the General took me into his confidence, which enabled me to document in words and images the Armys genocidal scorched earth policy against the Mayan civilian population in the highlands and bring it to the attention of the world. Now General Lucas García is one of those charged in the warrants issued as a result of Rigoberta's tireless pursuit of justice.

So this is the panorama in today's Guatemala that will be woven with "When the Mountains Tremble" to create our new film, which we are calling "Granito."

• Posted by Pamela
• 04-May-2007
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I call the course "The Art and Soul of Documentary Editing." I am working with a group of young people on an intensive one-week workshop at Casa Comal, a community media center in Guatemala City.

For seven years Casa Comal has almost single-handedly built a skills base in cinema basics among young people here. I first met the "Comales" (as they call themselves) four years ago when they invited me to show our 1983 release "When the Mountains Tremble" in its first public presentation in Guatemala, after having been informally banned for 20 years, seen only in clandestine screenings during that time. It was an unforgettable night, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that I'd been looking for a way to come back to Guatemala and do something with Casa Comal ever since.

So when Skylight Pictures decI'ded to return to Guatemala to continue an exploration begun 20 years earlier with "When the Mountains Tremble," I contacted Casa Comal's two founding leaders, Elias Jimenez and Rafael Rosal, and we cooked up this course. Casa Comal has taken on the task of raising the level of independent film not only in Guatemala but also throughout Central America. They have a year-round school to train students, a production unit that produces an independent feature film a year (in a country where you can count homegrown features on one hand) and they organize the fabulous Icaro film festival with participants from across Central America.

My workshop lasts a week. In that short time I present the methodology of documentary editing, and the students divI'de up to work on four Adobe Premiere edit systems, each group using the same batch of footage used to create a scene in our last film, "State of Fear."

Squeezed in the mI'ddle somewhere Casa Comal has me speak on their weekly cultural radio show. Then on the last day we watch each group's cut, after which I reveal the scene I had cut for "State of Fear" from the same footage. And alongsI'de the craft there are passionate discussions of "what is a documentary" and "what is the responsibility of the documentary filmmaker."

Guatemala has almost no independent documentary tradition, and needs it badly. But then I suppose that might be saI'd about a great many places in this beautiful and troubled world.

• Posted by Peter
• 29-Apr-2007
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The Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing here in NY, and we just watched a remarkable film (actually five short films by five directors, produced by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in association with Doctors Without Borders) about invisible victims of conflict and disease in five different countries. This may sound depressing but the way the stories were handled really should inspire you to action. Two films that really stood out were one by Wim Wenders set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one by Spanish/Peruvian documentary maker Javier Corcuera (who also made The Back of the World and Winter in Baghdad, two memorable docs) that follows a group of Colombians returning to their land after being forcibly displaced by paramilitary groups. Here is the trailer of Invisibles - don't miss it if you have chance to see it...

• Posted by Paco
• 28-Apr-2007
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I've been struck by the recent spate of films that tell stories of police states and the courage of individuals that defy them. In the narratI've fiction realm there were two magnificent films nominated for Academy Awards: Pan's Labyrinth and The LI'ves of Others (both won Oscars in different categories). In each case the story takes us deep into a police state when it is firmly entrenched, when the apparatus seems impregnable and resistance might seem futile...

but both lead us into inspiring, if bittersweet, tales of the courage of convictions and the illuminating spirit of individuals who band together to defy brutal oppression, one during the 1940s in Franco's fascist Spain, the other during the 1970s and 80s in East Germany when the Stasi secret police ruled daily life. Pamela and I are currently at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, where we saw an eye-opening short film called Democracy 76: My State of Emergency, about the Egyptian police state and the relentless violence, intimidation and torture it used against dissidents during the run up to the 2005 "elections" called with 3 months notice — several Egyptian dissidents interviewed in the film mentioned how difficult it was to overcome the "fear factor," as they called it, to protest this inherently flawed election, yet they kept going into the streets, knowing they would likely get beaten or arrested or even killed, as so many did.

Here is the film:

During the international outreach campaign we did after releasing State of Fear we crossed paths a couple of times with Tanya Lokshina, a Russian human rights activist who reminds us of those courageous individuals we see in the films.

The first time we met Tanya was in Moscow at a State of Fear screening where our Q&A session was shut down when audience members started comparing President Putin's expansion of power to President Fujimori's power grab in Peru in the 90s. Tanya had been instrumental in getting State of Fear shown in Moscow, along with Yuri Dzhibladze (another dedicated human rights defender). After the startling shutdown of our Q&A we went to a restaurant where we learned just how precarious it is to be a human rights defender in Russia today: click here to listen to this recent NPR story where Tanya is interviewed, and you'll get a sense of the courage it takes to continue speaking truth to power in Putin's Russia.

The second time we crossed paths with Tanya (and Yuri) was at

the Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta in May 2006. This is a remarkable annual gathering of human rights defenders from all over the world, hosted by President Jimmy Carter (and on this occasion co-hosted by Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and co-organized by Human Rights First. We were there to screen State of Fear, and spent 2 days listening to about 30 fellow human rights defenders from all over the globe tell tales of resistance to abuses of power - one of the most effectI've human rights tools is the documentation and airing of these abuses, which is what we do in our human rights work through film. We were inspired by the stories of our colleagues, and salute the Carter Center and Human Rights First for bringing us all together.

• Posted by Paco
• 27-Mar-2007
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