Diarios de Motocicleta

Ernesto Guevara, a young idealist student in Medicine, and Alberto Granado, a biochemist whose taste for the pleasures of life overcomes the idealism of his brother-friend, embarked on a thousand-of-miles travel across the core of South America.

They left their bourgeois lives in the acomodate Buenos Aires of the 1950's to face the miseries and exploitation of the weak, in any form and number, in any country, city, farm, mine or jungle they found. The marginalization of those who can not defense themselves is overrepresented in the case of the Peruvian camp of lepers. Those who are severe ill are separated from the rest, also marginated from the rest of the world in the jungle. But they are doublely separated by the Amazon shores from the less sick persons, underlying the "no-limits" of injustices.

The main problem in the film is that Guevara adopts a role similar to Jesus. He traveled accross mountain and deserts, in misery, meeting poor people that increased his compassive nature for the Human being. He tried to sane the ill, to give love to those that felt alone, to be honest all the time, to keep him loyal to his principles until the end. He becomes a mesianic figure in the middle of the film, and it can be quite irrealistic. Fanatism is not unveiled, meanwhile politics appears as a secondary topic in the script.

But this film is noteworthy for many reasons, especially those more anthropological related to the way humans react to injustices: according to their resources and skills. Indirectly, one can conclude that only those individuals who accumulate the abilities and resources to overcome situations of injustice, would do it. By contrast, the majoritarian rest will remain silent, trying to find alternative paths of survival inside the system.

Consent is a strategy not only for those privileged by the social equilibrium, but also for those unable to construct an alternative and fight for it.

Those dirigents willing to change the nature and dimensions of the government they rule would find surprising allies among those who apparently express consent, while the case of those who will oppose for sure to changes of the status quo are quite more easy to identify -through an analysis of those who lose privileges.