Testimonio at 50

Why Women’s Testimonial Documentary Now?

Since the 1990s, there has been a surge of Latin American documentaries. The wars that coalesced in the 1970s and 1980s—the “dirty” and the “civil”—brought about a cinema of memory at the turn of the new millennium. Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael Lazzara (2016: 4) note that “from the pain of exile, state terror, and the defeat of the revolutions, a cinema of memory and political protest emerged that, though born in these years, continues to flourish in the present.” This growing documentary cinema in the Americas coincides with two other cutting-edge developments in the twenty-first century: the rise of Central American cinema (Cortés, 2018), with examples ranging from Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (Volcano, 2015) to Diego Quemada Díez’s La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage, 2013), and the prominence of Latin American women filmmakers such as Claudia Llosa, Lucía Puenzo, and Lucrecia Martel (Martin and Shaw, 2017).

Contemporary documentary cinema from and about Latin America has at times positioned itself in transnational or global spaces to foreground a universalist frame of human rights. Regarding the paradigm of women’s rights as human rights, in particular, the film scholar Patricia White (2015: 170) asserts that “many of the insistent issues of twenty-first century feminist politics—migrant women’s labor, feminicide, rape as a tactic of war, sex trafficking— exceed the bounds of the nation-state.” The move beyond the nation-state can operate on a political level as a self-reflexive strategy that emphasizes the role of coloniality in the violation of human rights. At the same time, it is important to recognize that these very supranational dimensions in cultural production can run the risk, however slight, of Anglocentric or Eurocentric cultural imperialism.

In her essay “Are Cultural Studies ‘Against Literature’?” Sophia McClennen (2003: 67) goes a step farther to caution against critical colonization and argues that testimonio should be treated as a discrete form of cultural production. “The Testimonial,” for McClennen, “is an act of textualizing a story that otherwise might have been forgotten, repressed, or silenced.” If we were to trace testimonial traits in cinema, we would find them apparent in fiction films (Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial [The Official Story], 1985, and Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden, 1994), as well as hybrid documentaries (Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera [One Way or Another], 1975, and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios [The Blonds], 2003). In this essay I focus primarily on a social practice of documentary cinema that Julianne Burton (1990: 6) has described as the instrumentality for “social and political transformation.” Equally important, I attend to nonfiction media, since they have been especially significant for feminist filmmaking. As Belinda Smaill (2017: 174) persuasively argues, the documentary is “overwhelmingly the genre taken up for advocacy purposes as a tool within grassroots movements . . . [and] crucially tied to the politicization of women’s experience.”

I suggest that 500 Years and Berta vive represent an emerging new genre of films that engages in memory making and denouncing unresolved human rights abuses, largely bridging the Cold War period and the postwar/postcoup moment. Paralleling the development of the testimonio literary genre, testimonial documentary can be understood as a cinema of memory composed of first-person accounts and rooted in a continuum of grassroots activism. Over the past two decades, this genre in the Americas includes Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman, 2001), Tin Dirdamal’s De nadie (No One, 2005), Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light, 2010), and Ryan Suffern’s Finding Oscar (2016), among many others. Disappearances, forensic investigations, memory of atrocity, migration, mining, and the prosecution of war crimes have been some of the topics explored in the new millennium. 500 Years and Berta vive uniquely consider indigenous activist women in relation to their environment and the ways in which they challenge cultures of impunity.

From When the Mountains Tremble to 500 Years

Pamela Yates has directed several award-winning documentaries but is perhaps best known for the trilogy called “the resistance saga”: When the Mountains Tremble (1983), Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011), and 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017). I first saw Yates’s latest installment in the summer of 2017 at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, New York, as part of a triple feature followed by a Q & A with the filmmaker herself. The triptych structure of 500 Years consists of the highs and lows of the 2013 genocide trial (Part 1), the interconnected issue of land defense (Part 2), and the 2015 citizen uprising (Part 3), implying a progression from silence to popular protest. The film employs archival effects and film-within-a-film sequences as a stinging indictment of U.S. interventionism and Guatemala’s denial of past and present violent practices. Unsurprisingly, the testimonio icon Rigoberta Menchú appears in all three films as a historical social actor and an indexical figure, although increasingly decentered as the series progresses.

Menchú gained global prominence, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, for bringing the Guatemalan genocide into international focus. As the historian Greg Grandin and the writer Francisco Goldman (1999) remind us, “Menchú’s book came out in 1983, just after the Guatemalan military had concluded the most brutal campaign of repression in this hemisphere.” Despite the controversy revolving around textual discrepancies that followed or perhaps even because of it, Menchú’s impact “changed the direction of the field of Latin American studies” (Gugelberger, 1998: 62; 1999). The Rigoberta Menchú controversy, as Arturo Arias and others (2001) have demonstrated, had more to do with issues of authority than with so-called authenticity.

The 2015 historic verdict in which the former chief of police Pedro García Arredondo was convicted marked a change in the way we might reread the landmark testimonio Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la consciencia (Menchú, 1984 [1983]). García was found guilty of homicide and crimes against humanity for ordering the burning of the Spanish embassy in 1980, a signal event that led to the deaths of 37 diplomats, student activists, and indigenous organizers, including Menchú’s father. This belated justice permitted the unframing of a previously presumed scandal. Dwelling on the significance of the guilty verdict on Democracy Now! (2015), Menchú remarked, “What is most important is the memory of the victims.” For her this shift in the national narrative restored the dignity of the previously slandered and held the state accountable for the Spanish embassy massacre. Prior to 2015, responsibility for the conflagration had at best been interpreted as inconclusive and at worst attributed to the protesters themselves as an act of self-immolation or, in the words of David Stoll (1999: 88), “revolutionary suicide.” In his article “Rigoberta Menchú’s Vindication,” Grandin (2015) explains that those in the “blame-the-victim” camp “meant to undercut accounts that focused on ‘structural violence,’ racism, and economic exploitation for the ensuing genocide.” Thus, this recent turn of events allowed Menchú’s testimonio and attendant critical discourse to take on new significance. It marked a turning point from regarding Menchú as a “tainted witness” (Gilmore, 2017: 17–18) to viewing her as vindicated.

The publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú radically altered representations of indigenous women. (For clarity, I will use the name “Menchú” to refer to the historical figure and “Rigoberta” when I speak about the character in her book.) The literary scholar Victoria Bañales (2014: 365) insists that critics have largely overemphasized the collective dimensions of the written text at the expense of its gender dynamics. One could, with Bañales, consider its renderings of the particular perils of sinister, sexualized punishment at stake for Maya women (as evident in the exquisitely painful scene in which the state kills Rigoberta’s mother). One could also consider how “indigenous women’s revolutionary struggles in I, Rigoberta Menchú openly defy and challenge dominant racialized gender and sexuality discourses that represent women as essentially passive, penetrable, and apolitical.” Viewed with a feminist lens, the text moves beyond the trope of woman as “silent subaltern” to shine light on women’s political agency, including armed resistance as a means to defend life and land.

Equally significant is the Maya narrator’s preoccupation with environmental justice, especially in highlighting the disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards that poor and indigenous communities endure. For example, in Chapter 7 we learn of her brother Felipe’s death on the plantation. Recalling her shared experience as a child agricultural worker, Rigoberta (Menchú, 1984 [1983]: 38) says, “They’d sprayed the coffee with pesticide by plane while we were working, as they usually did, and my brother couldn’t stand the fumes and died of intoxication.” Relatedly, she renders visible the deliberate harm to the racialized poor through her other brother’s death of malnutrition. The family’s subsequent firing and withholding of wages make plain the risks involved in the cultivation of commoditized coffee and cotton. In the correlating segment of When the Mountains Tremble, released in the same year, the camera turns its attention to plantation economies and appears to capture the hard labor of racialized male bodies in the earth. It then cuts to a low-angle shot of a boy picking cotton, punctuated by Menchú’s voice-over and the sound of an airplane. An image of a plane indiscriminately spraying agrochemical toxins, oblivious to the proximity of workers still in the fields, then appears. Such moments in the book and film dramatize the ecological thinking that allows audiences to observe the intricacies of the violence that threatens the well-being of Maya communities.

A major problem of When the Mountains Tremble relates to its use as evidence for the genocide trial. On the one hand, as Arturo Arias (1994: 15) argues, Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel’s film merely simulates living history, creating an artifice of Guatemalan current affairs (and self-reflection): it “pretend[s] to portray a contemporary situation in Mayan life, accounting for the recent social and political upheaval in Guatemala.” On the other hand, the prosecution team relied on the film to establish that Efraín Ríos Montt, in an interview with Yates, acknowledged his powerful position in the army’s chain of command. In both cases, though, the film’s iconic view of Guatemala’s genocide renders it historically significant even if mediated. In this light, Yates’s resistance saga as a whole could be viewed as aligning itself with other atrocity films such as Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein Muñoz’s Las madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1985) and Patricio Guzmán’s El caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case, 2001), films that “have registered the importance of individual testimony in telling stories about genocide and in the prosecution of crimes against humanity” (Wilson and Crowder-Taraborrelli, 2012: 9).

In discussing When the Mountains Tremble, Arias has further expressed concern about the way the U.S. codirectors obscure class struggles in Guatemala for primarily U.S. audiences. In “Mayas and Gringos” (Arias, 1994: 20), he maintains that the filmmakers “simplify the conflict by schematizing it as a struggle of good versus evil, in which ‘good’ was the Mayan people as a whole, and ‘evil’ was the ladino world linked to the Reagan administration.” While I would concur with Arias that When the Mountains Tremble presents a reductive view of the intraracial tension between the Maya and ladinos, I see the later film, 500 Years, as complicating the earlier eclipsing of ethnic discrimination in the resistance saga. One salient example is the scene in which the journalist and social anthropologist Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj articulates a vision of a more equitable Guatemalan society and asserts that this kind of national transformation would require the support of nonindigenous people (mestizos and poor ladinos).

As with testimonial literature, testimonial documentary film raises the thorny issue of the ethics of representation. Does the documentarian replicate an objectifying, imperial gaze? Given that the New York–based filmmaker Yates occupies a privileged position as a middle-class white woman, one must be especially attuned to the “inter-racial-looking relations” (Kaplan, 1997: 3) that may result in co-opting or commodifying cinematic views of women of the Global South. In my view, Yates attempts to distance herself from a colonialist gaze in her most recent film by featuring a trio of Maya activist women including the doctorate-holding Nimatuj rather than a single narrator as in When the Mountains Tremble. While Menchú’s cameo appearances, forming a kind of visual rhetoric, occur at critical moments during the genocide trial and later uprising, Nimatuj provides the semantic authority in the film through her frequent poetic voice-overs, which function as the main narrative filter. Strikingly, she redefines the Guatemalan indigenous woman as a lettered advocate herself.

At the start of 500 Years, we see traces of imperialism highlighted through the focus on trains, bananas, and military men. Repurposing preexisting film footage not only conveys an overarching reflexive mode and generates an archive effect but also offers nuanced insight on the imperial gaze beyond the military-industrial complex associated with the Guatemalan civil war. The camera then settles on abject poverty through the image of a lone child pushing a broken chair on the street as the credits appear. With these establishing shots the film lays bare the economic precarity of global capitalism through such colonial projects as U.S. financial interest in banana republics. Next we see a red Mayan codex overlain with the caption “Since the Spanish Conquest a powerful elite has been subjugating indigenous Mayans—seizing their lands, destroying their lives.” Thus, the film gestures toward centuries-long “economies of dispossession”—“those multiple and intertwined genealogies of racialized property, subjection, and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically and change over time” (Byrd et al., 2018: 2).

500 Years sets out to show that it is no coincidence that “contests for land can be— indeed, often are—contests for life” (Wolfe, 2006: 387). Rather than consider the confluence of displacement and state-sponsored terror in twentieth-century Guatemala as an isolated event, the documentary reveals its structural nature, predicated not solely on race but also, more significant, on access to territory. After signaling the long arc of Mayan survival and resistance, the camera transitions into a long shot of a verdant landscape, and we hear the intradiegetic sound of sheep bleating. Accompanying a shot of campesinos in transit, we listen to the following words of Nimatuj: “The [ladino] elite took away our best lands and sent us into the mountains. Now the mountains have gold, silver, and nickel, so we were forced out.” The ecological thinking mobilized in the film is best understood in Macarena Gómez-Barris’s (2017: 5) proposal that the “extractive view” “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.” Invoking Eduardo Galeano’s (1973) The Open Veins of Latin America more broadly, the film reflects on the land theft and mass atrocities of the Spanish empire that would naturalize cruel coloniality and that underlie the contemporary corporate conquest in Guatemala.

As a post-genocide film primarily about gender, 500 Years should be briefly considered for its critical treatment of what Shoshana Felman (2002: 4) calls “the juridical unconscious,” whereby the law “finds itself either responding to or unwittingly involved with processes that are unavailable to consciousness or to which consciousness is purposely blind.” There are several dramatic moments during the genocide trial at which the legal proceedings (including nearly 100 Maya, mainly Ixil, testimonies.) lead not to closure but to repeated trauma. For example, an anonymous, shrouded eyewitness relates her experience of rape as a weapon of war. In laying bare the sexualized violence of the Guatemalan genocide, her legal language ultimately collapses into speechless anguish, the unnarratable, as she begins weeping. At this point, the film exposes governmental gaslighting with a medium shot of Ríos Montt’s daughter, Yuri, adamantly discrediting Mayan testimonies, suggesting political puppetry and financial gain at play. Viewers ultimately witness the “veritable theater of justice” (Felman, 2002: 4), the cruel optimism of a guilty verdict nullified 10 days later on technical grounds.

We see how memories of atrocity interface with land struggles through shots depicting eco-trauma. ² In one scene with Daniel Pascual, the head of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee for Campesino Unity—CUC), Yates reenvisions Guatemala as a palimpsest of memories. ³ Throughout her trilogy, mountains are a mise-en-scène that simultaneously evokes the territory of relocated indigenous communities and marks extractive zones generating further forced removals. Significantly, Pascual recalls that the mountains were once a site for training in guerrilla warfare. As he reminisces about his sister Inés, the film dissolves into a flashback from When the Mountains Tremble, in which she likens her contribution to national liberation to a grain of sand. Pascual later tells us that although Inés died in combat at the age of 16, her presence is still palpable. The trees in this shared natural setting heighten the archive effect and reinforce a haunting sense of what Guatemala has become after dictatorial terror. Yates critically recontextualizes her archival footage of revolutionary struggle to elaborate a longer view of indigenous young women confronting exploitation, discrimination, and repression.

Pascual fittingly characterizes the time lapse between the military dictatorship and the postdictatorship as “slow genocide,” which, of course, echoes Rob Nixon’s (2011: 2) idea of “slow violence”—“a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Yates later makes this point all the more explicit with a map highlighting highland communities such as Salquil Grande with the caption “Today, massacre sites are occupied by transnational megaprojects.” 500 Years pushes the audience to see how the spectacle of genocide overshadowed the steady incursions of extractive industry.

The second segment of the film directly confronts the problem of governmental land grabs through the submerged perspective of the K’iche’ Maya activist Andrea Ixchíu. The youngest woman from Totonicapán to be elected a tribal leader, Ixchíu is a prominent protagonist, dramatizing decolonial maneuvers in two significant ways. First, she perceives Guatemala otherwise as a journalist-creator for the television organization Red Tz’ikin, an alternative online network. This representation of a cyber-connected Mesoamerican millennial dislodges imaginings of indigeneity at odds with technology and shows how “indigenous peoples shape and reshape ideas about citizenship, culture, language, and geography within their respective nations, but also contribute to a transnational indigenous imaginary” (Gómez Menjívar and Chacón, 2019: 5). As a result, we see Ixchíu at the cutting edge of digital activism, seizing the very means of production. In contrast to the indigenous subjects with limited access to the public sphere in Yates’s previous films, here we glimpse indigenous youth asserting a greater sense of communicative autonomy. Indeed, nowhere is the indigenizing of the social media more evident than with the #RenunciaYa (Resign Now) campaign, which relied largely upon Facebook to organize mass demonstrations leading to the overthrow of the Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, “another ex-army commander from the genocide years” (Oglesby, 2017: 502). Second, the camera captures Ixchíu’s agency as she organizes a national roadblock with over 1,000 protesters. We subsequently see how Pérez Molina, symbolizing the nation par excellence, positions indigenous communities as “alien to modernity” (as Jean Franco [2013] has put it) in their resistance to the growing global extractive industry. Thus, viewers come to an accretional understanding of the way hydroelectric dams, open-pit mining, and agribusiness threaten to destroy Guatemala’s environment and its people.

Following the climactic event of Pérez Molina’s resignation, the euphoric moment captured in the film lingers in its optimistic closing scene. A group of mostly Guatemalan girls in this evocative moment serve material and symbolic roles as kite runners and “figures of futurity” (White, 2015: 198). As this team of young women flies a majestic, massive kite, Nimatuj’s voice-over offers a poetic reflection on wartime and postwar generations: “Our children are showing us that it is possible to build a new country with new ideas.” Thus, Guatemala remains a site of crimes against humanity but also serves as a space for kindling renewed perception of dissent in general and indigenous feminisms in particular.

Berta vive: The Dark Ecologies of Honduras

Like Yates’s film, Katia Lara’s 30-minute documentary Berta vive also makes twenty-first-century indigenous feminisms visible with urgency. In the opening sequence we see indexical footage of Berta Cáceres’s acceptance speech at the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony. The film thus presents her at the height of her career, honored for her contributions as a Lenca leader and cofounder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Berta had received the prize, also known as the “Green Nobel,” for mounting a grassroots campaign to block the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualquarque River in western Honduras. If, as Jaimie Baron (2014: 128–130) suggests, an archive effect signals “an awareness of the passage of time and the partiality of its remains, for an embodied experience of confronting what has been lost, and the mortal human condition,” one might conceivably read Lara’s film as generating both “a nostalgic desire to recreate the past in the image of the ‘perfect snapshot’” and “a nostalgic but self-conscious awareness of the past as past.” The film then immediately cuts into a rapid-fire newsreel sequence registering the global shock at finding out about Berta’s assassination. This archival montage, suturing worldwide news reports in different languages, not only crystallizes the sense of loss of a beloved, world-renowned environmental activist but also makes Berta legible to unfamiliar audiences on an international scale. Moreover, it produces an experience of temporal disparity between Berta’s presence “then” and her absence “now.”

We soon learn that assassins killed the 44-year-old activist and mother of four in her home on March 2, 2016, unsurprisingly sparking global outrage. Lara released her documentary short in 2016, after only five months of filmmaking, helping to draw international attention to the impunity for Cáceres’s murder. The storyline of Berta vive ostensibly pays tribute to the human rights defender and environmental leader and centers on her funeral, but it also creates a genealogy of ecofeminists in her wake and delves into the deeper inequalities for which Cáceres surrendered her life.

Born in Honduras, Lara studied graphic arts in her home country and Mexico before specializing in filmmaking in Argentina. She was mentored by leading feminist filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel, Lita Stantic, and María Novaro. Her directing credits include the documentaries De larga distancia (Long Distance, 2000) and Margarita Murillo (2015), as well as short films like Corazón, abierto (Open Heart, 2005). Before her most widely circulated work, Berta vive, Lara had demonstrated her commitment to slain Honduran women activists with the filming of Margarita Murillo, a documentary about the feminicide ⁴ of a founding member of the National Farmworkers’ Central while she was working in the fields in northern Honduras in August 2014 that makes visible the state’s delay in replacing the prosecution team in the aftermath of her murder. Another, more detailed documentary about Berta Cáceres titled Berta soy yo (I Am Berta) is in postproduction.

In Lara’s film, as Berta drives to the Río Gualquarque (with the director riding shotgun and two passengers in the back), the hand-held camera does a close-up of her relating the successful local efforts of the Lenca community in driving out Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned hydropower and dam construction company, and pointing to new threats to indigenous territories such as the German companies Voith and Siemens and the European bank known as the Netherlands Development Fund. Imagining the inner dialogue among the guards as she approaches the river, Berta jokes, “Here comes the witch again.” The film later shows her on the riverbank, wearing a straw hat, in phone conversation with Rolando (presumably a fellow activist). The river serves as an icon and a metonym for indigenous peoples, deeply inflected with ongoing ecological violence and displacement of local communities while also representing the energy and essence of the ancestors. Berta mentions the irony of the community’s victory over the mining company in that it was the river itself that ultimately won. Personifying the river in this way expresses a spiritual ecology, a deep sense of interdependence. In this river sequence and throughout the film, Berta’s perspective suggests a “fish-eye episteme, seeing below the river’s colonization” (Gómez-Barris, 2017: 91).

Aerial shots of the Río Gualquarque accompany this key moment (and the film’s closing), a visual motif Berta had imagined with the filmmaker but never got a chance to view. As with the film’s opening, this visually iconic scene abruptly ends with intertitles telling us that two years later Berta was assassinated, again producing temporal disparity and Baron’s (2014: 87) archive effect—“a tragic sense of loss.” Since 2013, Lara had begun recording the farmworkers’ union’s opposition to the Agua Zarca Dam. The intimate footage of Berta was initially intended for a film preserving this struggle, but with the death of her central character Lara recontextualized it in pursuit of justice for Berta’s murder.

The river sequence recalls the campesino and feminist struggles in the 1980s reflected in Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo (1987: 101–102), in which the campesina organizer Alvarado paints a portrait of the twentieth-century corporate extraction of resources: “The land here is rich, but it doesn’t belong to us. Large parts of it are controlled by the banana companies, and all their profits are taken out of the country. . . . They take all these minerals and ship them out of the country, and they don’t leave anything for us Hondurans.” At one level, Berta vive expands on this foundational invasive image of U.S.-based transnational corporations in Honduras to include other extractive entities in Germany, the Netherlands, and China. At another level, the film draws attention to Berta’s murder as a resurgence of death squads reminiscent of “a sustained state effort to silence the voices of women leaders” in the 1980s (Méndez, 2018: 12).

While Berta vive certainly touches on the long-standing trend of violence against Honduran activist women, it emphasizes the brave continuation of Berta Cáceres’s struggles through her three daughters. One scene that exemplifies how Berta lives on, articulating indigenous feminisms vis-à-vis “daughters of futurity,” occurs during the evening of the wake. Laura Zúñiga Cáceres proclaims, “My mother can’t be murdered. My mother can only be planted, to be born and reborn.” Rather than extinguish a fire, Laura suggests, the perpetrators have poured gasoline on it. This intensification of struggle and notion of afterlife is further reinforced by the film’s title, which draws on the political slogan “Berta did not die, she multiplied” that is chanted at countless rallies around the world demanding accountability for dam violence. It reflects the heart of feminist testimonios in which “re-membering is really an act of birthing and re-birthing” (Sternbach, 1991: 98).

Latin American women’s organizing around redress for state aggression and gender-based violence in the twenty-first century has grown considerably from Argentina’s Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the 1970s to the #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement. Cecilia Palmeiro (2019: 1) argues that “the horrifying and escalating number of femicides and transfemicides at a continental scale, the murder of local anti-extractivist female leaders, the wave of redundancies, and the current and future austerity measures . . . find in feminism their most vital form of resistance.” Feminicides in Honduras have skyrocketed and normalized the devaluation of women. Years before the Honduran court would convict seven men (hired hitmen, state security officials, and employees of the private energy company Desarrollos Energéticos, SA, though not the intellectual authors or investors), Lara’s film set in motion a kind of counterinvestigation (Lakhani, 2020). Given that contract killers had long trailed Berta Cáceres, Lara’s film falls squarely into what Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011: 1) calls “countervisuality,” challenging the systemic surveillance of a colonial complex. ⁵ In another sense, the film shows indigenous female subjects asserting their “right to look” or “claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity.” At one crucial moment, Olivia Zúñiga Cáceres calls attention to the state’s complete lack of criminal investigation of her mother’s murder, which illustrates that “even if the [postcoup] government is not killing women directly, acts of commission and omission create conditions that promote impunity and increase risks of victimization by normalizing the targeting of women for violence, at home and in the streets” (Menjívar and Walsh, 2017: 222).

In addition to shedding light on the struggles of indigenous ecofeminists, Berta vive also presents the interplay between black indigenous empowerment and food security through the vantage point of the activist Miriam Miranda. A Garifuna organizer and leader of the Black Fraternal Order of Honduras, Miranda elaborates on her bond with Berta, highlighting the solidarity between indigenous and black indigenous communities, and offers a trenchant critique of what the geographer David Harvey (2003) calls “accumulation by dispossession” in the postcoup moment. ⁶ Put differently, she raises the problem of entangled anti-indigenous and anti-black racisms at play in state and corporate land acquisitions, urging viewers to see the local relationships to land, particularly entwined displacements, differently. For Miranda, it is not enough to demand justice for Berta’s assassination; it is also necessary to continue contesting the inequalities of the multiply marginalized for which Berta was murdered. Gesturing toward the interrelatedness between ecological sustainability and social justice in Latin America and elsewhere, Miranda exposes the threat to food sovereignty as African oil palm displaces beans, corn, and rice in Honduras. Illuminating the destruction of food systems reveals how agrofuel plantations participate in “the hijacking of the global food supply” (Shiva, 2000: 5). In comparing neoliberalism to the mafia, Miranda implicates transnational corporations and local partners alike.

Honduras is often regarded as a small nation, with its population slightly over 9 million. More recently, it has been associated with widespread violence (high homicide levels and violence against women), poverty, and popular “migrant caravans.” If the Garífuna and Lenca communities in Honduras are deemed “unimagined communities” (which is to say “marginalized within the nation-state”), Lara’s documentary registers these erasures. Rob Nixon (2011: 151) employs the notion of “spatial amnesia” to signal the situation in which communities, “under the banner of development, are physically unsettled and imaginatively removed, evacuated from place and time and thus decoupled from the idea of both a national future and a national memory.” In bearing witness to the absent, Berta vive returns to a documentary filmmaking of a “transformative concern,” as Julianne Burton (1990: 3) would have it, evincing “a growing preoccupation with the rise of extractivism in Latin America and the determination and political engagement . . . to bring awareness to the ecological and social costs associated with it” (Kressner, Mutis, and Pettinaroli, 2019: 11).

Both Berta vive and 500 Years make manifest the continued relevance of testimonio today. These female-made films illuminate the internal displacement, owing to contemporary dispossessive regimes, of those who remain in the isthmus. ⁷ At the same time, they can be understood as “refram[ing] the ‘Cold War’ in Central America as an extractive imperial project that lengthens the periodization of colonial capitalism, taking the emphasis off of ‘the neoliberal turn’” (Gómez-Barris, 2019: 151–152). Viewed in this way, the retrospective first-person accounts of these films provide insights into the repercussions of the Cold War and the reformulations of testimonio in the early twenty-first century that complicate simple narratives of transition from dictatorship to democracy. Testimonio, by and large, has renewed urgency and importance in the light of ongoing state-sanctioned violence, dangerous diasporas, detention in privatized prisons, global capitalist exploitation, and historical amnesia.

The indigenous women portrayed in these independent feminist documentaries are represented not merely as victims within a more universal narrative of womanhood but as rights-bearing subjects who challenge past state crimes and current structural inequalities. Therefore, these examples of testimonial documentary have the potential to propel human rights struggles forward in contemporary Central America and elsewhere. Even now, at 50, testimonio still has unfinished business.