GAUCHO is an evocation of a dying way of life and a portrait of a true original, Heraldo Rial, an eighty-year-old cattle rancher who embodies the traditional ranching culture of his Patagonian ancestors. ‘Gauchos’ are proud, self-reliant cowboys living on the edge of the known world in an immense land virtually untouched by man. Grazing their herds in glacial valleys under mountain peaks and along trout-filled rivers and lakes, it is a way of life virtually unchanged in centuries: hard, beautiful and dangerous.  

The Arratia family of gauchos: Papo, his son Franco and nephew Diego, lead us into the wilderness and their proud culture as they undertake an action-filled three-day journey on horseback out to Don Rial’s remote mountain cattle ranch. There they will resupply and for a week help the old man before the winter snows cut him off him from the rest of the world, utterly, from April until September. The gauchos will have to do the last and most dangerous work of the year: corralling, pointing and castrating the bulls of the herd and slaughtering Rial’s meat for the winter. But first they must find them, free-ranging as they do, thousands of unfenced hectares of forest and hillside. Dangers lie in wait for the unprepared and the unlucky. So too does death, and it has touched Rial more than closely in his life.

For the Arratias, Rial is a legend and perhaps mad. Certainly he is the last true gaucho living the old ways, utterly alone and free of the need for outside help until a recent accident left several fingers broken. For the philosophical Rial, the raging rivers, snowdrifts, runaway animals and life’s personal tragedies are part of the natural order of things.

This may be his last winter and the last time the world can ask wisdom of a man living at the outer limits of the earth and conventional reason.

“I will die here alone…if they find me, fine. But if they don’t, they should just leave me. I’ll be in the earth anyway.”

Run Time: 37 mins

Film Credits

Directors: Tom Martienssen & Josh Bullock
Executive Producer: Josh Bullock
Commissioner: CNN’s Great Big Story

Josh Bullock:  is a freelance writer and filmmaker. He has worked for a variety of current affairs and documentary strands at the BBC, Channel 4, Press TV and ARTE. His own films include subjects like Alabama juke joints, the new Cuba and Gabonese pygmies. Until early 2017, he co-edited the international print magazine he also co-founded, So It Goes, writing regular features on world affairs and the arts and interviewing leading cultural figures from Werner Herzog to Tony Benn. He also headed a production company, So It Goes Films, directing and producing an eclectic mix of branded docs, music videos and promos for clients like Land Rover, Sundance and the Natural History Museum. Josh is a storyteller in several forms: a freelance journalist published in major broadsheets; an agented novelist and a Royal Court Theatre Young Writer. He is currently writing a film script about the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Tom Martienssen is an Emmy nominated journalist turned director, Tom has filmed in all but one continent. From Afghanistan to Bolivia, Tahiti to Patagonia, he’s told the stories of those unable to tell their own. A former soldier in the British military he now travels the globe creating content for brands and broadcasters alike. Tom started his journalism career working with the BBCs World Affairs Unit before moving into the world of independent filmmaking. He now makes adventurous documentaries and features.

Simon Parker is a British travel writer and broadcast journalist covering stories from round the world and across topics such as product shortages in Venezuela, the migrant crisis in Greece and social inequality in the barrios of Northern Colombia. He is a contributor to the Daily Telegraph, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4, The Lonely Planet and The Independent amongst others. Between March and July 2016 he embarked on a sail and cycle expedition from England to China in 133 days.

“He’s this wonderful presence [in person],” remarked Rory Carroll, who spent from 2006 t0 2012 in Caracas as The Guardian‘s chief correspondent for South America, and whose latest book Commandante profiles Chavez in depth.

Western media, Carroll said, often offered a “polarised simplistic version, like Chavez is the demon, he’s blood thirsty, some kind of semi-Stalinist character, which was ridiculous, or he’s this messianic character who is delivering the poor from hell and he’s building a shining city on a hill, which was equally as ridiculous.”

“He is amiable,” The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson agreed, “and quite a fun interlocutor.”

But Anderson and Carroll, along with Diego Moya-Ocampos, a political analyst who used to practice law in Venezuela and event host Richard Lapper, the Financial Times‘ Latin America editor from 1998 to 2008, were dismayed by the promises Chavez made to fix Venezuela.

After 14 years, inequality has reached a gothic degree in today’s Venezuela, noted Anderson; hospitals are Dickensian, Carroll said – “people are selling bandages, sheets . . . there’s no bulbs . . . you’re crunching over broken glass, there’s malandros [thugs] in the corridors, maybe with guns”; the prisons are awash with automatic weapons, and have largely been overtaken by their prisoners.

Anderson commented: “The revolution made common cause with a kind of thug culture, that I don’t know how they’re going to undo at this point . . . violence is off the charts.”

Chavez championed the masses, but Moya-Ocampos saw democracy in tatters:

“[Chavez] has systematically undermined democratic institutions. . . . What we have in the end is just one institution in place: the armed forces – the only institution in Venezuela with the capacity . . . to obtain certain outcomes. . . .

Everyone wants to believe: ‘Chavez! It’s a revolution going on in Venezuela! . . . We’re really tackling inequalities, we’re really beating poverty issues!’ . . . No. It’s not true.”

Carroll agreed: “He was an extraordinary illusionist.”

“Is the Revolution one of Chavez’s illusions?” Lapper asked.

For the most part it was, the panel seemed to agree.

Carroll and Anderson still found value in Chavez’s defiance, however – be it to America’s domination of global decisions, or to haughtiness and racism suffered by Venezuela’s lower classes.

Anderson reflected: “There’s no doubt that, whatever else you say, . . . Chavez has had an extraordinary presence on the regional stage, and that he will have meant something.”

Carroll added:

“To some extent, [the revolution] is real. . . . A lot of ordinary Venezuelans feel there’s been a revolution, feel empowered by this government, and therefore in that sense, it’s real. Because for them, it’s written on their hearts, and that has value. I could [give] lots of anecdotes about people who just feel that now they finally have dignity, and the issue of poverty is [finally] center-stage, and that they don’t need to feel apologetic for being quite dark, or not speaking great Spanish. . . . In the longterm effect, how can you quantify that? No idea. But that certainly has value.”

Watch the discussion here:

Provoking adoration and revulsion in equal measure, Hugo Chavez is a leader like no other. In October last year his loyal supporters came out to vote him back into office for his fourth presidential term.

In his new book, Comandante, acclaimed journalist Rory Carroll sheds light on the inside story of Chavez’s life and his political court in Caracas. He will join the The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson and others to ask, after more than 13 years in power, what Chavez’s legacy will be.

With his inauguration indefinitely postponed and the severity of his medical condition unclear, we will be looking back at Chavez’s rule, examining his time in power and what the future holds for Venezuela.

Chaired by Richard Lapper, the director of Brazil Confidential, the FT‘s research service on Brazil.  He was Latin America Editor at the FT newspaper between 1998 and 2008, during which time he visited and reported from Venezuela regularly.

The panel:

Rory Carroll is the Guardian‘s US West Coast Correspondent based in Los Angeles and author of Comandante: Inside Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. For the past five years, throughout the writing of his book, Carroll has been stationed in Caracas as the Guardian‘s chief correspondent in South America.

Jon Lee Anderson is foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, and is the author of many books including The Fall of Baghdad and Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World.

Diego Moya-Ocampos is a senior political risk analyst for Venezuela for IHS Global Insight and IHS Jane’s. He previously worked as a lawyer for a private firm in Venezuela advising government agencies and private businesses on constitutional, regulatory and environmental issues, and as Chief Secretary at the Venezuelan Attorney-General’s Office.