CBC News: the fifth estate: Run for Your Life

FILMMAKER'S NOTES

fifth producer, Claude Vickery on a train during the filming of Run For Your Life.

CLAUDE VICKERY is the director/producer of Run For Your Life. He joined the fifth estate in 1990. Among the documentaries Claude has produced for the fifth estate are SPIES, LIES AND SECRET WEAPONS (espionage, bribery, and a quest for a Russian super torpedo), THE MURDERED BRIDE (a young Sikh woman from Vancouver marries outside her caste and sets off a tragic chain of events), and AIR RAGE.

Claude was interviewed by Senior Producer, Sally Reardon about the making of RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

SALLY REARDON: HOW DID THIS STORY FIRST COME TO YOUR ATTENTION?

CLAUDE VICKERY: I was cruising on the web and I came across a website that the Los Angeles Times has. They had done a piece they called “Enrique’s Journey”. They told the story of Central American young people, teenagers, going all the way from Honduras to the United States…and I thought, wow, that’s an interesting story and the photographs are really interesting.

So, it was a question of seeing a really interesting story, but thinking that there was another dimension to it, something that we could take well beyond what had already been done on it. And there hadn’t been really any television coverage of this story at all. There’d been little bits and pieces over the years, but no one had tried to embed themselves with a person who was going to make this illegal three thousand mile journey, all the way into the United States.

SALLY REARDON: AS A STORYTELLER, THERE MUST HAVE BEEN AN ESSENTIAL DRAMA THAT GRIPPED YOU ABOUT THIS STORY. WHAT WAS IT?

CLAUDE VICKERY: It’s all drama. The thing that captures your attention is hopping on trains because it’s so dangerous.

We’ve all had some exposure to the great exodus of people during the American and Canadian depression years. And here is another generation in another hemisphere basically doing the same thing but under much, much more hazardous circumstances.

These kids, they had to worry not only about the police, they had to worry about the army. And they have to worry about these incredibly vicious gangs, including the Mara Salvatrucha. And these gangs come onto a railcar in a very stealth manner and they rob everybody.

So, if you say what is it that attracts your attention it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic, a greater challenge for a young person who’s sixteen, seventeen, eighteen to set out from Honduras and go through what amounts to running the gauntlet…stakes are enormously high.

Quique with journalist Jorge Flores before he set out on his journey north.

SALLY REARDON: NOW AS YOU SAY THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF THESE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN WHO EMBARK ON THIS PERILOUS JOURNEY. BUT YOU HAD TO FIND ONE WHOSE STORY YOU WANTED TO TELL. HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT FINDING THAT ONE PERSON?

CLAUDE VICKERY: We had contacted a journalist by the name of Jorge Flores who had done work for the CBC before in Honduras. We asked him to do some research about the problem in general and then we asked him to find someone. He did not have to look very hard as it turned out. We anticipated this might take a couple of weeks, but Jorge knew somebody who knew somebody else and he knew the father of this boy who was running a small sawmill and he just said 'Don Chilo’s son is going next week or in two weeks, you should go and talk to him'.

As it turned out Quique was really a perfect subject for a documentary, a very soft-spoken, quiet, young man. Very strong religious convictions. Very good, moral character. Someone who had a wonderful family. I think he understood in a fairly short period of time what value it would have to show other people the dangers of the journey.

SALLY REARDON: THIS WAS SOMETHING OF A LONG SHOT. THERE WAS NO ASSURANCE THAT THIS JOURNEY WASN’T GOING TO BE ENDED BEFORE IT HAD BARELY BEGUN.

CLAUDE VICKERY: Absolutely. We had a little bit of insurance in the sense that he went with three other young men, all of these people friends from the same neighbourhood in Tegucigalpa. And we always thought if Quique doesn’t make it perhaps one of the other three will make it. But we always thought that Quique had probably the best chance of making it. He had twice before attempted to reach el norte and twice he had failed. So he’d accumulated a lot of experience. By the time he was tackling this again, seven years later, he knew the ropes. We really thought he had an extremely good chance.

SALLY REARDON: NOW TELL ME ABOUT THE PROCESS OF FIGURING OUT HOW YOU WERE ACTUALLY GOING TO TELL THIS STORY.

CLAUDE VICKERY: We went into this story with a lot of really grandiose ideas about how we could use modern technology to do this. I spent time trying to figure out if we could put some sort of a tracking bracelet on Quique, but none of that technology was in a state that would make it possible. Then we looked at them carrying a GPS [Global Positioning System] device so that at least they would be able to report to us their precise coordinates, so we could follow them that way. That didn’t work because they didn’t want to carry a GPS device because they thought it was too much of an attraction to robbery.

The third thing was a cell phone. Now, that seems like a basic and simple thing in North America. We did have a cell phone with him at one time but it was stolen almost immediately. And even if you have a cell phone the next problem is that in these areas there isn’t a cellular network. So, a lot of the things we took for granted and hoped would bridge this gap and allow us to follow at a distance if we had to, they didn’t end up really working for us at all.

They’re always running from something. They’re basically in hiding. So, it’s very difficult to try and follow them. So, the only thing you end up doing is trying to physically shadow their movements and that presents a lot of difficulties in itself.

There were four of us that were actually shooting video on this. Myself, the fifth estate’s cameraman, Colin Allison. We had a cameraman from Mexico, Juan de Dios who did a lot of the most difficult filming for us because he was Mexican and we thought he had the best chance of dealing with the Mexican police when they did arrive. He was a journalist so he had lots of good contacts and when dangers like that occurred he was able to talk his way out of it. We also had Jorge Flores, the gentleman who had started this whole thing with Quique. He shadowed them for large portions of the journey as well.

fifth producer, Claude Vickery inspects one of the cameras with Jorge Flores and Quique.

SALLY REARDON: WHAT FORMAT CAMERA DID ALL OF YOU USE WHEN YOU WERE SHOOTING?

CLAUDE VICKERY: We actually used four different kinds of cameras. Juan de Dios had a Sony Handycam-type camera. We had a small digital camera for Jorge Flores, probably the smallest format that they have. I had one of the Sony high-end Handycams and Colin Allison had a conventional SX Betacam.

SALLY REARDON: AS JOURNALISTS YOU KNEW THAT YOU COULDN’T GIVE QUIQUE OR ANY OF HIS FRIENDS ANY ASSISTANCE. YOU JUST HAD TO RECORD THE EVENTS AS THEY UNFOLDED. DID THIS POSE ANY DIFFICULTIES FOR YOU AT SOME POINT?

CLAUDE VICKERY: I think the longer that you spend time with them the more difficult it is to get around that problem. Jorge Flores had the day- to-day contact with these kids. He made it really clear to them at the outset what they could and what they could not expect from us. And this was one of the reasons why we were so careful about who we chose originally because we didn’t want somebody who just wanted to try and get some financial reward out of it. We wanted somebody who had really strong values and was quite idealistic. And we saw that as being absolutely a cornerstone of the whole journalist enterprise.

SALLY REARDON: ONE OF THE MOST CHILLING MOMENTS FOR ME IS WHEN QUIQUE LOOKS INTO COLIN ALLISON’S CAMERA AND SAYS COLIN, PUT THE CAMERA AWAY, IT’S WAY TOO DANGEROUS. TELL ME ABOUT THAT MOMENT.

CLAUDE VICKERY: They had been robbed the night before. The Mara Salvatrucha gang had come onto their railcar and taken every last cent that they had. It means that either you’ve got to bum some money off your fellow travellers or you’ve got to go into towns and essentially beg for money or beg for food. So, they had just gone from being quasi-independent to being alone in the world. And Quique was pretty shook up. He’s a pretty together guy and pretty strong guy, but this particular incident with the gang really shook him up and he just anticipated many more episodes of this.

We were just at one way station, but there were many, many more situations that he knew would be coming up where the gangs would be returning and he was concerned for Colin’s safety. But he was also concerned for their safety because sometimes the camera just attracts unwanted attention.

SALLY REARDON: ANOTHER MOMENT IN THE DOCUMENTARY THAT I FIND REALLY HEARTBREAKING IS THE CLINIC THAT YOU GO TO WHERE WE SEE THE EVIDENCE OF JUST HOW HOW DANGEROUS HOPPING TRAINS CAN BE. TELL ME ABOUT THAT.

CLAUDE VICKERY: It’s really a heartbreaking situation. This is a very small clinic in Tapachula, Mexico. It’s run by a Christian organization on an absolute shoestring, just donations that come in from ordinary people. I don’t think the Mexican government really gives them any money at all.

They go and they collect people from the hospitals after they’ve been run over by trains, lost arms, lost legs. They bring them back to this hospice or healing centre. They get them up and, as best they can, moving again. If the guy’s lost a leg or an arm or something, they’ll go around and try and raise some money to get an artificial limb.

On a strictly emotional level, it’s heartbreaking to see all these people who went out with such enormously high expectations and such great dreams. One young man - we were there when his mother arrived from Honduras to collect him and bring him home - he'd lost both his legs. Now he’s going to be a burden to his family. And you have a mother who’s already got five or six kids at home. Now she has a kid that’s in a wheelchair, who is actually an additional burden. So it’s like a double loss. Not only have you lost the dream and the revenue that you’d hoped to get from your son going to el norte, it’s just the opposite. It’s turned into a nightmare.

SALLY REARDON: AT ONE POINT IN THE DOCUMENTARY QUIQUE AND HIS TRAVELLING COMPANIONS DISAPPEAR. YOU CAN’T FIND THEM. YOU MUST HAVE REALLY DESPAIRED AT SOME POINTS IN THIS PROCESS THAT YOU HAD ACTUALLY LOST THEM. TELL ME ABOUT THAT.

CLAUDE VICKERY: Well, to be honest with you we despaired more from a technological standpoint before the emotional standpoint because we’re so accustomed in North America to being able to contact people at every moment of the day. You can call with a cell phone and what not. So, when you get back into the third world and you get the situation with the train it’s just enormously frustrating that you can’t do what you normally do in North America. You get separated frequently.

This particular occasion, we were really worried that they had not been able to get back on the train. They knew the cops would stop the train at some point. We knew that they weren’t going to be caught sleeping or something like that. So, we knew they’d probably be able to get away, but, would they be able to get back on? That’s much trickier because cops and the army stays around, until the train starts moving again. And so they’ve got to wait literally till the last second before they come running out of the shadows and try and get back on the train again.

Sometimes one or two of them are going to be able to get back on, the others aren’t. So, are they going to jump back off again? Will some of them go ahead, some of them stay behind? Every time you can’t get back on the train you’re seriously disadvantaged because there’s probably not going to be another train for another twelve hours. And during that time you’re vulnerable because you’re sitting in the middle of nowhere and you’re surrounded by essentially hostile elements, police, the army, gangs, etcetera. So, you want to get back on the train. You want to desperately get back on. You don’t ever want to be left behind.

In this particular case, we just weren’t sure because the police had stayed around for quite a long time. The train starts moving again. You just can’t see who’s basically able to get back on and who isn’t.

SALLY REARDON: I WANT TO TURN TO THE PARALLEL STORY IN YOUR DOCUMENTARY, THE STORY OF EDWIN RAUDALES. TELL ME AT WHAT POINT IN THE PROCESS DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT EDWIN’S STORY AND HOW YOU THOUGHT THAT PLAYED INTO YOUR DOCUMENTARY.

CLAUDE VICKERY: We knew about Edwin’s story from the get-go. I always thought it was a fascinating story as the other bookend to the story that we were trying to do in Honduras. Edwin Raudales had left Honduras when he was fifteen. In a lot of ways he was just like Quique. Edwin Raudales had hitchhiked and took buses and he’d actually made it into Canada, which only a very small number of these kids ever do.

He eventually turned up in Nelson, in the interior of British Columbia in absolutely the one place in the world where something incredibly miraculous and special could happen for him. If he’d ended up in Toronto or in Hamilton or Ottawa, he’d just have been another illegal, who might have gotten a little bit of help here and there. But, in my view, he probably would have been deported within a fairly short period of time and never would have really hooked up with any kind of a support network.

This is a kid who has been raised in a slum, who’s been stitching shoes before he leaves Honduras and all he wants in life is to get an education, to have a future and that’s what he gets. He comes to this place called Nelson. You know it’s kind of a small little blip on the map and he finds these really special people that make this miracle happen for him.

SALLY REARDON: AND JUST AS THERE WAS THE UNCERTAINTY ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT QUIQUE WOULD ACTUALLY FINISH HIS JOURNEY, THERE WAS ALSO THE UNCERTAINTY ABOUT EDWIN’S SITUATION, WASN’T THERE?

CLAUDE VICKERY: It’s really interesting how it happened because Edwin’s story had kind of concluded a couple of years earlier when there had been an interim decision that he could stay in Canada while he was finishing his Grade Twelve school year. When we were filming with him and Edwin pulls out this letter, completely out of the blue. No one was expecting it. It was the final verdict on his case from the bureaucrats in Ottawa. Everybody shared the moment at the same time. It was quite an amazing moment because his status was frozen two years before that. It was like somebody had hit the pause button and then it was like somebody hit the play button two years later and you were just kind of catching the end of the story. So, it was a bit of serendipity.

SALLY REARDON: IT’S BEEN PROBABLY CLOSE TO A YEAR SINCE YOU STARTED WORKING ON THIS. AS YOU LOOK BACK ON IT WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MOST?

CLAUDE VICKERY: Well, I think Quique and his family are the things that I remember the most. We were just so impressed with what wonderful, dignified people they were. We liked his family enormously and liked Quique and his friends enormously.

They just have a wonderful unspoiled quality. I suppose people say this all the time but we have everything here and these young men they’re just so happy to work with what they’ve got which is like nothing. They were enormously hospitable and enormously welcoming. They were just wonderful people to be around, full of optimism. I mean it’s amazing, you put yourself in their position, what would you do? You’re fifteen years old, would you chuck everything? Would you risk everything to go to another country, live in the shadows for the rest of your life, live illegally for the rest of your life or for as long as you’re in that country? It’s an enormous gamble. You just have to admire their determination. You admire their courage.

I think the central perception of all of this is that we in North America take a pretty disparaging view of illegal immigrants. You’ll hear them described as queue-jumpers and people that are corrupting the system. What we really wanted to do was meet some of these people up close and get a completely different view of them. They’re so hard working. They’re so determined to succeed. It will be hard for me to use the expression queue-jumpers again. They’re the kind of people that every society needs. You need a lot of them.

SALLY REARDON: HOW DID THIS STORY CHALLENGE YOU AS A DOCUMENTARY MAKER?

Jorge Flores takes a look at the guns carried by the Mexican police.

CLAUDE VICKERY: I think technically it was really challenging just to try and cover this five thousand kilometres. Typically when we go and do a story it consists of two or three places where the story is pretty much self-contained. But, it’s unusual for us to try and follow a story for such a long period of time with so many obstacles in the way. It’s the kind of story that would be impossible to do the way you wanted to do, even if you had ten cameras you’d still miss things and you would still be prevented from doing things.

The geography conspires against you. The police and the army and the gangs conspire against you. But, I was convinced that we had the right people. We certainly had the right sort of central character. I did really feel that we were getting a real sense of a typical story. We weren’t getting somebody that had an unusually difficult time or an unusually easy time of it. It just struck me as being consistent with everything I’d read about this.

As a journalist, you just felt a lot of times like you were being swept up in something that was a lot bigger than you were and a lot bigger than your capacity to convey it. But, this is why I was so happy that we were able to focus on one person. When you look at something and it’s a hundred people or two hundred people or a thousand people doing it you tend to de-personalise it and you tend to not take it terribly seriously. But, when it’s one person and one person’s struggle and one person’s adventure I think people can really identify with that. I can certainly identify with him. Journalistically, that’s where the heart of it is for me.

SALLY REARDON: IS THERE ANYTHING THAT YOU WANT TO ADD EITHER ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE DOCUMENTARY OR ANY OTHER ASPECT OF IT?

CLAUDE VICKERY: The major thing is that we had enormously great people working on the show. Colin Allison did wonderful work, Jorge Flores basically did the yeoman service. He did camera work for us but he also looked after so much of the minutiae and was with our characters for so much of the trip. We could not have done this kind of program without these resources, particularly in Honduras.

Associate Producer, Patti-Ann Finlay did a marvellous job. She was with this project right from the get-go. Patti-Ann helped us so many times when we not only had cell phones to worry about, we had satellite phones. And we were many times trying to connect cell phones and satellite phones and what not and this was an enormously frustrating business. And, often times, we were trying to route these calls through Toronto, oddly enough. So, she ended up being the sort of point of contact in a lot of cases. But, she did marvellous resource work for us, just an absolute pillar of our journalistic team. She also did all of the legwork for us in the United States in terms of setting up interviews.

I think it’s the kind of show that some people will look at and say, illegal immigration, I’m not really interested in that. Guys being deported, that’s not my kind of story. Then people will look at this and it’s a fresh look at what is essentially kind of an old story. I don’t think most people can watch this and not empathize with this guy at some level or other. Even if they hate illegal immigrants, even if they have no interest in the third world at all and don’t think that these people should get anything more or anything less, I think ordinary people would look at this story and get it. And I think you’ll empathize with this guy. If you empathize with him I think then you open up your mind to a whole lot of other issues and a whole lot of other possibilities.

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