SOURCE: Berger, Rose Marie. “Languages and People Disappeared: The Danger of Men with Guns.” Sojourners 27, no. 4 (July-August 1998): 59-61.

In the following review of Men with Guns, Berger maintains that Sayles is exploring, within his film, the extent to which individuals acknowledge, and are therefore partially responsible for, the actions of their governments and police forces.

Rough hands gripped mine. I stared down, uncomfortable, at the yellow and silver Formica table. “Tat nupal,” the voices began, “tey tinemi tic ne ylhuicatl.” In a rundown tract house in the weedy suburbs of Washington, D.C., five Salvadoran refugees began their evening blessing over our meal. “Our Creator in heaven,” they pray in Nahuat, one of the indigenous languages of El Salvador. As a poet in a time when languages are being lost at a rate equivalent to the rain forest, I clung to the edges of the words, the narrowness...