Word: barreras
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...polemics, however, is apparent from the opening scene, in which we are confronted by a slow-motion close-up of a brutal beating by vicious grunting thugs wielding chains and pipes. The violence, excerpted from a later sequence in the movie, immediately propels us into the career of Roberto Barrera, a national union leader who makes himself the subject of a mock kidnapping so as to elicit worker sympathy for himself at the upcoming union elections. Through a series of flashbacks, that film shows Barrera's rise from bomb-throwing revolutionary to corrupt union boss, from a principled, uncompromising factory...
MUCH OF THE appeal of The Traitors stems from its straightforward story line. The brutality of the opening scene pervades the movie, though usually not through such outright violence but through the blatant rapacity and selfishness of Barrera's motives. After seeing the young, sincere Barrera win his first election as leader of a local union, we are shocked at the off-handed manner in which he suggests to other union officials that they take over an illegal numbers game conducted in the factory in order to fill the union's coffers. The scenes of each passing year chronicle increasing...
...Argentine worker, whom the makers of The Traitors are addressing, Barrera's story is sufficient in itself to make him recognize how miserably workers can be exploited by his supposed leaders. It is a common knowledge in Argentina that, beginning with the rule of Gen. Juan D. Peron in 1945, when workers received a wide array of economic and social benefits, trade unions became increasingly conservative until they were virtually at the beck and call of the government. Throughout the spectacularly popular decade of Peron's regime, and throughout the military rule that followed, Argentine workers lost their autonomous leaders...
...North American, too, the reader of sketchy newspaper stories about the internecine strife among Argentine labor's right and left wings, the story of Barrera helps give a fuller understanding of the tensions involved. But the film offers more to the American viewer, an added dimension to which the native Latin American would probably be oblivious. It is the same quality, though more muted, that is so impressive in the vibrant scenes of Brazilian life in Black Orpheus. The Traitors, with its filmed scenes in the crowded neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, captures the struggle of life waged by these impoverished...
WHAT IS perhaps the most striking scene in the movie does at deal with Barrera at all, but rather with a middle-aged couple walking down a narrow street gray with afternoon shadows cast by deteriorating tenement houses. The wife has long sagging brown hair and dark tired eyes. She wears a beaten skirt and a plain white blouse. The husband, his paunch hanging over his belt, talks with a gusto that tries to hide the hardships so apparent in the lines of his face. He waits outside as his wife enters a factory for a job interview. Inside...