Analysis Of Cuevas's 'I'

The motive of the journey and the return—Cuevas’s return to Guatemala, her return to a traumatic past—are central to her memory narrative. The director’s narrative “I” assumes a situated point of view as a woman, a ladina, an exile, and the direct relative of a disappeared person. By placing herself in Guatemala, by returning, so to speak, to the scene of the crime, she counters the hegemonic discourse of the nation and of history, a discourse whose impersonal and universalizing vantage point reflects the normative values of la patria del criollo.
Taking her brother’s death as a starting point, she reframes her personal pain as “the echo of the pain of many people,” thereby linking her family to the broader collectivity; in so doing, she reshapes
She forges affective and emotional bonds with other victims, and these affective ties bring creative and transformative potential. One of the main contributions of Cuevas’s film, then, is that its cinematic inertia is rooted in blood ties that are at once posited and transcended: the film posits a ripple effect that unites individual iterations of pain, thus (re)creating and sustaining community without eviscerating the specificities of individual instances of trauma. To the contrary, each testimony presented is unique. But in juxtaposing these unique testimonies, Cuevas establishes an intersubjective network of survivors whose epicenter is the genocide suffered by Guatemala’s indigenous peoples, a network in which her own personal loss, as the film’s title suggests, ceases to be an origin and becomes instead a mere
Lack of legal justice amounts to an extrapolation of the war’s violence, that is, to the denial of indigenous rights by other means; the dead and disappeared hover over the nation as an unresolved symptom of a traumatic past that spills ominously into the present.
El eco del dolor de mucha gente insists that violence persists in Guatemala for two main reasons: genocide denial and the military establishment’s imperative to forget its crimes and protect its own people. As a result, the documentary explicitly points out the disturbing continuities that link Ríos Montt to the current president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, a retired military officer who has been accused of (though not formally charged with) participating in scorched earth campaigns that led to nearly two hundred deaths in the early 1980s. Pérez Molina has consistently denied responsibility.
In an attempt to challenge these denials and establish symbolic justice, Cuevas shows two indigenous women who survived the Choatalúm massacre. They contest and undermine the military’s discourse of impunity and forgetting by defending a counterimperative not to forget. Immediately following the women’s voices, we hear the testimony of a military man, who