ABSTRACT
Researching the industrial livestock sector is like watching the Luis Buñuel film, Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones). Set in Mexico City’s slums, the film depicts a number of events in the lives of a neighborhood stricken by poverty and despair. It’s difficult to find the good guys because everyone but the animals is somewhat maleficent. Yet there are explanations for much of violence and neglect: Pedro, one of the lost youths who is complicit in the murder of another, has a mother who doesn’t or can’t love him. She refuses to feed him and treats her other children (by other fathers) with preference. You despise her until you find out later that Pedro is the result of a rape. The circumstances afford some empathy then even though you can’t entirely forgive her for her cruelty. You feel sorry for the young people in these miserable conditions; but then they attack and rob a blind man and break his musical instruments. You despise them for it but find out later that the blind man is a miser, a seducer of young girls in the neighborhood, and an informant who tells the police where Jaibo (the leader of the group) is, resulting in his death. Yet the blind man also helps a sick woman and takes in a small boy whose parents have deserted him. The youth also torment a legless man and, again, you can’t help but abhor them. But then, with more insight, we viewers are led again to feel sorry for the violent youths who are unloved, unfed, and unseen by the rest of society. Indeed, the film begins with a narrator stating that the film has no answers and leaves the amelioration of the problems of exploitation and brutality to the ‘progressive forces of society’, which will be shown as ‘well-intentioned but ultimately feckless’. Buñuel, a contemporary of Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, was an anarcho-Marxist (although at times, disavowing both) with a marked orientation toward surrealist nihilism.
