[THS] Oliver Stone Tells the Real Story of the Leftist Latin American Leaders

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25932.htm

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.