El Salvador2018Docudrama58 min
El Camino de la Sombra
In June 1983, men in plain clothes walked into Carlos Mauricio’s classroom in San Salvador and asked him to move his car. When he stepped outside, they forced him into theirs.
They handcuffed him and blindfolded him, and the van pulled away. He knew what happened to people the army took: they were dead by the next day. Through the gap between the blindfold and his cheekbone he could see out the window, and he watched the buildings go by, waiting for trees. Trees would mean the edge of San Salvador, and the place where they would kill him.
The trees never came. The van was headed for the headquarters of the National Police, where he was held and tortured for nearly two weeks.
“I’m already dead.”
Carlos Mauricio, to his interrogators. “I’m not going to say anything, because dead men can’t talk.”
The Path of the Shadows is Mauricio telling it himself, to a camera, more than thirty years later. He begins plainly: “My name is Carlos Mauricio. I’m from El Salvador, from a town in the west, called Ahuachapán.” Around his voice, writer and director Baltazar López stages what the words describe, with Oscar Suncín as the professor, and footage from the war years runs between them.
The scenes López staged begin with a homecoming. Mauricio has spent three years in Mexico earning a master’s degree, and Antonio, his boss at the university, hands him the keys to a borrowed house and a borrowed car. “Welcome to your land,” he says.
At the family table one of his brothers asks why he came back at all. “I could have stayed,” Mauricio says. “It would have been easy to stay. But I missed you all a lot.” They tease him about the tacos he has learned to make. On the television, the Pope is arriving.
The country he missed is not the one he finds. A woman he remembers has been gone so long that people take her for dead. María de los Ángeles, from his hometown, tells him to stop following her and not to use her name; the next evening he is at her table anyway, explaining what a master’s in genetic improvement is. It is a lot, he says, like making nances, a fruit no bigger than a cherry, grow to the size of an orange. Before the night is over, men with radios are closing on the house and she is running.
At the university his class is nearly empty. “With the situation,” someone says, “it’s not surprising.” Men in plain clothes come asking for the engineer who has just got back, they say, from Cuba. They go through his car. Then word comes that they have been through his house.
By June 1983 El Salvador had been at war with itself for more than three years. The war would last until 1992 and kill some 75,000 people. When a United Nations truth commission counted afterward, it recorded more than 22,000 complaints of serious violence, and nearly 85 percent of them named agents of the state, the paramilitaries allied with them, or the death squads.
The university was a target from the start. In June 1980 the army took the campus with tanks and six hundred troops, killed sixteen students and kept it shut for four years. The rector was assassinated that October, and some thirty of the university’s teachers were murdered or disappeared. The classes Mauricio came home to teach belonged to a university that had been driven off its own grounds.
The men who came for him worked the way the death squads worked: plain clothes, an unmarked car, a prisoner who officially was nowhere. When the Red Cross came to police headquarters asking for Mauricio, it was told he was not there.
La Puerta del Diablo, the Devil’s Door, is a cleft between two crags above Panchimalco, on the southern edge of San Salvador, with a view that runs to the Pacific. Today it is a park and a lookout. During the war it had another reputation: it was known as a place where the death squads left bodies. Joan Didion went up in 1982 and put it in Salvador.
In January 2018 the production carried its camera up to the edge. In the scene filmed there, Mauricio’s captors drag him to the drop and threaten to throw him off. A photograph from that day shows what the frame leaves out: director of photography Michael Potter an arm’s length from the actors, a boom microphone just over their heads, a town far below in the valley.
Writer and director
An actor, playwright and former director of El Salvador’s National Theater, born in 1952. He left the country in 1980, as the war took hold, for Mexico and then Nicaragua. For this film he wrote the script from Mauricio’s testimony, found the cast and directed on location.
Producer and editor
His mother is Salvadoran, and he had been recording the testimonies of people who lived through the war when he filmed Carlos Mauricio’s in Washington. He took it to López, a longtime family friend, produced the film and edited it himself.
Director of photography
The American cinematographer shot the dramatized scenes on a RED Epic camera with Leica lenses, among them the sequence at the edge of La Puerta del Diablo.
Led by Oscar Suncín
Oscar Suncín plays Carlos Mauricio, a performance that won him Best Actor at the Diamond Film Awards in 2019, with Sofía Pérez Ortiz as María de los Ángeles and Leandro Sánchez Arauz as Antonio, in a Salvadoran cast.
The first audience sat in a café. On November 10, 2018, the film opened at Guazapa Café in the colonial town of Suchitoto, during the town’s international film festival, and the poster promised a showing every afternoon through the 17th. Three months later it was in the auditorium of the national anthropology museum in San Salvador.
After that it traveled as El Salvador’s entry on the circuit of showcases that Latin America’s embassies run abroad: Washington, Buenos Aires, two cities in New Zealand and, in Australia, a university, a maritime college and the Instituto Cervantes. In Melbourne the Consul of El Salvador, Ernesto Antonio Dueñas, spoke when it ended. Festivals in Providence, Valencia and Apulia chose it as an official selection, it went to Oaxaca, and in January 2019 the Diamond Film Awards, in Italy, named Oscar Suncín Best Actor.
Best Actor
Oscar Suncín
Diamond Film Awards, 2019
Official selection
Providence Latin American Film Festival
2019
Official selection
South Europe International Film Festival
Valencia, 2019
Official selection
Apulia Web Fest
2019
One screening stands apart. The filmmakers took the film to the Academia Nacional de Seguridad Pública, the academy created under the 1992 peace accords to train a civilian police in place of the forces the accords abolished, the National Police among them.
Afterward Baltazar López stood up in front of the officers to talk it through. Some of them said they found it hard to see themselves in the policemen on screen. The police went on to use the film in their human rights curriculum.
The story that began in a classroom ended in a courtroom. In the summer of 2002, in West Palm Beach, Florida, Mauricio and two other survivors, Juan Romagoza and Neris González, faced two of the generals who had commanded El Salvador’s armed forces. The trial ran four weeks. On July 23 the jury found both generals liable and awarded the three of them $54.6 million.
“We didn’t do the trial for money,” Mauricio says. “We did this because we were after justice.” What helped him most to heal was to face the generals in that courtroom, to look straight at them and tell them, “You’re responsible for what happened to me.” He calls it “really something wonderful.”
The last voice in the film is his. He is one of very few people from the Salvadoran civil war, “perhaps only the three of us,” who have found justice. “We accused the generals, and the generals were convicted. They were found responsible for what was done to us. And that’s important for a torture survivor.”
Carlos Mauricio’s story, in full
The Path of the Shadows (El Camino de la Sombra) was written and directed by Baltazar López and produced and edited by Lawrence Justin Mills. Michael Potter was the director of photography, and Sarah Plant wrote the music. Mauricio’s testimony was filmed in Washington, D.C., and the dramatized scenes in El Salvador in January 2018. The film runs 58 minutes, in Spanish. It opened in Suchitoto on November 10, 2018.
