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Tupamaro: Urban Guerrillas is an award-winning feature length documentary that chronicles the life of Alberto "Chino" Carias, the leader of a vigilante "colectivo" from the slums of Caracas, Venezuela. Once accused of robbing banks and killing cops, Chino sheds his outlaw reputation and takes a post in Hugo Chavez's government. But after Chavez dies, the country's struggling economy collapses. In the absence of true law and order, Chino clings to his contradictory roles as saint and executioner.
Tupamaro: Urban Guerrillas is directed by Martín Andrés Markovits, produced by Matt Weinglass, Martín Andrés Markovits, Peter Marshall Smith and Carlos Corredor, co-produced by Andrew Rosati and Sebastian Kennedy, co-executive produced by Ryan Foland, Michelle Berezan, Francisco Roman and Rossana Lafianza. Executive produced by Ed Asner.
Collective Bargaining
Martín Andrés Markovits
Imagine that Tony Soprano became the Chief of Police in Newark, New Jersey. Or that Scarface sits in the Capitol Hill offices for a Florida senator. In Venezuela, that improbable scenario was Alberto "Chino" Carías in the 2000s, as shown in the documentary Tupamaro: Urban Guerrillas.
In Caracas, Chino ran a colectivo, a grassroots group that protected the impoverished neighborhoods from police corruption and narco trafficking. They built roads, operated schools and literacy programs, and ran mobile healthcare clinics. Colectivos were always vigilantes of sorts, but they began to defend the state’s interests. They started assaulting the individuals they claimed to protect, first for President Hugo Chavez, and for his handpicked successor Nicolás Maduro now.
The colectivos story is a cautionary tale, as I explain in my film Tupamaro. I witnessed Venezuela’s promise to effectively protect and defend its people. I saw these potential Robin Hoods morph into the thugs they initially opposed.
I arrived in Caracas in 2005, fascinated with Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution. He promised to use Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to fund social programs for the poor. He wanted, like Simón Bolívar, to merge South America into an unified economic zone, like the European Union and the United States. I liked his anti-imperialist stance against US dominance in the region.
Chavez was thrown out by a coup in 2002. The colectivos helped rally thousands in front of the presidential palace to demand his return to the presidency. Two days later, he was reinstated. He had the mandate of the masses, and more clout. He was a rock star.
For a newspaper feature, I wanted to interview Chavez’s people, revolutionaries I imagined to be like the Black Panthers in the 60s. I met Chino at a fancy restaurant, odd for a self-proclaimed communist. He was a legendary leftist guerrilla. Once accused of robbing banks, Chino now had an office at the Venezuelan legislative building. But everybody knew him, like Norm on Cheers (R.I.P. George Wendt). I bought into the Robin Hood schtick.
I borrowed a camera from a cousin and assembled an LA production team to turn my article into a film. Chino talked smack about the US, but he loved the culture, listened to Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, and wanted to be John Wayne. He lived in a gated community, drove his kids to school, but “disappeared” perceived foes, then told everyone what he did. He was a Catholic who had “666” tattooed on his neck. He was a high-ranking police official who had previously been accused of killing cops. Chino was conflicted. So was I.
We investigated Chino’s backstory. We found out that he and some colectivos were not the social justice champions they claimed to be, but were often involved in drug deals and money laundering, like New York’s five mafia families. Chino had given me access to make a favorable piece about him, but now I knew the real story. Yet if I exposed this, I put myself and my young family at risk.
I moved to New York to buy time at Columbia’s graduate journalism school, where I started to edit all my footage of colectivo leaders whose promises had descended into sociopathy. I moved back to Caracas in 2012, and showed the rough cut to Chino at a rundown restaurant. He was losing his cachet, and seemed scared. The film is primarily in Spanish, but most colectivo criticism was in English so Chino approved. I didn’t have the film’s ending yet.
Chavez died from cancer in 2013. Maduro became president. The economy collapsed, the protests increased, and Venezuela became a broken, lawless state. The colectivos started attacking people who took to the streets to oppose the government. There was my ending. Chavez’s story was Chino’s, and vice versa. The colectivos were actors who railed against the corrupt state, only to become the corrupt state, full circle.
Seven years after we started, Tupamaro received numerous festival awards, including Best Foreign Film and Best Picture at the 2017 Beverly Hills International Film Festival. After we won, Chino called me. He said, “I sent two agents to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to watch your film.” I felt nervous. “They loved it,” he said. Then he got serious. “Thank you for showing the reality of Venezuela.” Chino was a master bullshitter. I think he lied about the agents, but I think he felt redeemed by the movie, which he had seen on my laptop. Chino died three weeks later, after years of alcoholism. It was sad, but I was relieved.
Chino was complex. He talked philosophy and music, made jokes, but he was Don Corleone, the colectivos were his cosa nostra. I was his confessor, and we wrestled to control his narrative. I was seduced by the colectivo ethos. Chino is dead, I’m in the US, but they’re still running Venezuela. But the decade I worked on this film taught me that saviors can turn into devils, that deification often precedes or even predicts destruction, that a biography can become an epitaph.
