Cárcel de árboles

The central theme was very interesting: a false psychological reorientation center for "problematic" young people of both sexes suffering, above all, substance abuse and belonging to the Guatemalan oligarchy and military leadership, plus some sick young people brought from the United States. They were located in the high forests of the Central American country, and directed by David Burden, a sociopathic chiropractor who sold himself as a psychiatrist, to direct the place between 1974 and 1988.

However, from the beginning the documentary seems out of focus, with irrelevant footage in Morocco showing the novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa (who co-directed the movie with Guillermo Escalón) at Paul Bowles' home, before establishing a link between the subject of the film and the plot of his novel «Cárcel de árboles» (*) set in a similar fictional center, which ended up giving the documentary its title.

ASPREJO (Association for the Reorientation of Youth) had the support of the government and prominent families of Guatemala. It was a kind of concentration camp, sold as a "therapeutic resort", close to a jail for political prisoners who were kidnapped and killed for opposing the Guatemalan military regime. Common graves, severed heads, perforated skulls and other subsequent discoveries have led to the belief that experiments were being carried out with the political prisoners and the ASPREJO kids, but everything is speculation until evidence appears.

Despite the fact that many people give their testimony in the film (surviving victims, Burden's daughter and son-in-law, prison guards, women who worked in the center, relatives of the victims, all kinds of specialists and authorities, an American security agent), the information was not processed to come to the proposition of a hypothesis, especially when Uli Stelzner, a German documentalist who directed the investigation, entered the scene a few minutes into the film. But it was more important to continue with the parallel between the novel and reality, with reflections, landscapes and images from a notebook, perhaps to reinforce the product.

Most unfortunate of all, however, is the use of music. And it was not even the composer Quentin Chiappetta's fault, but the filmmakers who allowed the excessive use of all those thriller and suspense musical cues and notes, which do not clarify anything, but instead create an unwelcome atmosphere of mystery, when Stelzner is precisely doing otherwise with the help of the interviewees. Of course, much remains to be discovered in this story, which will continue to be covered up by those who participated in it. «Cárcel de árboles» remains as a first and somewhat tangled attempt.

(*) Published in English as "The Pelcari Project,"