Jorge "Poncho" Ramirez was the point man of the rescue team led by Alan "Dutch" Schaefer in Predator, the 1987 film in which Richard Chaves played him. He set the pace on the march into Val Verde and shelled the guerrilla camp with a six-shot grenade launcher during the raid. Once the team found itself hunted, he outlived most of his comrades, but a log from the failed trap left him badly hurt. The Jungle Hunter killed him near the river while Dutch was helping him toward the extraction point.
Biography
Earlier Life
The film gave Poncho almost no backstory beyond his place on Dutch's rescue team, where he served as the point man who moved at the front of the column. He spoke Spanish, a skill that later made him useful when the team took a prisoner who knew little English. The shooting script placed his roots in East Los Angeles and showed him taping his harness down to the last strap before the helicopter dropped the team into the jungle. On screen he was a lean, quiet soldier in a camouflage cap who let his weapon and his jokes speak for him.
Poncho first appeared when the team arrived at the base in Central America, still dressed in civilian clothes, with a striped shirt, dark trousers and glasses. The men had been called in for a rescue job across the border in Val Verde, and they changed into jungle gear before the mission began. That night they boarded a helicopter for the flight over the mountains, with Poncho seated among the others in the cramped cabin. The red light of the cabin lit their faces as the aircraft flew low toward the drop zone in the dark.
The ride turned into the kind of banter the team used to ease the tension before a fight. Blain offered his plug of chewing tobacco around the cabin and called it strong enough to turn a man into a sexual tyrannosaurus, and the others turned him down. Hawkins tried out one of his crude jokes about his girlfriend, which drew groans from the men. Dillon flicked his lighter and tried to show it to Poncho, but Poncho paid him little attention, and Blain spat tobacco juice across his boot before the team readied the ropes.
The novelization by Paul Monette gave him the full name Jorge Ramirez and described him as a headstrong Chicano troublemaker from the Houston barrio. The book called him fanatic about details and placed him beside Blain near the cockpit door, fixing a last strip of camouflage tape to his pack harness. He faked a throw of the roll and then fired it at Hawkins, who caught it without looking up, a reflex test the two men kept before every battle. Ramirez called the medic Puddytat for the nine lives he had used up in near misses.
During the steep descent Blain offered his tobacco again, and Ramirez swatted it away and told him to get the stinking thing out of his face, since refusing the plug was part of the ritual. When Dillon held out his battered lighter with its snarling panther crest, Ramirez bent closer over his harness and ignored him. After touchdown he and Blain gathered the landing gear, four steel cones with rope bags, and Hawkins tossed them out. The men slid down the ropes in order, Mac first, then Blain, Billy, Ramirez and finally Hawkins.
On the ground Ramirez gave Billy the nickname Tonto and took his place at the head of the line. As point man he set a medium-brutal pace through the trees and hacked a trail with his machete while the others followed fifteen feet apart, each carrying close to ninety pounds of gear. Dutch steered him with whistle signals, one long and two short for a change of direction. He also relied on Ramirez and Billy to read the ground together, since the point man set the pace while the scout searched the trail ahead.
Finding The Wreck
After the drop, the men moved out in a line behind their point man and followed the trail to the wreck of the downed helicopter. Billy read the tracks of the guerrillas who had brought it down, and the trail led on to the remains of a special forces unit that had been skinned and hung from the trees. The sight shook every man on the team. Dutch recognized the dead as Jim Hopper's men, soldiers he knew personally, and he began to suspect that the mission was not what the CIA had told him.
The novel gave Ramirez a larger part at the wreck. He climbed the grappling line quick as a monkey, ran his knife around the doorway to check for trip wires and found the pilot and co-pilot hanging upside down in their seats. He told Dutch that each pilot had taken a round in the head and that the aircraft looked more like a surveillance bird than an army taxi. At the clearing with the skinned bodies he crossed himself, gasped a prayer and broke the code of silence by shouting for help, as if he had forgotten that the team was the help.
Raiding The Guerrilla Camp
When the team reached the guerrilla camp, Poncho took up a position above it with his six-shot grenade launcher while Dutch opened the attack by sending a truck rolling into the huts. He shelled the camp from the slope as the others swept through it, and the blasts tore apart buildings and gun positions. During the fight he saw blood running down the arm of Blain, who told him that he had no time to bleed. Poncho asked him whether he had time to duck, then turned the launcher back on the enemy.
In the novel Ramirez lay hidden on a knoll with Dutch while they scouted the camp, and Dutch had to stop himself from slapping his hand aside when he crossed himself after watching the guerrillas murder a prisoner. During the assault he checked the six loaded rounds of his launcher, set his MP-5 in front of him and lobbed grenades behind the camp so that nobody could slip away across the stream. He then went into the underground bunker with Dutch, gunned down a rebel who was trying to open an escape hatch and chased the survivors into the trees.
The chase ended at the foot of a cliff where two rebels had taken cover in shallow caves. Ramirez shot one of them and, staring at the dead man, thought that they could have been cousins, since the book said he did not like killing brown men. Blain then reached him with a shirt soaked in blood from a grenade blast, and Ramirez scolded him for bleeding all over him. Moments later he leaped over the boulder and put six rounds on a high arc into the cave above, a move he called a Tijuana yoyo.
Guarding The Prisoner
The raid left one guerrilla alive, a young woman named Anna, and Dillon insisted on taking her along for what she knew about the rebel network. Because Poncho spoke Spanish, he and Dillon handled most of what she said for the rest of the team. The men pushed on toward the border with the prisoner in tow, and she kept looking for her chance to escape. When she finally broke away and Hawkins ran after her, the team lost its first man to the unseen creature in the trees, and only Anna saw what happened.
The novel built this stretch into a running feud. When Anna threw dirt into the eyes of Dillon and grabbed for his rifle, Ramirez pressed his own gun against her ear and told her not to even try it. Later Dillon handed him a knife with orders to watch her, but Ramirez swapped the blade for his rifle, since knives reminded him of the barrio. When he looked away she hit him over the right eye with a chunk of wood and kicked him in the groin, then fled up the ridge while he lay curled on the ground.
From that moment, the book said, he despised her with an intensity beyond reason, because being beaten by a woman with her hands tied hurt more than his wounds. He still shouted for help, and he urged Hawkins to chase her rather than stay with him. When he limped back to the others with dried blood streaked across his face, Blain told him that he looked like Dracula. Ramirez then joined the search, and he was the man who walked into the remains of Hawkins at the base of a bamboo trunk.
Facing The Unseen Hunter
The body of Hawkins was gone when the team found the place where he had died, and Anna said that the jungle had come alive and taken him, an answer the men did not believe. The next day the creature killed Blain on the trail, and Mac opened up on the trees with the minigun of his fallen friend. The rest of the team, Poncho included, joined in and shredded a wide stretch of jungle with every weapon they had. The barrage seemed to hit nothing, and when the smoke cleared there was no body and no sign of the attacker.
In the novel Ramirez tried to explain the killing of Hawkins with a story about a couple of monkeys that had trailed the team from the camp, and he blamed Anna for setting them up. Dutch punctured the theory by asking why the attackers had left the radio and gun behind and forgotten the woman they had supposedly come to rescue. After Blain died, Ramirez raced to the scene, offered to give Mac a little light and fired into the bamboo. He came back from a search of the area with nothing and said that it was as if they had all disappeared in a hole in the ground.
Holding The Night Camp
The survivors dug in for the night on a ridge, and Poncho kept watch near Billy. When Billy admitted that he was scared, Poncho told him that he had never been afraid of any man. Billy answered that something was out there waiting for them and that it was no man, adding that they were all going to die. In the dark a wild boar tripped the perimeter and Mac killed it with his knife, and while the men were distracted the creature took the body of Blain from where they had left it.
The novel added smaller moments to the night. Ramirez set up the radio that Hawkins had carried and searched the frequencies while Dillon tried to call the standby helicopters, and he traded racial insults with Mac over a missing cigarette before both men laughed. When Mac killed the boar, Ramirez joked that an apple in its mouth would feed them for a month. He then fetched the medic's bag, patched up the gash in the chest of Mac, checked the trip wires and reported that whatever took Blain had come in through the wires right under their noses.
Springing The Trap
By morning Dutch had worked out that the creature moved through the trees, and the team rigged the area around the camp with trip wires, a net and a heavy log. The hunter walked into the trap and was caught in the net, but it tore itself free and the men opened fire as it fled. In the chaos the swinging log struck Poncho and left him badly hurt and unable to keep up on his own. Mac then ran into the trees after the creature, and Dillon followed him, leaving Dutch with Billy, Anna and the injured point man.
In the novel Ramirez helped rig the defenses, wiring a grenade into the crotch of a cottonwood branch while Billy tossed him the roll of wire. When the alien slashed through a limb eight inches thick, the falling wood hit him in the shoulder, threw him into the underbrush and tore a deep gouge in his chest. Anna, who had wanted to escape only hours earlier, ran down the hill to help him. Billy told Dutch that he was busted up badly, and Ramirez snarled back that he could make it and held out his hand to be helped up.
Last Stand & Death
With Mac and Dillon gone after the hunter, Dutch led Anna, Billy and the wounded Poncho down toward the river and the helicopter beyond it. When they reached a fallen log across the water, Billy threw down his rifle and stayed behind to face the creature with his machete, and his scream soon came from the trees. Moments later the hunter fired its plasma caster and killed Poncho while Dutch was still holding him up. Dutch fired back, told Anna to run for the helicopter and turned to draw the creature after himself.
The novel told the escape at greater length. Dutch carried Ramirez on his back across the churning river on a log while Anna led the way and Billy covered them. After Billy turned back to make his stand, Dutch set Ramirez down at the top of the ridge, and Ramirez, the most loyal friend Billy had on the team, struggled to cock his rifle. Before he could fire, the alien's spear struck him in the neck and pinned him to the ground. His MP-5 landed at the feet of Anna, and the alien tossed his body aside like a bag of trash.
Personality & Traits
Poncho was a tough, blunt soldier who handled the exposed point position without complaint and stayed loyal to Dutch and his teammates to the end. In the film he met danger with dark humor, from his quip to Blain in the burning camp to his refusal to believe that Billy could be afraid. His faith in the firepower of the team lasted longer than that of most of the men, and only the failure of the trap and his own injury left him helpless. Even then he kept moving with Dutch toward the river until the hunter caught them.
The book by Monette drew a sharper portrait of a barrio tough who was cocky, abrasive and quick to anger, yet fanatic about details. He traded insults with Mac and Billy as a sign of friendship, crossed himself out of a habit left over from the daily mass of his mother and hated being treated like a cornered rat. The book also showed his fear. When Billy confessed that he was scared, Ramirez felt as if he were standing naked and weaponless in a den of lions, and his loud denial sounded more like a threat than comfort.
Weapons & Equipment
In the film the main weapon of Poncho was a six-shot grenade launcher built from a World War II flare gun, the AN/M5 pyrotechnic discharger, fitted with a Heckler & Koch stock and grip. He used it to shell the guerrilla camp and to blast the trees after Blain died. He also carried a chopped HK94 styled as an MP5 submachine gun, and a Desert Eagle pistol rode on his hip. He wore a camouflage field cap through the mission, along with a vest and webbing over his fatigues.
The novelization armed Ramirez with a six-shot launcher firing 40mm rounds and an MP-5, and it described him reloading the launcher behind a boulder before he charged into the open. He also carried a machete for cutting the trail and a knife for checking doorways, though he preferred a loaded gun to a blade because knives reminded him of the small-time world of the barrio. The book gave him a black pearl ring and a tattooed shoulder as his only personal marks. His MP-5 was the gun that fell at the feet of Anna when he died.
Behind The Scenes
Richard Chaves played Poncho in Predator, which John McTiernan directed for 20th Century Fox from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. The film opened in the United States in June 1987. The shooting script placed the character in East Los Angeles, while the novelization moved his roots to the Houston barrio and gave him the name Jorge Ramirez. In the novel Dutch called him Pancho once in passing and Poncho near the end, when he hauled the wounded soldier to his feet and told him that they were getting out of there.
The six-shot launcher that Poncho carried was not a real military grenade launcher. The prop department built it from the AN/M5 pyrotechnic discharger, a revolving flare gun from the Second World War, and fitted it with a Heckler & Koch stock and grip. The novelization kept the idea of a six-shooter and had Ramirez fire it on a high arc, while the film used it for the large explosions of the camp raid and the barrage that followed the death of Blain.
Famous Quotes
- "You got time to duck?"
- "Looks more like a surveillance bird to me." (novelization)
- "Don't even try it, sweetheart." (novelization)
- "Coupla monkeys been trailing us all the way from the camp, Major." (novelization)
- "Like they all disappeared in a hole in the ground." (novelization)
- "Came in through the wires." (novelization)
- "I can make it. Help me up." (novelization)
Conclusion
Jorge "Poncho" Ramirez was the point man who led Dutch's team into the jungle and the grenadier who shelled the guerrilla camp in the opening raid. He met the first deaths with jokes and theories about guerrillas and monkeys, but the hunt slowly stripped that confidence away. A log from the failed trap left him unable to walk, and he died to the plasma caster near the river after Billy made his stand. His death left Dutch and Anna as the last survivors in Val Verde.
Appearances
- Predator (1987)
- Predator novelization by Paul Monette (1987)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore
