Vanessa Guillén was an accomplished, athletic, hard-working ,and ambitious young woman when, following her graduation from high school, she enlisted in the army. Though her mother Gloria didn’t want her to embark on that path, Vanessa had dreamed of military service for her entire life, and by all accounts she was supremely cut out for it. Yet upon being stationed at Texas’ Fort Hood—one of the U.S.’s largest bases—Vanessa started to change, losing weight and developing insomnia. Something was wrong, and it culminated on April 22, 2020, when the 20-year-old soldier suddenly vanished.
Director Christy Wegener’s Netflix documentary I Am Vanessa Guillén (Nov. 17) commences as a mystery, with Gloria, Vanessa’s sisters Mayra and Lupe, and her fiancé Juan Cruz reacting to her disappearance by immediately attempting to determine her whereabouts. That entailed Mayra and Juan traveling from their Houston home to Fort Hood to get some answers. They received few, although, as Mayra recalls, they did get derisive laughter directed their way by a soldier who was later identified as Aaron Robinson.
Pleas for information and action ensued, attracting media attention that only escalated the longer Guillén remained missing. Mayra found the military’s Criminal Investigation Division to be “a joke, literally,” but thanks to constant protests at which Lupe vehemently accused Fort Hood bigwigs of covering up the truth, people began taking the Guillén family seriously. That includes lawyer Natalie Khawam, who had professional experience dealing with the armed services and agreed to take on the case pro bono.
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The worst, if most obvious, explanation for all of this was forthcoming, courtesy of human remains found near Belton’s Leon River that belonged to Vanessa, and the subsequent discovery that Robinson had apparently killed her with a hammer and dismembered, burned, and disposed of her body with the help of his girlfriend Cecily Aguilar. Robinson was already in custody at the time of this revelation and—after phoning Aguilar, informing her “Baby, they found pieces”—he escaped custody; when he was located a short time later, he killed himself with a handgun. While Aguilar later tried to recant her confession (she’s still awaiting trial), the whodunit portion of this story was, for all intents and purposes, over.
I Am Vanessa Guillén, however, is much more than just the tale of a homicide inquiry. Despite Robinson’s obvious guilt (he reportedly confessed to Aguilar), his reason for murdering Vanessa was never proffered. Given that Vanessa had told her mother that she’d twice been the victim of sexual harassment at Fort Hood, her family quickly assumed that Robinson had been a predator.
The army firmly denied such a connection. In fact, the army denied everything—namely, that Vanessa filed sexual harassment complaints, and that they had leads regarding Vanessa’s killer—that would later be proven true. To those on the Guilléns’ side of things, it looked like a cover-up designed to minimize criticism over, and responsibility for, a crime that was potentially part of a much larger scourge of Fort Hood misconduct.
Gloria refers to Fort Hood as “the mafia” and Colonel Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders, states that there’s “a lot of bad there.” I Am Vanessa Guillén briefly mentions some of it, including a rash of murders, harassment accusations, mass shootings, and other sordid tales, like one sexual assault advocate pimping out financially disadvantaged soldiers for cash.
Since the military polices itself, however, the Guillén family had little recourse when it came to demanding justice from them. Instead, they did the only things they could: they took to social media to build a campaign around the hashtag #IAmVanessaGuillén, thereby turning Vanessa into a rallying-cry symbol for victims of military sexual assault. They went to Washington, D.C. with Natalie to sponsor legislation that would challenge the military’s chain-of-command status quo by taking investigative and prosecutorial authority away from army brass and giving it to independent lawyers.
This, it turns out, was Mayra and Lupe’s real fight, and one for which they turned out to be ready. Despite the burden of being far from home and having to relive the trauma of their sister’s demise, the two—with staunch ally Natalie by their side—lobbied House and Senate members on both sides of the political aisle, as well as met with President Donald Trump.
Predictably, Trump is seen in I Am Vanessa Guillén dispensing one of his patented hot-air nothingburgers—“We will get to the bottom of a lot of this, and maybe all of it”—and the girls’ proposed legislation ultimately failed to make it to the floor for a vote. Nonetheless, they continued to press for change, and with a new Biden administration in office in early 2021, they got it—albeit in a “historic” form that even chief sponsor, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, found wanting in terms of real reform.
I Am Vanessa Guillén relays Vanessa’s plight through empathetic interviews, TV news reports, and no-frills on-the-ground footage, and it sticks closely to Mayra and Lupe along their journey in both Texas and the capital. Rather than indulging in a pat happily-ever-after, it illustrates the tireless (and tiresome) work required by democratic governance. More moving still, it proves a portrait of disparate immigrant Americans banding together to battle for the values that this country champions and the rights it affords its citizens.
That’s not an easy struggle considering that, as Wegener’s documentary depicts, institutional systems rarely admit to their own wrongdoing, much less willingly give up their enormous influence and control. The Guilléns learned that when Fort Hood refused to offer up details about its probe into Vanessa’s disappearance, when it later refused to name the supervisors who had originally harassed Vanessa, and when Mayra and Lupe navigated the corridors of DC power—all of which makes their perseverance additionally admirable.
Global murals of Vanessa suggest, at film’s conclusion, that perhaps the Guilléns' tragedy has helped transform not only the military but also a global culture of misogyny that’s only recently been combated by the #MeToo and Times Up movements. Yet any modest uplift is tempered by the gnawing sense that, no matter its positive impact, #IAmVanessaGuillén was likely less of a giant leap forward than merely a small step toward a sought-after future.
