Anna Gonsalves was a guerrilla fighter in Predator, played by Elpidia Carrillo. She was the only survivor of a rebel camp in the jungles of Val Verde destroyed by Dutch Schaefer's rescue team, and the CIA agent Dillon took her prisoner because of what she knew about the guerrilla network. On the march to the border she saw the Jungle Hunter kill Hawkins, told the commandos the old legend of the demon who makes trophies of men, and became the only person besides Dutch to survive the hunt. She later gave her account to the OWLF, and her taped interview appeared briefly in Predator 2.
Biography
Early Life
Little is known about Anna Gonsalves before she was captured, and most of it comes from the story she told Dutch on the last morning of the hunt. When she was a little girl, the people of her village found a man who looked as if he had been butchered, and the old women crossed themselves and whispered strange things about what had done it. They said that it happened only in the hottest years, and that when the weather grew hot, the men of the region began to turn up without their skin, or worse, so that the killings became part of local legend long before she ever saw the creature herself. The film never names her homeland beyond a small Central American country, but later franchise material calls it Val Verde, and the jungles where she grew up were the same ones where the hunters kept returning.
The villagers had a name for the killer, El Diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres, which Anna translated for the Americans as the demon who makes trophies of men. She grew up with that story and remembered it clearly as an adult, and when the summer of the hunt turned unusually hot, the old legend returned to her before anyone else understood what was stalking the jungle. The killings she heard about as a child fit the pattern of the Jungle Hunter and its kind, which came back to the same region whenever the heat drew them, and her memory was the only link the commandos ever had to the creature's earlier visits.
The novelization by Paul Monette gives her a different childhood, with an upbringing in the capital city pampered by nuns and European governesses, a convent school, a white-dress first communion, and an old drunken priest she still longed to confess to. In the book she was in her mid-twenties, and Dutch guessed that a woman holding a place in the top rebel force of such a chauvinistic country had to be extraordinarily talented and well-connected. Her great guerrilla triumphs had been bombings of government buildings and embassies, and although she had marched proudly with her unit to the jungle, she had never lost a childhood fear of the wild, of pumas and vipers, which stands apart from the village memories she shared in the film.
The Raid On The Guerrilla Camp
As an adult, Anna fought with the guerrilla army of Val Verde, which held a camp just across the border from the country where the Americans were based, and where Russian military advisers were helping to prepare a major offensive against the neighboring country. The guerrillas had shot down a helicopter carrying American intelligence agents and killed the Green Berets sent to find them, and the CIA man Al Dillon brought Dutch Schaefer and his rescue team in under the cover story of a captured cabinet minister. Dutch's men destroyed the camp in a fast assault, killing the soldiers and their Russian allies, and only then learned that the hostages were already dead and that the mission had been a lie from the start. The novelization names the neighboring country Conta Mana, places the American base at Balancan under General Homer Phillips, and has Dutch find guerrilla orders for an offensive on the Conta Mana capital in the papers around Anna.
Anna was the only guerrilla who survived the raid, and the novelization explains that she had been knocked out by a falling roof, dressed in loose fatigues that hid her gender so well that Blain missed it in the fighting. Dutch found her among the bodies and papers inside a palapa, recognized her as a young woman when he pulled off her cap, and could not help a glint of respect for a fighter who had risen so far in a rebel army run by men. When she came round, mumbling a prayer in Spanish, Dillon searched her pockets and found an identification card in a nylon billfold that gave her full name, Anna Gonsalves, with no rank noted.
Dillon's Prisoner
With guerrilla reinforcements less than half an hour away, Dillon insisted that Anna go with them because she was too valuable to leave behind and had a whole other network that the CIA wanted to learn about. Dutch argued that she would give away their position at every chance she got, but Dillon reminded him that he was still under orders, and Dutch gave in only on the condition that the prisoner was Dillon's baggage and that he would be on his own if he fell behind. With her hands tied in front of her, Anna was marched out of the burning camp toward the valley that led east to the border.
Anna made no secret of her hatred for the men who had killed her comrades, and in the novelization she spun on Dillon the moment he touched her, called him Yankee scum, threatened to mutilate him, and spat at his feet. When Mac skewered a scorpion crawling on Dillon's pack, Anna smirked at the dying insect and promised Dillon that when her people caught him, he would wish he were the scorpion. The book describes her as tall and sleek, with a long black braid, bright eyes, and an upper lip that quivered with contempt, the proud rebel who would die for her cause without flinching.
The March To The Border
On the march Anna stalled as much as she could, and Dillon fell behind the rest of the team as he tried to keep her moving, telling her to stop sandbagging and get up when she dropped to the ground. In the novelization she faked a fall, flung a handful of dirt into his eyes, and grabbed for his rifle, only to find Poncho holding a gun to her ear and ordering her not to try it. Poncho mocked Dillon for not being able to control a prisoner half his size and suggested that he put her on a leash, a jab that the other commandos kept repeating as the agent struggled to keep up.
Anna obeyed the rules of capture but gave her guards nothing, and the novelization adds that the Predator watching from the branches had already noticed that the rebel prisoner was a different breed from the soldiers around her. The march took the team up a riverbank and toward a narrow canyon, and Anna slipped repeatedly in the mud because she could not balance herself with her hands tied, drawing rougher prods from Dillon's rifle each time she fell. By late afternoon the two of them had dropped a few meters behind the column again, and the tension between the prisoner and her guard had grown into open hostility on both sides.
The Escape
When Billy sensed something in the trees at a clearing above the river, the team took cover, and Anna was pushed to the ground with a knife held to her throat while Dillon moved off into the brush to take command. In the novelization Dillon handed the knife to Poncho, and while he nervously scanned the grass, Anna quietly picked up a loose root-burl and tucked it against her stomach with her bound hands. The moment Poncho swapped the blade for his rifle and looked away to find a place for the knife, she sprang up, hit him over the eye with the chunk of wood, and kicked him so hard that he collapsed in agony.
Anna ran up the muddy slope through the broad-leaf ferns, and the novelization notes that even though she knew this jungle better than the commandos, she had never been this way and knew only that she must not wander over the border, where capture meant certain death. Dutch sent Hawkins after her, and despite carrying the radio and his rifle he closed the gap with relentless stamina, because her panicked trail was easy to follow. Poncho, still unable to stand, swore that he would slit her throat, and from then on he despised her with an intensity that the book describes as beyond reason, the humiliation of being beaten by a bound woman hurting more than his wounds.
Hawkins' Death
Hawkins caught Anna in the jungle, knocked her to the ground, and pinned her down at gunpoint, and as she looked past him she saw something that left her pleading in terror. In the novelization the chase ended in a long alley of bamboo, where the Predator stepped out undisguised for the first time, nearly as tall as the trees from where she lay, its skin swirling with color and its honeycomb eyes fixed on them. Hawkins thought she was pulling a trick, but he glanced over his shoulder as the creature charged, fired a single wasted shot, and was killed by a blow that threw his body thirty feet into the undergrowth, leaving Anna soaked in his blood.
The Predator dragged Hawkins away and left Anna alive, and the film later suggested that the hunter ignored her because she was unarmed and posed no threat, which gave her no value as a trophy. She crawled to the side of the clearing and crouched against a trunk, shaking uncontrollably, biting her fingers, and murmuring the prayers she had learned from the nuns, unable to run even though nothing was holding her anymore. The novelization adds that the creature had followed Anna by taking over a hawk and copying its shape, one of the shape-shifting powers the book gave the hunter, but in both versions she was left in a near catatonia that kept her from escaping.
Blain And The Hunt For Hawkins
The commandos found Anna covered in blood with her eyes vacant, and Dutch realized at once that it was not her blood, since she had no wound and Hawkins' radio and gun were still lying in the grass. When Dillon asked her in Spanish what had happened, she said that the jungle had come alive and taken him, and Poncho insisted that the guerrillas had set the team up and that she had led them into a trap. Dutch dismissed the idea, asking why the rebels had not taken the radio or the weapon and why Anna had not escaped, and Billy quietly answered that the same thing had happened to Jim Hopper and his Green Berets.
During the sweep for Hawkins' body, the Predator killed Blain with its shoulder cannon, and Mac emptied the minigun into the trees, joined by the whole team in a wild burst of fire that cut down a wide swath of jungle. In the novelization Anna broke free from Dillon and walked over to Blain's body as if drawn by a spell, and when she looked up, she and Mac locked eyes as the only two who had seen the thing, unable to put it into words. As the team climbed toward its camp, the book has her wander to a bush where the hunter's glowing blood had splashed, touch it with a fingertip, and wipe it on her pants, a stain that became important the next morning.
The Night Camp
The team dug in for the night on a ridge mined with flares, flags, and claymores, and Anna sat with them in a shallow foxhole, staring into the dark trees with Billy while Dillon tried to get the extraction helicopter on the radio. When Dillon asked her again what had happened to Hawkins, she gave the same answer in broken English, that it was the jungle, and Poncho translated it with disgust, saying she was repeating the same thing over and over. The novelization explains that her politics no longer mattered to her, that the American enemy was nothing compared with the devil she had seen, and that she now wanted the protection of the men who had captured her.
In the middle of the night a wild boar set off a trip flare, and in the confusion the Predator stole Blain's body from under the noses of the team, while Anna was left completely unguarded and did not try to run. Dillon demanded to know why nobody had been watching her, but Dutch answered that she was scared out of her mind, and the novelization adds that she had actually picked up an MP5 with her bound hands before dropping it again, too afraid of what waited in the dark. At dawn the book has her let a chameleon crawl onto her arm and watch it change color to match her skin, a small moment that gave her the words she needed when Dutch finally questioned her.
Freed By Dutch
That morning Dutch worked out that the hunter was using the trees and killing them one at a time, and he pulled Anna to her feet and demanded to know what she had seen, while Dillon told him he was wasting his time. She said that she did not know what it was, but that it changed colors like the chameleon and used the jungle, and Dillon exploded, calling it a psych job and mocking the idea that Blain and Hawkins had been killed by a lizard. Dutch ignored him, asked her name, and when she answered Anna, he told her that the thing was hunting all of them and cut the rope from her wrists.
Dillon protested that he was taking her back and that the rendezvous was ten to twelve miles away, but Dutch told him that they had to make a stand now or there would be nobody left to reach the chopper. Anna then gave the team its first real hope, explaining that when the big man was killed, one of them must have wounded the creature, because its blood was on the leaves. Dutch answered that if it bled, they could kill it, and from that moment Anna was treated as an unofficial member of the team, as the novelization puts it, watching the tree line through binoculars while the men built their traps.
The Demon Who Makes Trophies Of Men
While Dutch and the others rigged a net and a spring trap of bent saplings around the only path into the camp, Anna sat with Dutch and told him the story of the butchered man from her childhood and the whispers of the old women in her village. She explained that the killings happened only in the hottest years, that this year was growing hot, and that they had begun to find their men again, sometimes without their skin and sometimes much worse. She gave the local name for the killer, El Diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres, and translated it as the demon who makes trophies of man, the first account anyone on the team heard of the hunter's long history in the region.
The trap caught the Predator in its net at midday, but it tore free, and in the chaos that followed Poncho was badly hurt by the swinging log of the trap, while Anna, who had stayed behind praying, ran down the hill to help him as soon as she saw him fall. The novelization says that the creature's physical presence had shocked her back to reality, and that she understood the more commandos stayed alive, the better the odds were for all of them. When she picked up a rifle, Dutch told her to leave it, because the hunter had not killed her for the simple reason that she was not armed and there was no sport in it, and Mac and Dillon then went off after the Predator and were killed.
The Last Stand At The River
Dutch, Billy, and the injured Poncho followed Anna as she led the way down toward the river, shouting at them in Spanish to hurry, and in the novelization she guided the three commandos along the rocky slope while Dutch carried Poncho on his back. At a fallen log they began to cross the water, but Billy dropped his weapons on the far bank and stood alone with his machete to face the hunter, and his scream echoed from the trees moments later. The Predator then killed Poncho with a single shot as he tried to raise his rifle, and his weapon landed at Anna's feet, where her rebel instinct drove her to grab for it.
Dutch knew that an armed Anna would become a target, so he knocked the weapon away from her, and then screamed at her to run and get to the chopper while he drew the creature's attention with his own rifle. Anna fled into the jungle, and the novelization describes her running frantically through brambles that tore her fatigues and bloodied her face, her imagination filled with blazing yellow eyes as she kept going for even one more hour of life. Behind her, Dutch fell into the river and washed up on a muddy bank, where he learned that the mud hid his heat from the hunter's thermal vision, and Anna was out of the fight for good, the only member of the group still heading for the landing zone.
The Return With The Chopper
Anna reached the extraction point and told the Americans what had happened, and the novelization adds that during Dutch's final fight the Predator used a recording of her voice to lure him, whispering that he should look out behind him and that it knew the way out. Dutch followed the voice for a moment, desperate to make contact with another human being, before he realized that the hunter was copying her and that Anna was nowhere near him. The fight ended with the Predator crushed by Dutch's log trap, activating its self-destruct device, and the explosion that followed tore through the jungle as Dutch ran for cover and the helicopters approached.
At dawn the helicopter arrived with Anna aboard to pick up Dutch, who stood exhausted and traumatized at the edge of the blast zone, and in the novelization she guided General Phillips to the area by spotting the mahogany log where she and the men had crossed the river. When the door gunner trained his M60 on the naked, mud-covered figure who no longer looked human, Anna recognized Dutch by his gait and shoulders, shoved the gun aside as it fired, and shouted that it was their man. She jumped from the hovering chopper, ran to him in tears, thanked God that he was alive, and led him aboard, and Phillips admitted that if it hadn't been for her, Dutch would be dead, even though he could still barely believe the story she had told him.
Interviewed By OWLF
After the hunt, Anna was questioned by the government task force that became the OWLF, and the Predator 2 novelization by Simon Hawke explains that she was the key witness who corroborated Dutch's account right down the line. According to Peter Keyes, the young female guerrilla leader the team had captured was sent ahead to the landing zone, guided the helicopters to Dutch, and passed an entire battery of polygraph examinations, just as Dutch had. Her testimony, along with Dutch's record and the strange radiation readings at the blast site, convinced Keyes that the creature was real and set him on a ten-year search for the hunters' return.
Ten years later, in 1997, Keyes played a taped debriefing of Anna for Lieutenant Mike Harrigan inside the OWLF's mobile command center in Los Angeles, after the City Hunter had begun killing in the city during a summer heat wave. On the tape she spoke with emotion, saying that the creature used the jungle to move, that it was very fast and powerful, that it was colored like the chameleon and invisible, and that it was hunting the men like a game. In the released Predator 2 the tape appears only for about a second on a small monitor next to the debriefing of a survivor of the Vega massacre, and Anna's later life after the interview was never shown, leaving her last known appearance as the witness on the OWLF's tape.
Personality And Traits
Anna began the story as a proud and openly hostile prisoner who insulted her captors, stalled the march, and took every chance to escape, from the dirt she threw at Dillon in the novelization to the blow that dropped Poncho. She was quick-thinking and patient, waiting for the moment a guard looked away, and the novelization calls her a proud rebel who would have died for her cause without flinching. That defiance was rooted in her loyalty to the comrades the Americans had killed, and she made no attempt to hide her contempt for the men around her during the first day of the march.
The death of Hawkins broke that hostility, and for a time Anna withdrew into shock, praying and rocking in her foxhole, too frightened to run even when nobody was watching her. Once Dutch treated her as an ally, she recovered quickly and became observant and useful, describing the creature's camouflage, pointing out its blood, telling the legend of the demon, and running to help the wounded Poncho, the same man who had wanted to kill her. By the end she was the one who saved Dutch from the gunner's bullets in the novelization, and her last moments in the book show a bond with the commando built on a secret that nobody else would believe.
Skills And Equipment
Anna was a trained guerrilla who knew the jungle of the border region better than the commandos, even though the novelization notes that she had never traveled the stretch of the river they took and could not navigate it with certainty. She was fit and fast, able to outrun a soldier for a long stretch with her hands still tied, and capable enough in a fight to disable Poncho with a single blow and a kick before fleeing. The novelization adds that her earlier work for the rebels had included planting bombs in government buildings and embassies in the capital, a record that had made her one of the top fighters in her army.
She spoke Spanish and some broken English, and Dillon and Poncho had to translate most of what she said for the rest of the team, which left her early warnings open to doubt and mockery from the men who did not trust her. Her greatest value to the team was her eye for detail, as she was the first to compare the hunter's camouflage to a chameleon and the first to realize that the blood on the leaves meant the creature could be wounded. She carried no weapon of her own after her capture, and the few times she picked one up, Dutch made her drop it, knowing that being unarmed was the only thing keeping the Predator from treating her as prey.
Behind The Scenes
Elpidia Carrillo, a Mexican actress who had appeared in The Border and Oliver Stone's Salvador, played Anna in Predator, which was directed by John McTiernan and released by 20th Century Fox in June 1987. The film credits her simply as Anna, and the surname Gonsalves comes from the novelization and later material, which is why most sources now use her full name. In a 2014 interview with Latin Heat, quoted by AvPGalaxy, Carrillo joked that the only thing she learned from making Predator was how to survive among a group of macho muscle men, and she has said that the part remains the role most people know her for.
Anna's return in Predator 2 began in the first draft of the sequel by Jim and John Thomas, dated October 1989, which brought back both Anna and Dutch in debriefing footage recorded in a Central American palapa. When the production could not secure Arnold Schwarzenegger, the December draft removed both characters, but the January 1990 draft restored Anna alone with new lines, and new footage of Carrillo was shot for the film. A 1990 publicity still shows Keyes and Harrigan watching her on the screen, yet the theatrical cut reduced the moment to a glimpse on a background monitor, as AvPGalaxy found when it traced Anna's cut cameo through the script drafts, making her the only character from the first film to return in the sequel.
Famous Quotes
- "It changed colors, like the chameleon. It uses the jungle."
- "Anna."
- "There is something else. When the big man was killed, you must've wounded it. Its blood was on the leaves."
- "When I was little, we found a man. He looked like... like, butchered. The old women in the village crossed themselves... and whispered crazy things, said strange things."
- "Only in the hottest years this happens. And this year, it grows hot."
- "El Diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres. Means the demon who makes trophies of man."
- "It used the jungle to move. Very fast, powerful. It was colored like the chameleon, invisible. It was hunting the men, like a game..." (Predator 2 novelization)
Conclusion
Anna Gonsalves was a guerrilla fighter who grew up hearing of a demon that hunted men in the hottest years, and who was the only survivor when Dutch's team destroyed her camp. Taken prisoner by Dillon, she escaped, watched the Predator kill Hawkins, and was spared because she was unarmed, and once Dutch freed her she helped the team with what she had seen and the legend she remembered. Sent ahead to the chopper while Dutch faced the hunter alone, she brought the rescue back to him, and her testimony and taped debriefing helped convince the OWLF that the hunters were real.
Appearances
- Predator (1987)
- Predator novelization by Paul Monette (1987)
- Predator 2 (1990), on a video monitor in the OWLF command trailer
- Predator 2 novelization by Simon Hawke (1990), as the female guerrilla on Keyes' debriefing tape
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
