Alfonso Cuaron Orozco received an Academy Award in the best director category for his much-hyped film “Roma” despite its lacking both the nostalgic humor necessary to a family drama as well as the sort of innocent naivete in a remembrance of childhood. His visual strategy of piling on ponderous images overwhelms the audiences, thereby keeping viewers in a gullible stupor, if for no other reason to divert attention away from its whitewash of mass murder of hundreds, and more like thousands, of idealistic students. The financing for this con job came from Participant Media, which churns out CIA-friendly propaganda like “Syriana”, “Darfur” and that paranoiac weather report from Agency patron Al Gore.

Flashback to 911, on a flight over Chicago, and the lanky passenger sitting next to me introduces himself as an editor with a new streaming-media company called Netflix, who urges me as a writer of intelligence-related articles to send my resume to “the Canadian guy who makes the decisions and fronts the money for productions,” citing a name.

I asked: “Is he Jewish?” Nod. “So what’s the point when he’s going to rip me off?”

My Yid pals on Flatbush and Fairfax are surely laughing at that zinger.

The avoidance strategy had to eventually fail, as it just did, now with the Yid-pic “Roma”, which was financed by Participant CEO Jeffrey Skoll, the said Canadian who serves as one of the Hollywood cut-outs for the Office of Public Affairs (OPA, which sounds a lot like opioid for the masses), the Agency’s bureau for public mind-control and propaganda.

Excuse me once again, this time for the two-track approach deployed below, a critical-theory cinema review of a Jewish melodrama in Mexico alongside a counter-intelligence analysis of Yanqui spies high on tequila and cocaina. From my archaic slang it can be surmised that I’m a survivor of those halcyon years and often went south of the Border for mezcal shots while waiting for a craftsman to complete a 12-string guitar in the silent space between the balas, which is Spanish for “bullets”.

As the motive force that paid the death squads that conducted the sort of massacres depicted in “Roma”, the CIA has a keen interest in toning down or editing out critical parts of the modern history of Mexico City, an important chapter in clandestine operations and in fact one of its finest achievements. The intel offices inside the US Embassy within the DF (Distrito Federal, the capital) served as an offshore ops center against Castro Cuba with its political inroads into Gulf+Western’s Dominican Republic and United Fruits’ Central America.

The Agency’s more venal interest in Mexico derived from the steady unreported income for off-the-books blacks ops and payoffs thanks to the generosity of its business partners out of Sinaloa, Michoacan and Juarez. (A substantial part of that Yanqui cut, of course, gets cycled and cleansed through Hollywood, Vegas and the Democratic Party of California.) Therefore, let’s explore how “Roma” whitewashes the CIA crimes in 1960s-70s Mexico before delving into its other more grotesque themes.

Operation TEMPO

Cuaron chose to focus on the Corpus Christi day massacre of 1971 rather the more revealing Tlatelolco Plaza nighttime massacre in October 1968. At the time, the American ambassador Fulton Freeman was a high-ranking member of the Department of State’s diplomatic intelligence service (he went on to serve as president of the Monterey Institute) and had a previous posting in Paris. Just days after the French student protests toppled the de Gaulle government, as youth revolts and anti-Vietnam war movements were mushrooming across the USA and worldwide. Later in early autumn antiwar protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention shattered public confidence in the war effort, effectively tolling the bell for the LBJ war policy.

Panic was gripping Langley and Foggy Bottom with the realization that Washington was not just facing defeat in Vietnam but also was about to lose everything else. Envoy Freemen called an emergency meeting of his intelligence staff to quell the swelling protest marches pouring out of universities throughout Mexico. Paranoia strikes deep and into one’s heart it will creep.

The CIA station chief Winston “Scottie” Scott did not buy into the End of Empire scenario and enjoyed nothing better than a life-and-death crisis with the clear understanding that it was the opposition that must do the dying, even though they may be just college kids with naive ideas about a better world. In preparing for just such a scuffle, Scottie had bribed President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, and his family for good measure, and right-hand fixer Luis Echeverria, and the capital cops for good measure, since Yanqui dinero went a long ways then, especially for Operation TEMPO, the buying of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

However much their hundreds of field agents and thousands of paid informers tired, the vast spy network could not come up with a single instance of Cuban or garden-variety communist subversion inciting the students, who were fiercely focused on realizing a democracy since capitalism wasn’t much of a menace to the lower classes in a Mexican economy dominated by state-own monopolities.

Trotskyite False Flag

Without a smoking gun, the CIA did the next best thing, which was to false flags by organizing fake terror cells, of criminals posing as students armed with AKs from China with serial numbers filed off and recruiting a Trotskyite splinter group to plant dud explosives on power transformers in the city center. Alfonso Cuaron based his student protest scenes on notes, photos and newsclippings left by his late uncle, a Trotskyite in the phony bomb plot. Like uncle like nephew, it’s the same game of duplicity, eh, ninos? Truthfulness is not one of Cuaron’s assets.

Trotsky in Mexico has cultic status. After his escape from the purge in Stalin’s Moscow, Leon Trotsky fled to Mexico, where he was lionized by the Jewish artist Diego Rivera, who was patronized by John D. Rockefeller for the famous Ford Motor mural in Detroit. Just prior to the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian Jew Trotsky had found favor on a tour of the United States with the German-Jewish banker Jacob Schiff with the Loeb, Kuhn and partners, the financial firm underwritten by the house of Rothschild in Frankfurt, Germany. He got a blank check to take Russia out of World War I, to save the Rothschild homeland. The founder of the Red Army ended up dying ingloriously with an icepick in his temple inserted by a Comintern agent, so his followers wanted revenge at any price on the left however they could get it, and thus the false flag operation involving an attempted city blackout.

Trotskyism certainly was not in the mainstream of the uber-wealthy Jewish financiers and merchants in the Polanco District or in Cuaron’s boyhood neighborhood of Colonia Roma, comprising middle-class Sephardic Jews from Aleppo and Damascus, Syria, most of them professionals, including engineers, teachers and physicians as seen in the film.

What I’ve just written, the comedy of a misguided Jewish radical caught up in a CIA entrapment scheme that shames his conservative immigrant family, should have been the narrative of a retrospective film on Mexico in its moment of crisis amid a massive economic-political transition. Instead, audiences have been presented with an over-aestheticized simulacrum that pretends to be a childhood autobiography but then morphs into neo-fascist visual orgy with backhanded praise for state-sponsored repression. Since there has been so much adulation for the Cuaron “masterpiece”, let me change hats from helmet to a physician’s cap to start dissecting this monstrosity. But first, this.

Que Viva Mexico

So what transpired in the plaza that on the night of October 2, 1968? Thousands of students from Polytechnic University poured onto the streets to march for democracy. Meanwhile CIA-directed military snipers dress in plainclothes were positioned on the roof and doorways of the Chihuahua building overlooking Tlateloloco Plaza with orders to shoot anyone trying to escape the square, which was surrounded by riot police. Once the plaza was filled, the hail of lead was so intense that 16 police officers sustained gunshot wounds, their injuries blamed on students. An accurate death count was never conducted since most were dragged off to mass graves, with latter-day estimates in the hundreds. At the time, the Spanish radio stations and underground press estimated 2,300 unarmed protesters were killed. Nowadays, we hear a lot from the US media about Tiananmen Square, but what happened in Mexico City was far worse yet has been met with stony silence from the mainstream media.

The Mexico City Olympics proceeded on schedule later that month, but was interrupted at an awards ceremony when two American sprinters defiantly raised their fists in protest at state-sponsored mass murder around the world, including inside the United States against their brethen. And now, four decades after, Alfonso Cuaron feels honored to receive the blood-soaked dollars from these murderers.

Mexican Mothers Need Abortion

The ostensible aim in “Roma” is to spotlight courageous women in a family crisis, yet a more disturbing agenda emerges with a sinister assault on the birth rate among the nation’s impoverished masses. The heroism on display arises not from the protagonist, a pregnant housekeeper named Cleo, nor even the soft-spoken grandmother Teresa, the matriarch who rises to the challenge of wading through gunfire to escort the maid in the throes of contractions to a maternity ward. No, it is the bombshell revelation amid an earthquake.

The consequence of these praiseworthy and charming women’s ordeals is not some deserved reward that compensates life’s slings and arrows, but to the contrary the politically correct conclusion that losing an infant is better than adding another mouth to feed for Mexico. Moving on, the story then takes a turn toward darkness, when the unsung male heroes of “Roma” are shown to be those fearless young men in the death squads holding the lid down on per capita consumption and ensuring population reduction by any means. With my apologies to the rationality of the human-rights crowd, “Roma” is an ethical crime against humanity.

The ballistic arc of this weaponized film aims for shrinkage of the demographic majority of impoverished masses that in images through the film are treated as statistical data rather than sympathetically as fellow citizens and people in need. Newton’s rule is, however, that what goes up must come down under the pull of “Gravity”, especially the birth rate. Cleo’s acceptance of trauma is the solution for Latin America according to the pseudo-science of the Rockefellers and Gates.

More victim than heroine, the maid Cleo is caught between the cruel ambitions of her lover and Catholic society’s inbred resistance to abortion, which Cuaron sadistically twists through the unquestioning happy reaction of all the women to news of the pregnancy. As if gunshots and quake are not enough, then comes a grotesque scene of the coldly clinical delivery of her still-born corpse, followed up by a medic gingerly wrapping the tiny corpse, presumably to harvest its stem cells, a lucrative trade to supply the ultra-rich with rejuvenation treatment. Across the developing world, newborns are now a biochemical resource to be extracted like a gas field or a mineral mine containing lithium, just another raw material plundered by the technology-driven economy of the post-human future.

Deficit of Honesty

Given his opposition to church influence in a profoundly spiritual Mexican society, the director had a professional responsibility to disclose that his childhood home in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Colonia Roma happened to be predominantly Jewish in that time-frame of the 1970s. His glaring omission of ethnicity would be as if Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street” or Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre remained in denial of Jewish identity in New York City. Even with the pictorial-overflow from “Roma”, the missing ingredient of Jewish secularism leaves image-bloated viewers with a puzzling feeling of hollowness, sort of like eating Chinese food in Queens.

To clarify, I am not an opponent of abortion rights to protect a girl’s right to a career or escape constant reminder of a foolish mistake or a criminal assault. I do, however, strongly object to the unethical methods used to entice medical professionals into terminating embryos for the not-so hidden agenda of preserving the world’s natural resources for ownership by tycoons and expanding the political authority of globalist neoliberal bureaucrats. For Cuaron to preach the “necessity” of a child’s death in contrast to his squeamish flinching from the taxidermist-mounted heads of pet dogs on the wall of a hacienda is hypocrisy. Animals have a right to a proper burial that the children of the poor don’t deserve? Welcome to the warped ethos of post-human futurism.

Nuevo Samaria

In the Distrito Federal (DF), within core Mexico City, the unspoken controversy over population limits is a faultline between a Catholic majority and progressive professional class under secular influence rooted in the Jewish districts of Polanco and Colonia Roma (the latter significantly depopulated following the 1989 earthquake), both in the northeast quadrant of the capital.

The site for Colonia Roma was once a small Aztec village, which was cleared of its indigenous inhabitants for development by an Englishman who was the ringmaster of the Orrin Brothers traveling circus. Colonia Roma became a settlement for Syrian Jews fleeing Arab nationalists soon after the collapse of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The district is subdivided into two neighborhoods, its northern section for self-exiled shopkeepers from the souks of Damascus and Roma South inhabited by Aleppo Jews, shopkeepers and professionals. In the late 1940s, the rise of Baathist Arab socialist movements in Syria and Iraq increased the pressure on Jews to emigrate due to the creation of Israel, thereby adding to the Jewish minority in Mexico.

The immigrant parents, as depicted in the quiet grandmother Teresa, never attained proficiency in Spanish, as so aptly shown by her linguistic fumbling at the hospital reception desk (one of the most touching scenes of this film). The second generation Syrian-Mexicans of Roma attended local schools and most enjoyed as good or better living standards than their local classmates, thereby advancing to university and professional life. The spacious Ford Galaxy with its powerful engine was a status symbol then, prior to the advent of luxury cars from Germany and Japan.

The myopic conservatism of Roma inhabitants was, however, only half the story since, as in the case of most well-to-do immigrant groups worldwide, cash donations to politicians was an unspoken act of “good relations” reducing the odds of persecution. This contact with the politicians and bureaucrats would gradually integrate a younger Jews into the political arena and corporate world, take for example Maronite-Catholic Syrian Carlos Slim or Vicente Fox, a descendant of the German-Jewish Fuchs who converted to Catholicism in the US. In the footsteps of Japan’s economic miracle, Mexico’s economy underwent a drastic transformation starting in the early 1960s driven by export-oriented industries, especially maquiladores along the US border, and by the ‘80s emerging as a global financial center, with subsequent ramifications of deregulation and private-owned corporate enterprise.

For the Sephardim from the Near East and Mediterranean regions, social and cultural progress were not stymied by rigid religious customs as, for example, among the ultra-traditionalist Lubavitcher Jews from the Baltics and Romania. Unlike many Ashkenazim who had historical grievances against religious-based pogroms in Europe and Russia, the Sephardim had been embedded in Semitic cultures with common dietary rules and few divergent practices other than going to mosque or temple. A sensible degree of tolerance is the most effective suppressor of religious zeal. The secularism in Roma can be seen in the scraggly Christmas tree in the no-surname family’s living room.

This complacency over religious and social issues of Sephardim in Mexico was abetted by their wealth, garnered from money-lending to Arabs crimped by anti-usury rules and the same relationship developed with the Christians in the New World. The Sephardim were content with their social status as “Jews with Money” and the privileges conferred by personal wealth.

Their comfort zone contrasted with the anarchist and communist radicalism of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to the US and Canada who had arrived from Eastern Europe and Russia to Ellis Island with only a few thin dollars in their pockets, they being “Jews without money”.

Thus, economic privilege enabled Roma and the upper-class stronghold of Polanco to remain aloof from the deepening crisis over economic inequity in the expansionary national economy. Cuaron was only 8-years-old at the time of the bloody pre-Olympics massacre, and as the film indicates in the character “Pepe, or Pepon” he was a mama’s boy, not at all a child of the streets and was happier playing with his train set than going outside. Cuaron has recalled that his interest in the brutal events that gripped Mexico City arose when he discovered a collection of photos and news clippings among the belongings of his late uncle, who was a Trotskyite, these items probably provided by CIA operatives planning a false-flag attack on the metropolitan power supply to implicate students in a “communist terror plot”.

Linga Worship

Avoiding the by-now-forgotten debates between leftist factions of four decades ago, Cuaron as filmmaker became instead engrossed in the visual artistry potential of the right-wing militia formations skirmishing with the hapless students. What obviously piqued his intense curiosity was the fetishism of fascistic masculine identity, derived from the technology-cult of Marinetti’s Futurism and the body-focused narcissism of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, who penned the far-right classic “Sun and Steel”, the gospel of neofascism.

To quote this masterwork: “Why, still, should the lust for ascension seem, in itself, so close to madness? Nothing exists that can satisfy me; earthly novelty is too soon dulled. I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable, closer and closer to the sun's illuminance.”

That explains Cuaron’s images of airplanes overhead, Professor Zovek’s claim of levitation; and the scene from the space opera that inspired Curon’s sci-fi “Gravity”.

It can be surmised that the wimpy liberal Alfonso Cuaron is like one of those children who on first sight are frightened out of their wits at encountering a poisonous snake but then gingerly tries to pick it up and then becomes an obsessive snake-hawk. Since the thought crops up in your dirty little minds, the same goes for penises. D.H. Lawrence’s “Plumed Serpent” is likewise a paean to the renewal of his boyhood sexual experiments later on a sojourn in New Mexico’s Indian country. It’s skipping along the path into deep fascism.

The maid’s samurai-obsessive boyfriend summarizes the iconographics of the male body in a single word: “foco”, as through a camera lens or gun-sights, to always keep focus at the center of one’s mind. As a male who’s spent his entire life in the close company of older women, Cuaron was obviously gob-smacked by the discovery of the body politic, displayed with frontal nudity and a reverse of Felix as he swings a rod with Japanese sword technique, merging sex with death, before laying down on the bed to bonk the shy maid. As to the long and short of these rods, the philosophically pornographic scene is classic Rough Trade, the nightly feast for the CIA thugs and their Jesuit go-betweens, catered by the Halcones with cojones followed by a sweet dessert of little boys from the Los Pequenos orphanage run by Fr. William Wasson (for the latter, see at rense.com my Pizzagate 10 article on Wasson and Dr. Maccony along with the Haiti child-sex trade).

Oy, Alfonso, we expected the uncovering of Yanqui spies not a gay stripshow! “Roma” is the stuff of CIA agent wet dreams. Is Cuaron one of “them”? I mean here spooks. Well, he does live a posh lifestyle in London, not in some miserable barrio, with a multi-millionaire’s ex-wife and hopes to rival George Clooney in celebrity status and foreign adventurism, so go figure, if they are wannabe James Bonds.

The question that crosses my mind as I recall the disturbing scene is: Why hasn’t any reviewer dared to mention the perversity? Were they too engrossed or simply swept off their feet by that demonstration of raw power and sex? Power, in the figure of Felix, the aspiring youth from the underclass, is the very image of the Aztec warriors, the Spaniard conquistadors, the bandoliered jefes of the Mexican Revolution, those hard men who created Mexico out of dust and blood.

Therefore as a novice true believer, Cuaron fails utterly in his attempted parody of Professor Zovek, a mesmeric demagogue whose stunts and cult-like mantras succeed in brainwashing the trainees for the Falcon death-squad. (Zovek was a television super-hero rumored to be involved in paramilitary training with Army intelligence.) Overseeing the progress of the baton exercises are a Korean martial-arts instructor and a Yanqui overseer from the CIA. As across much of Latin America, the militarist-minded right harbors enormous respect for Imperial Japan for daring to assault the hate white colonial powers without fear or hesitation, a fanaticism that was continued into the Cold War and Vietnam conflict by the South Korean Tiger Division in its ruthless suppression of radical nationalists. This idolatry of masculine violence is treated by Cuaron as a wake-up call into adulthood for the effete little boy clinging to his surrogate mother.

The terse scene at the training field concludes with Felix disowning his pregnant lover with an overt threat against Cleo, now that he is assured of advance through the ranks of the Central Intelligence and Security Agency and an eventual marriage with a mestizo instead of a lowly Mixtec indio from Oaxaca, a pretty picture indeed.

The Poison of Aesthetics

What I would do now for a shot of mezcal with a gusano from inside the agave. The German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin stated that “aestheticization of politics” is a basic feature of fascism. “Roma” is precisely within the canon of fascist art, and certainly not the progressive message that it pretends to be for hipsters. Cuaron’s film is a purist demonstration of the impact of imagery over the nuances of language, and the reviewers have been knocked senseless and bowled over.

Fascistic order is not reserved for men only. Women, too, must answer the demand for obedience, sacrifice and loyalty, whatever the emotional cost. Toward the movie’s ending, Cleo expresses her unequivocal loyalty to her mistress’s family in that gratuitous rescue scene of the servant who never learned to swim courageously wading through the waves like a loyal dog to rescue the girl Sofi and young Pepe the pepito. Her march across the beach into the threatening sea captures the essence of Triumph of the Will, sheer superhuman determination of a Valkyree against all odds for the love of something greater than one’s little possession in swaddling. Servitude and sacrifice, the constant refrain on the parade toward apocalyptic destruction.

Devilish Details

If this essay was for a lecture in a film class, I would dwell on its many untidy technical flaws, including the jerkiness and loss of focus (foco!) in transitions from pans to tilts, and distorted edges in moving wide-angle shots that can cause seasickness for viewers, the selective ambient sound, the unnatural wave motion in the opening scene, and the excessive speed and improbable activity in the panoramic landscapes. These flaws were not due to a lack of funding, considering the fact that one quiet shot required 45 cameras. This is NOT cinema, it is on-screen virtual reality. All of these errors surely led to downgrade by members of the Academy. The other problem noted by a fellow cultural writer is that film’s digital black-and-white lacks the sheen, halo and softer tonality of the silver-salt processing of the silver screen era of real film.

The greater stylistic problem with “Roma” is its whimsical switching between genres, with its aspiration for a neo-Realist cinema verite style of the 1970s being interrupted by Surrealist juxtapositions, for example the stuntman shot out of a cannon leading building up to a rock band leader and the risk-taking Felix. There’s also an all-too coincidental wedding scene following Sophia’s announcement to the children of the impending divorce. Then there’s the heavy-handed symbolism of the sea as an existential threat, the sky as promise of freedom, a watch dog as stand-in for domestic loyalty, and the wide-body Ford Galaxy as family unity; and most blatant of all, the broken cup. The abundance of visual symbols get in the way of telling a simple reality-based tale of loss and redemption, which Cuaron should have stuck to instead of this operatic disaster.

Over and Out

While Cleo and Felix are condemned to lead infertile existences under the new order that was modernizing Mexico, the divorcee Sofia makes the financial decision to quit her low-paying job as a biochemistry teacher to work at a salaried position at a publishing house. In devotion to her four children, she rejected the advances of a male friend at the hacienda. In a neoliberl era of integration into a global economy, sterility is therefore the solution for a Mexico to leave behind the chaos, turmoil and bloodshed of the past along with artistic vision, music, drunken joy and spiritual passion. As put by Madonna in “Die Another Day”: “I’m going to close my body now.” Get thee to the nunnery.

The film ends with the two older brothers, each alone in his thoughts, staring at the relentless Mexican landscape on the drive back from the depressing beach vacation, which was a ploy to allow their father to move out of the Roma house without meeting the children he abandoned. This single scene works powerfully because it non-consciously captures the alienation of being Jewish in an overwhelmingly Catholic society where everyone else has a comforting belief in eternal salvation, since there’s not much else to this temporal life. Mexico is just not as much fun as it once was.

Noted:

“Roma” begs for commentary, which could fill the Encyclopedia of Mexico, so to summaries a few salient points:

First, the 1970s saw the sunset on the hacienda elite, depicted in the New Year’s Eve party and forest fire, versus the rise of an export-oriented industrial sector. This transition moved the nation’s core economic policy away from agriculture and state monopolies toward the neoliberal investment strategies favoring private corporations and the rise of tycoons. The firefighting scene was a false note meant to signify the reunification of community after the gunfight over land rights, with the lone exception of the drug-craze brother of the white woman oblivious to the emergency and singing a Christian hymn.

Second, the story-line follows the pendulum swing described in the Dal Bo and Di Tella theory of “Plato O Plomo” (Silver or Lead), the symbols for bribery and punishment in national politics. Political donors in Jewish Polanco use bribes to control the Mexican assembly and the presidential executive, which on the other side of the religious aisle are under coercion from the traditionalist military and Catholic clergy. Balance of power.

Third, in that period of transition, the left-liberal faction within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) split off as the PRD or Party of Revolutionary Democracy, aligned with the Rothschild-backed Second International, which committed its own massacre of students at Iguala in 2014 as “proof” to Washington of its fitness to rule. The PRD has since been bypassed by one of its offshoots, which forms the current reformist government under the president known as AMLO, who is now trying to balance nationalist ideals with neoliberal financial policy.

Fourth, his Jewish circle in the film department of National Autonomous University includes cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and fellow filmmaker Carlos Markovich.

Fifth: While presenting himself as an indy filmmaker and despite the anti-Western statements in “Roma”, the truth about his phony nationalism is closer to his residence in London, and elite connections, exemplified by his female partner Sheherazade Bentley, the divorced wife of Zac, British scion of the Goldsmith fortune in London. Cuaron’s cultural bipolarity was vented in the hacienda scene at his rage against the gun culture of the English-speaking landlord and his blonde lady from abroad. The film is there not about childhood but centered on a childish adult using the media for a personal vendetta. Woody Allen meet your kindred soul. Mazel tov!

Sixth: The ringmaster of a traveling circus who founded Colonia Roma, the Englishman Edward Walter Orrin who headed the Orrin Brothers Circus, named the district in honor of ancient Rome with its social-contrl policy of “Panem et Circenses” (bread and circuses) at the original Circus Maximus racecourse and that popular entertainment center with its leaping big cats called the Colosseum, where early followers of Jesus were torn apart and devoured to be replaced by the Sanhedrin’s pseudo-Christian cabal that would dominate the Vatican in the struggle against the apostolic Orthodox Church of the East, as is now happening in Ukraine, the homeland of the Khazarian Ashkenazi Jews. As “Roma” shows, that which goes unmentioned could be the most important factor of all.

Seventh: Occultism is alive wherever the Jesuits venture, and the upper-class Jewish-predominant Polanco district is no exception being named after Juan Alfonso de Polanco, the private secretary of Ignatius de Loyola, the founding Superior General of the Jesuit military order (Society of Jesus, IHT). The Polanco family had its origins in a converso (converted Jews) Bishop Paul of Burgos, formerly known as Rabbi Solomon Ha-Levi, whose penetration of the Church is one of the clearest examples of Kabbalist infiltration into Christianity and the complicity of the self-appointed “Inquisitors” as protectors of hidden Jewry, a role that resumed with Jesuit seminarian Adam Weishaupt’s founding of the Order of Illuminati and, of course, the present-day Jesuit Vatican. Note that Cuaron’s given name is the same as the converso Jesuit father.

The Jesuits in Mexico took special interest in the legends, customs and arts of the Mayans, Toltecs and Aztecs who practiced pre-Christian paganism. Particular interest was given to evil spirits as cultural equivalents of Satan, Lucifer and the like. A key scene in which traditional folk belief haunts Cleo follows Felix’s break-up, his abandoning the child she is carrying on that Day of the Dead, as street vendors jiggle tiny skeletons around her, in premonition of the still-birth of their daughter, yet another ham-fisted attempt at symbolism. The paramilitary marching ban is also another death image, a premotion of the funeral dirges for the students who are soon to be massacred.

Even the sparse Christmas tree, as a pagan symbol of renewal, in the secular Jewish home indicates the fallow harvest from the father’s career in Euro-American medicine and the grim future without gifts that awaits his children. Missing from this condemnation of the indigenous culture is the life-sustaining spirituality among the Mexican people against all the adversity they face, including this travesty against the Mexican spirit that is “Roma”.