Val Verde is a fictional Latin American country that screenwriter Steven E. de Souza created for the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando. It is also the country across the border where most of Predator takes place, according to de Souza and the 2020 game Predator: Hunting Grounds, although the 1987 film never names it on screen. In its jungles Dutch Schaefer's team destroyed a Soviet-backed guerrilla camp and then fell prey to the Jungle Hunter. In Commando, Val Verde is the homeland that the exiled dictator Arius wanted to rule again, and the film shows its name on an airport terminal that reads Aeropuerto Val Verde.
Overview
Val Verde exists only in fiction, and the films that use it show very different sides of the country. Commando presents it as a republic that had recently overthrown the dictator Arius, with President Velazquez in power. Predator shows only its mountain rainforest, a border region held by Soviet-backed guerrillas that the American military treated as hostile ground. Neither film names a capital or labels the country on a map, so its geography rests on dialogue, signage and later tie-ins. The Predator side of its history covers a single violent episode in 1987, which began with a rescue mission that was not what it seemed.
CIA officer Al Dillon told Dutch that guerrillas had captured a cabinet minister and his aide after their helicopter strayed over the border. In truth the passengers were Dillon's own CIA men, and an earlier unit, Jim Hopper's team, had vanished while searching for them. Dillon needed Dutch's rescue team to find and destroy the guerrilla base, which the agency had been hunting for months. The team crossed the border by helicopter before dawn and marched into the jungle with no backup. The Dutch tapes in Hunting Grounds later described the same mission as the rescue of a Guatemalan cabinet minister held by guerrillas in Val Verde.
Geography And The Border
Predator opens at an American base in a neighboring country, where General Phillips briefed Dutch on a helicopter carrying a cabinet minister and his aide from "this charming little country." A transponder fixed the wreck on the far side of the border, and Dutch asked whether the minister always traveled on the wrong side of it. Phillips answered that they had strayed off course and were almost certainly in guerrilla hands. The tactical map from that briefing, covered in the Predator Universe Maps guide, marked the contact point and a search radius. The tapes in Hunting Grounds later called the minister Guatemalan, which puts Val Verde next to Guatemala.
Beyond the border lay steep mountain jungle broken by ridges, rivers and waterfalls. Mac Eliot said he had seen some bad bush before but nothing like it, and Blain Cooper answered that it made Cambodia look like Kansas. The guerrilla zone was too hot for a pickup, and Billy Sole found that the only way out was a valley leading east. In Paul Monette's novelization, Phillips ran the operation from Balancan on the Pacific coast of Conta Mana, and the wreck lay over the border in the Guatemalan highlands near the mouth of the Usamacinta.
Points Of Interest
The Guerrilla Camp
The guerrilla base was a jungle clearing of thatched huts, sheds, sandbagged guard bunkers and a dusty yard where trucks stood parked. Dutch's team followed the trail of twelve guerrillas from the downed helicopter, passing the skinned bodies of Hopper and his Green Berets on the way. From the ridge above, Dutch watched a captive executed and saw Russian military advisers working with the guerrillas. The raid began when Dutch rolled a truck down into the camp, and Blain's minigun, Poncho Ramirez's grenade launcher and Mac's M60 tore through the huts and guard posts. Within minutes the base was burning, and Anna Gonsalves was the only guerrilla taken alive.
Mac found the second hostage dead and identified the bodies as CIA men, and Dillon admitted that the rescue was a cover story. He claimed the guerrillas would have invaded across the border within three days. In the novelization, the camp stood in a grove of rubber trees, with a huge palapa roofing gun emplacements dug into the hillside, some of them anti-aircraft. About thirty men held the camp, and the orders Dutch found called for an offensive on the Conta Mana capital. Billy later found the flattened ruin of a Mayan temple on the march and felt that its builders had known the same hunter.
The Waterfall
After Dutch sent Anna running for the helicopter, the Jungle Hunter chased him through the forest to the edge of a high waterfall. Dutch went over the falls and plunged into the deep pool at their foot, then dragged himself out of the river onto a muddy bank. The hunter dropped into the water after him and scanned the bank, but the cold mud coating Dutch's body hid his heat, and the creature moved on. Dutch realized what had saved him and said that the hunter could not see him. That discovery shaped the rest of the fight.
In the novelization, the river swept Schaefer about a mile downstream before it hurled him over a thirty-foot falls into a wide pool, and he crawled onto a mud overhang among the roots of a dead tree. Neither the film nor the book says exactly where the falls lay. The team had been marching toward the extraction point, which the novelization put just over the border, so the waterfall may have stood on the border or beyond it. The tactical map from the opening briefing shows many rivers in the region, and falls like these fit the terrain it shows.
The Jungle Hunter's Destruction Site
The Jungle Hunter watched the team from the trees after the raid and picked them off on the march toward the extraction point. Rick Hawkins died first, followed by Blain, Mac, Dillon, Billy and Poncho, until only Dutch and Anna were left. After his escape at the waterfall, Dutch coated himself in mud again and prepared to make his stand in the forest above the river. He rigged traps in the forest, lured the creature into the clearing and crushed it beneath a log counterweight. The site of that last fight became the most important Earth location of the early franchise.
The dying hunter triggered a self-destruct device, and Dutch ran for cover before the blast tore a crater out of the jungle. Phillips arrived by helicopter and found him standing alone in the smoke and ash. In the novelization, the alien ship exploded in a purple flash that threw the approaching helicopters out of control half a mile away. Later tie-ins sent the OWLF into the crater, and Peter Keyes questioned Dutch about what had happened. In the Hunting Grounds tapes, Dutch said his radiation sickness and the crater were the only evidence the creature had ever been there.
The Capital
Commando never names Val Verde's capital, and the only part of the country it shows is the airport where the flight from Los Angeles was due to land. The whitewashed terminal carried the words Aeropuerto Val Verde above its entrance. Vendors spread goods and crates across the pavement outside, older cars waited at the curb and armed soldiers in green uniforms moved through the crowd. Arius had told John Matrix that Val Verde needed a president with an understanding of discipline, and the soldiers at the airport suggested a country still run by its army. Beyond this terminal, no street, palace or landmark of Val Verde appears on screen.
The airport mattered to the plot because it set the deadline for the life of Matrix's daughter Jenny. Arius's men had put Matrix on a flight that a flight attendant said would land in Val Verde in exactly 11 hours. Matrix slipped off the plane in Los Angeles, and when it landed without him, the news reached Arius at his island hideout off California. He ordered Jenny killed, but Matrix had already reached the island and was starting his attack. The scene is the closest any film has come to showing the capital of Val Verde.
Other References In Predator
The Predator franchise took decades to settle on Val Verde, and most of its tie-ins placed the 1987 hunt somewhere else. Some renamed the country outright, while others moved the jungle to a real nation such as Guatemala or Colombia. The film left room for this, because its dialogue only ever refers to the far side of the border. The Dutch tapes in 2020 are the clearest exception, naming the country outright. The works below are listed in order of release, with a note on how each one treats the setting.
- Predator novelization (1987): Monette's book never uses the name Val Verde. It swaps in the invented country of Conta Mana for the staging base and real Guatemala for the hunt, as described under Geography And The Border.
- Predator comics (Dark Horse, from 1989): Mark Verheiden's sequel comics place the events of the first film in Colombia rather than Val Verde.
- Predators (2010): Isabelle recalls a classified report about a Special Forces team hunted in Guatemala in 1987, so the film treats the jungle as Guatemalan and never mentions Val Verde.
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020): in the Dutch tapes, voiced by Schwarzenegger, Dutch calls himself the only survivor of the Val Verde incident and decides that he needs to investigate the country himself.
Appearances Elsewhere
Outside the Predator franchise, Val Verde is mostly de Souza's own recurring setting, and he brought it back in films and comics for more than two decades. Commando and Die Hard 2 both came from his scripts and from producer Joel Silver, so the name quietly links the two films. In 2007 he took the country into comics with his reboot of Sheena. Other filmmakers have borrowed the name as a nod to his work, most clearly in a 2013 dinosaur film that cast one of the Commando villains. The works below are listed in order of release.
- Commando (1985): Val Verde drives the whole plot. The deposed dictator Arius kidnapped Jenny Matrix to force her father to return there and kill President Velazquez, who had made Matrix a hero of the revolution that overthrew Arius. Matrix never reached the country, so the film's view of it ends at the airport covered in The Capital.
- Die Hard 2 (1990): General Ramon Esperanza, the deposed dictator of Val Verde, is being extradited to the United States on drug charges when rogue soldiers under Colonel Stuart take over Washington Dulles airport to free him. De Souza co-wrote the film and later confirmed that Esperanza came from Val Verde.
- Sheena (Devil's Due Publishing, 2007): de Souza's comic reboot moved the jungle queen from Africa to the rainforests of Val Verde.
- Jurassic Attack (2013), also released as Rise of the Dinosaurs: a commando unit crashes in the jungles of Val Verde and finds a valley of dinosaurs, with Commando villain actor Vernon Wells in the cast.
Behind The Scenes
De Souza invented Val Verde for Commando so the script could show a corrupt Latin American government without naming a real country and drawing complaints from its officials. He later described it as something like Guyana, with tourist resorts, unexplored rainforest and a mix of cultures, and he told Empire that Predator is set there. NECA's Predator figures followed the same line on their packaging, and the name means green valley in Spanish. In 2012 Brazilian arachnologists named a goblin spider Predatoroonops valverde after the country, as part of a genus whose species all honor Predator.
Principal photography on Predator began in the jungles near Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, in late March 1986, but most of the film was shot near Puerto Vallarta. The team's opening arrival by boat was filmed on the beach at Boca de Tomatlán. Much of the jungle footage came from El Edén in the Sierra del Cuale, about 16 kilometres from Puerto Vallarta up the Mismaloya River. El Edén is now an ecotourism park with a jungle restaurant, river pools and zip lines. The shell of a helicopter left from the shoot still stands there beside a Predator statue, and visitors pose with both for photos.
Conclusion
Val Verde began as a legal convenience in Commando, the homeland that Arius wanted back and the destination of the flight that Matrix never finished. Predator never spoke its name, but de Souza and Hunting Grounds placed the guerrilla camp, Hopper's ambush and Dutch's final duel in its jungles. The burned camp and the crater left by the Jungle Hunter remain its two great landmarks in the Predator lore. Conflicting tie-ins still point to Guatemala, Conta Mana or Colombia, yet Val Verde remains the name most fans use for the place where the first Predator fell.
Appearances
- Commando (1985).
- Predator (1987), not named on screen.
- Predator novelization (1987), as Conta Mana and Guatemala instead.
- Die Hard 2 (1990), mentioned.
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020), Dutch tapes, mentioned.
Tag Categories: Predator Lore
