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SCREENINGS IN LONDON NOW 2006
Out
of fear
From Argentina to
Venezuela, Brazil to Peru,
the oppressed of Latin America are fighting
for their human rights. Ariel Dorfman looks at
four films that chronicle their struggle
by Ariel Dorfman Saturday March
18, 2006 (Guardian London)London), 2006
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| "Latin
America doesn't matter ... People don't give one damn about Latin America
now." Thus spoke Richard Nixon
in April 1971, discussing with a young aide
named Donald Rumsfeld which areas of the world
he should not concentrate on if he wanted a brilliant career. Thirty-five years later, I wonder if Nixon, confronted by a seismic shift in the political topography of the land that "people don't give one damn about", would repeat that dismissive judgment. Left-leaning (though ideologically disparate) leaders govern Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia, soon to be joined by Mexico if, as expected, López Obrador wins the upcoming elections. Evo Morales of Bolivia (the first indigenous leader to preside over a country hitherto misruled by its white elite), Lula of Brazil (the first trade union activist to be elected president of any Latin American republic) and Michelle Bachelet of Chile (the first woman to become head of state through her own merits) are merely the most visible representatives of a teeming mass of men and women - landless peasants, mobilised Indians, dispossessed slum-dwellers, militants of non-governmental organisations, radicalised members of an impoverished middle class - who are the authentic protagonists of the new Latin America. In a continent that has been dominated, for most of its history, by colonels, cardinals, guerrillas and oligarchs, what is truly exciting is the democratic eruption of different and largely untested actors on to the public stage. They are the ones who will ultimately decide the fate of the continent that Nixon believed did not matter. Do they have the vigour and resiliency to confront, along with the governments they have brought to power, the endemic problems of Latin America: the worst income distribution in the world, 220 million poor surviving on less than a dollar a day, dysfunctional institutions, staggering levels of corruption and the highest incidence of daily criminal activity on this planet? Or are these social movements under severe constraints that will undercut their capacity to change society for the better?
For anyone intrigued by these questions, four compelling films presented at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival provide some tentative answers. For starters, there is The Dignity of the Nobodies, by the eminent Argentinean filmmaker Fernando "Pino" Solanas. Less stylistically provocative than his incendiary Hour of the Furnaces (1968), this film explores in 10 heartbreaking vignettes the ways in which his compatriots have managed to survive the unprecedented economic and social catastrophe that recently engulfed an Argentina reeling under the colossal failure of the neo-liberal "shock therapy" strategy. In Memoria del Saqueo (2004) he denounced the way in which previous governments, allied with the multinationals and the International Monetary Fund, had looted land that was once the breadbasket of the world and now could not feed its own people. Many of the "nobodies" documented by Solanas endure an existence on the outer margins of destitution, where hunger and unemployment are the recurring spectres and communal soup kitchens the solution. As a frequent visitor to Buenos Aires (I was born there), I had witnessed the protest marches of the piqueteros and the fervent solidarity among the poor that enabled them to outlast the crisis. But Solanas amazed me by uncovering a series of stories from more well-to-do sectors of Argentinean society who have confronted the degradation of their lives with a sort of gentle ferocity, like the workers who take over their abandoned ceramics factory and refuse to stop production, or the doctors and nurses who keep their disintegrating hospital afloat through ingenuity and pluck. But the most remarkable saga of them all is the struggle of the chacareras, middle-class women farmers who confront the threat of expropriation of their small land-holdings by singing the national anthem interminably (and off-key) at one public auction after another, drowning out the judges and policemen and effectively blocking the sale of the property - a humorous tactic of nonviolent resistance that has saved thousands of properties from being devoured by banks and corporations. The whole film is peopled with similar unassuming victories so that we end up deeply moved by the ways in which these nobodies have rescued not only their own dignity but the honour of their ravaged land. Below the surface of these inspirational stories lurk all manner of ambiguities. Solanas admits that this resistance has not come up with a unified and viable alternative to current mainstream policies, a political fragmentation for which the filmmaker tries to compensate - inadequately in my view - through his own rather intrusive versified narration. But that is not the only circumstance that undermines the potency of the popular movement. Although the state can no longer repress dissidents as it did in the savage years of the Argentinean dictatorship, the film subtly reveals how the threat of violence incessantly surrounds its subjects. It is true that the one assassination depicted in The Dignity of the Nobodies - Darío, a young activist - creates such a public furor that the officers responsible are put on trial. And it is a delight to watch those unarmed women farmers flummox their adversaries by belting out the national anthem while the police stand by indecisively. Yes, the military is discredited and weakened and cannot massacre those who dare to rebel. But the rebels themselves know all too well that the terror of the past can easily return, that this terror, in fact, is not really in the past as long as it can be remembered.
State
of Fear shows all too clearly how terror can contaminate a country.
This timely film by Pamela Yates, Paco
de Onís and Peter Kinoy crisply
recounts how the Peruvian struggle against
terrorists (in this case the messianic sect known as Shining
Path, responsible for the death of 30,000
indigenous peasants, in the name of the oppressed
Indians of the Andes) eventually
degenerated into state genocide and the
destruction of the democracy supposedly being defended. As if trapped
in a suspense film, we are forced to follow this escalation of violence
step by tragic step, slowly understanding how so many
Peruvians were poisoned by this maelstrom of madness and cruelty.
This documentary is a hymn to the victims and, above all, to the human rights defenders who stood up against these abuses and helped bring down a president, Alberto Fujimori, who used the war on terror - in ways chillingly reminiscent of George W Bush - to consolidate his absolute power and shield himself and his corrupt cronies from scrutiny. State of Fear is primarily an indictment of those who, in the words of journalist Gustavo Gorriti, had a "savage, wild resistance to the truth", those who did not want to acknowledge the horrors that were being perpetrated in order to guarantee their safety. "Where was I then?" asks an anguished Beatriz Alva Hart, who had been willfully blind to the suffering and repression raging around her until, as a member of the Truth Commission investigating 20 years of human rights violations, her eyes were opened.
the Catalan filmmaker Manel Mayol, attacks a crime that is occurring right now: the displacement of pehuenche-mapuche communities in the south of Chile to build the hydroelectric Ralco dam, the third largest in the world. The film painstakingly establishes how the Spanish transnational Endesa defrauded members of this Indian minority of their ancestral lands in collusion with powerful politicians and members of the judiciary. What is most alarming, in a country that has put dozens of army officers on trial and prosecuted the former dictator Augusto Pinochet, is the way in which the indigenous leaders who protested against this encroachment have been relentlessly persecuted - using anti-terrorism legislation instituted by Pinochet himself. The victims see this mistreatment as one more chapter in the long history of genocide against the native populations of Chile, with a Spanish corporation led by a follower of Franco now taking the place of the old Spanish conquistadors - racism again tainting Latin America.
And it is racism, though of a more insidious kind, that haunts What Is It Worth? by the Brazilian auteur Sergio Bianchi, perhaps the most provocative of these films. Bianchi mercilessly exposes the consumerism that is despoiling his country, weaving a fictional tale of false charity, media manipulation and gang violence. What makes this film so original, however, is that the same actors who embody the contemporary characters are cast in a series of parallel sequences from Brazil's slave days: the stories of today's greed and betrayal echo factual cases extracted from the archives of the late 1700s, the same exploitation of one race by another under the mantle of benevolence. Particularly disturbing is that Bianchi does not spare the victims, showing us how seamlessly the slave of yesterday can become the master of tomorrow.
· All these films are showing as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (hrw.org/iff), at various venues in London until March 25. Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden will be read by the original cast tonight (March 18) at the Royal Court, London SW1. Box office: 020-7565 5000. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 |
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