Immigration, especially for asylum seekers, at the border between Mexico and the U. S. is hardly complicated on the level of injustice and human rights. People from Mexico and Central America fleeing from violence and threats by drug cartels, or oppressive governments and their murderous security forces, or paramilitary groups and civil wars, have recently been subjected to family separation and, more traditionally, indefinite imprisonment in federal prison-like conditions. Immigrants and would-be immigrants say America’s border patrol hates Mexicans. Immigration judges routinely reject asylum applications.
The documentary The Guardian of Memory takes a deep dive into one horrifying example of a people in desperate need of refuge, who have been turned away by the U.S. through a legal technicality. Immigration courts have said a campaign of organized terror by a drug cartel is not the same thing as a political or government threat, even if there is evidence of government complicity with cartels.
This grave film by Marcela Arteaga is essentially an oral history about events in the Mexican border town of Guadalupe in the early to mid-2000s, as told by survivors of a purge of locals in what had been a prosperous port hamlet and peaceful place to live. But organized crime, with police corruption and secret security forces helping, wanted control of Guadalupe.
They went about kidnapping and murdering teachers, journalists, doctors, activists and other community pillars, followed by more random citizens found buried in desert graves. Families who sought information about missing loved ones were warned to stop or die. Businesses, including small food vendors, were financially extorted.
On and on it went until, as we see in The Guardian of Memory, parts of Guadalupe are a ghost town. Arteaga moves his camera with elegiac deliberateness through the ruins of former homes and streets, tours often led by one-time residents who share memories of the slayings of their parents, children, and other innocents.
Visually, Arteaga sometimes pours it on a little thick, taking up valuable time with too many artfully composed images of destruction or of barren neighborhoods when he could be providing more clarity about issues that need, at least for this film’s audience, further investigation. (Who was the cartel? Who were the secret security forces aiding in the “disappearing” of individuals?)
Still, one comes away with a more refined sense of what happened to at least one population of frightened people who were subjected to inhumanity on one side of a border and needless cruelty on the other. Strongly recommended. Aud: I, J, H, C, P