Oliver Stone Tells the Real Story of the Leftist Latin American Leaders
Transforming the Continent
Stone's new film traces the rise of Chávez, Lula, Evo, and others who
see participatory democracy and cooperation between Latin American
countries as the future.
By Daniela Perdomo
July 14, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- After
decades of military dictatorships and IMF puppetry in Latin America,
the southern cone of the New World is slowly but surely moving toward
reformist, left-leaning governance. This all started in 1999, when Hugo
Chávez was elected in Venezuela. Today, Chávez has left or left-center
allies at the helm of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay,
and preceding him, Cuba.
But
given the minimal and distorted coverage of political developments in
Latin America, most Americans don't know the real story. And when the
U.S. corporate media does deign to discuss the region's significant
ideological shift, it's usually in a very alarmist way. "Leftist
menace," CNN has blared, while Fox News consistently warns of "Rising
dictators" when one of these so-called despots wins a democratic
election.
The good news is that Oliver Stone's new documentary, South of
the Border,
offers American audiences an alternative version of this continent-wide
paradigm shift. The film traces the rise of Chávez, Lula, Evo, and all
the other members of a new generation of political leaders who see
participatory democracy, socialism, and mutual aid and cooperation
between Latin American countries as the future. Neo-liberalism,
capitalism and imperialism, they believe, are out -- and they're not
going to let the United States push them around anymore. This is a
terrific development given that the United States has launched military
interventions and political coups in Central and South America an
astounding 55 times.
Part
of what makes the film so compelling is that the historical actors tell
the story in their own words. Indeed, Stone's legacy as a successful
filmmaker known for going against the Hollywood grain -- consistently
leftist, anti-war and anti-power -- landed him relatively intimate and
uncensored access to each of the heads of state in question.
Hugo
Chávez comes off as particularly charismatic, which is likely why Stone
dedicated nearly the entire first half of the film to him. Multiple
scenes depict him driving through Caracas, children running after the
car yelling, "Hugo! Hugo!" He shakes many hands and holds many babies
during his time with Stone.
But
you also get a sense of the personality fueling the Bolivarian
revolution -- which is "peaceful but armed," he says -- and of his
efforts to distribute land for communal ownership by his country's
poorest. The film also explains the man behind the dramatic flourishes
-- such as calling Bush a sulphurous devil
and making the sign of the cross at the United Nations' General
Assembly -- that are so widely disseminated by the American press. In
one interview, Chávez admits that the American media's depiction of him
hurts -- or at least it did at first. In one of the film's funnier
moments, as he and Stone walk to a corn processing plant (pre-Chávez,
Venezuela had to import most of its corn) he tells the camera and its
eventual American audience, "This is where we're building Iran's atomic
bomb."
Chávez
isn't the only one who scoffs at the U.S. media's depiction of him.
Rafael Correa, the young American-educated president of Ecuador, tells
Stone he doesn't mind the bad press in the United States: "I'd be
worried if the U.S. media was speaking favorably of me."
In
this vein, one of the strongest points Stone makes is the way the
American government and its complicit press corps give consistently
negative coverage to, say, Venezuela but refer favorably to Colombia,
one of the United States' last malleable allies in the region. Human
rights, Stone intones, has become a buzzword void of meaning, employed
by the media and the State Department to delineate who we support and
who we don't. Although Colombia has a pretty terrible human rights
record -- indeed worse than Venezuela's, which is easily a safer place to vote,
unionize and politically organize -- you never hear about it in the editorial
pages of the New York Times or in remarks given by our diplomats.
South of the Border
is a biting critique of the American media's coverage of the movement
-- sparing no major news outlet. The movie opens with a bumbling,
outrageous clip featuring Fox News' Gretchen Carlson essentially
accusing Bolivian president Evo Morales of being a cocaine addict (he
chews coca leaves, as most Bolivians have for generations, so as to
withstand the nation's high altitudes), but Stone also calls out our
so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, for
endorsing (and then recanting its endorsement of) the failed 2002
U.S.-backed military coup of Chávez, a democratically elected leader.
It is no surprise, then, that the mainstream media has made
valiant efforts to pan South of the Border. Larry Rohter wrote a particularly
damning article in the Times in which he details what he views as the
documentary's "mistakes, misstatements and missing details." (It's curious that
the Times
let him write the piece in the first place given that Rohter is the
newspaper's former longtime South American bureau chief, responsible
for penning a 2004 factually imaginative article which claimed that Lula had a
drinking problem that negatively impacted his job as president of Brazil.)
Although Stone and co-writer Tariq Ali, the historian and
commentator, have handily refuted
all of Rohter's qualms with their film, once the movie opens nationwide
we can expect more corporate media outlets to spout talking points
similar to Rohter's, and of course to repeat the same less
sophisticated barbs CNN and Fox News have long been propagating about
the move to the left in Latin America.
What the media is unlikely to publicize is the fact that South
of the Border
demonstrates that Latin American leaders have a genuine interest in
maintaining good relations with America -- even Raúl Castro of Cuba
professes his love for the American people. The presidents Stone meets
with speak of their hope in Barack Obama's presidency -- they view his
replacing Bush as a tremendous win for the relationship between the
United States and their countries. (Things were really bad, after all.
Former Argentinian president Nestor Kirchner, now succeeded by his wife
Cristina, tells an appalling anecdote about asking Bush for a Marshall
Plan for Latin America; Bush reportedly replied that the best way to
revitalize an economy is to engage in war.)
As
positive as these new Latin American heads of state are about Obama's
presidency, they are not waiting around for the United States to extend
a hand. Already Argentina and Brazil are engaging in trade in their own
currencies, having dropped the dollar. Lula envisions an end to IMF
(and American) economic control of the region -- Brazil has paid off
its foreign debt and boasts a $260 billion surplus -- and a
continent-wide effort to strengthen labor unions. Evo has banned all
foreign military bases in Bolivia; Correa told the United States it
could build a military base in Ecuador only if he could build one in
Miami. Fernando Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop now president of
Paraguay, has revived the liberation theology of the 1960s, which calls
for the humanization of socio-economic structures that benefit all --
especially the most destitute. And all of these nations want to help
reintegrate Cuba into the global system.
There
was little about the film I did not find fascinating or compelling.
Requisite disclosure: I was raised in Latin America -- mostly Brazil,
but also Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala -- and believe that a move to
a multi-polar world is a really good thing. As a Latin American, it is
awesomely heartening to see not only governors who actually look like
the people they govern -- Evo and Lula in particular -- after years of
presidents culled only from the lighter-skinned, wealthier classes, but
to see that the continent's new leaders are making concerted efforts to
address the plague of poverty and ill distribution of opportunities
that have long defined the region. In fact, I'd argue that having
leaders that come from the same background as the majority of the
population is the only way real change is ever going to come to Latin
America.
Daniela Perdomo is a staff writer and editor at AlterNet.
Follow Daniela on Twitter. Write her at danielaalternet [at] gmail [dot] com.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute.
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