Playing dirty
in their backyard

>> Journalist and documentary filmmaker
John Pilger examines the uncomfortable
truths of American influence in Latin
America in The War on Democracy

AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME:
Pilger at Santiago, Chile’s infamous Estadio Nacional

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The weekend following Thursday, April 11, 2002, was a strange one. For weeks, tensions had been bubbling very close to the surface in Venezuela. Its populist, mercurial president, Hugo Chavez, had been trying to impose more government control over the country’s national oil company, by far its biggest moneymaker, alienating Venezuela’s elite in the process.

Following street-level clashes, top military officers seized the presidential palace and forced Chavez out of office. Pedro Carmona, then president of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, was sworn in as president of the country. Of all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, only the United States and Chile recognized the new regime.

Then, something remarkable happened. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, many of them the poorest in the country, took to the streets to demand Chavez’s return. The new regime caved, and less than 48 hours after the coup, Chavez was back in office.

While the Bush regime vigorously denied any foreknowledge, subsequent investigations by journalists and human rights group establish Washington’s acquiescence—and its outright though secret financial and political support—of the coup. The British Observer says links between the U.S. government and the plotters are “established.”

If the Observer and countless other reports are to be believed, this would only be the latest attempt by Washington to subvert local Latin American democracies for their own gain. The history of American intervention in the region is a long and sordid one, and British-based journalist John Pilger takes a very critical look at it in his new film, The War on Democracy. The film, screening next week for two nights only, makes its Canadian premiere as a co-presentation of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal and Cinema Politica. Pilger will be present at both screenings as part of a Canadian tour organized by SPHR. The Mirror contacted Pilger by phone and e-mail at his home in London.

Imperial mess

The film—Pilger’s first for cinema, following a long career in television and print—is not about Chavez, he insists. While the first third or so of it deals with the Venezuelan experience, including the continued health of the country’s upper and middle class and its “servile” opposition press (despite the refusal to extend the licence for opposition TV stations), as well as the improvements made by his “Bolivarian socialism” reforms for the poorest, his scope encompasses almost all of Latin America—a region often referred to in the U.S. as their “backyard.”

“Understanding the United States’s relationship with Latin America is understanding the historic relationship of great power to its ‘spheres of influence,’” he writes. “The same can be said for understanding the British relationship with India. This is imperialism, a word now returning to common usage, thanks to George W. Bush and Tony Blair. My experience is that it’s otherwise impossible to make sense of the world unless you view the unending struggle between a great power, seeking strategic advantage and resources, and subjected societies. The plunder of Latin America is a metaphor for much of the world.”

Pilger makes a convincing argument. From Venezuela, the film moves to Chile, still recovering from the darkness of the Pinochet years. There, after interviewing survivors of torture at the Estadio Nacional, a huge track-and-field stadium, he examines a political system that still excludes the poor, and on to Central America, the main battleground of so many of the United States’s “dirty wars.”

Whenever a left-wing government came into power—one that even hinted at the possibility of land reforms or nationalizing resources—it was ultimately doomed. Sometimes “a little harmless bombing,” in the words of the unrepentant former CIA agent, and later Watergate burglar, Howard Hunt, would do the trick. Other approaches included targeted assassinations, economic sanctions or the training and organization of death squads at the infamous School of the Americas in the U.S.

And yet Pilger still is able to interview men and women for whom this is all small beer. Duane Clarridge, a former CIA man, uses “national security” to justify the horrors committed in his country’s name, and tells those who have qualms about his methods to “like it or lump it,” and dismisses allegations of mass murder at the hands of Pinochet’s regime as “bullshit.” Another woman asks, in a breezy, off-hand manner, “Why torture people when you can shoot them?” It’s a jaw-dropping moment.

The power of propaganda

Throughout the film, the myth of American exceptionalism is exploded. Citing national security—or manifest destiny, or the civilizing influence—to justify the most egregious misdeeds abroad is, Pilger says, akin to citing divine right. It’s just something empires do. “The British and French thought no differently, running their empires,” he writes.

Empires, be they American, English, French or any other, have one thing in common, says Pilger in the film. They are “vicious, thieving and secretive.” They are run, writes Pilger, by secret agents like Hunt, Clarridge and “enlightened former CIA people” like Philip Agee, who admits frankly that the agency doesn’t “give a hoot about democracy.” Loyal citizens at home either don’t know, or don’t care, about foreign adventures and the toll they take abroad.

Thus Chavez is seen as a rapacious, power-mad dictator in waiting, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government an imminent threat and even modest leftists like Chile’s Salvador Allende must be eliminated. It’s a theme regurgitated, he says, by a compliant press with little interest in challenging power.

“The propaganda during the Reagan years [about Nicaragua’s Sandinista government] was absurd,” he says. “Nicaragua was mostly a free-market economy, and it was a tiny country. The most radical elements tried to adopt principles of a cooperative movement. But there was a hysteria about any country going its own way.” The white noise the White House emitted and the mass media repeated was like “a dense fog you had to go through before you find out the truth.”

The anti-Chavez pattern was repeated, to a lesser degree, when other anti-American leaders were elected in other parts of South America, notably Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. “Again, there’s lots of hysteria,” says Pilger. Because he was a leader in the opposition to the privatization of Bolivia’s natural gas resources, Morales was depicted as another threat to American interests, but Pilger says Morales is one of the movement’s most conservative figures. “Most of his career was compromising with his political enemies,” he says. “He just didn’t want his country to be ripped off.”

Ecuador’s Correa is someone who “made his own compromises, someone who picked up the scent of what’s happening and implemented some very important policies.” Correa may be swimming in dangerous waters, however: last month, he said he would not renew the lease of an American air force base on the country’s Pacific coast unless the U.S. allowed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami.

Lessons learned

In the film, Chavez says there is a “great awakening” throughout Latin America, and a growing belief that the American Empire is finished. Much of the continent is still trying to develop functioning democracies, and Pilger says the developed West is in no position to teach them.

“I think we produce autocrats who dare not describe themselves that way,” he says. “Liberal democracy has failed in the West…. What they’re trying to do in Latin America is part of a long tradition of finding their own way towards democracy. It’s worthy of a debate about democracy and the way we do it in the West.”

Indeed, as America’s global reputation collapses, he sees a country in dire need of repair. “It’s in a crisis of systems, of its own democratic systems,” he says. “The [2008] election won’t make a difference, although getting rid of Bush will produce a sigh of relief—most people realize now that he’s an embarrassment and a danger—but what will replace him? The Democrats are an utter disgrace. They won both houses of Congress [last year] with a mandate that clearly said to get out of Iraq, but instead they voted $124-billion to stay in.”

Asked how the United States can possibly repair its reputation, he says, “That’s up to it. It’s for all the millions of good people who worry about what their government is doing around the world to put pressure on their government to leave other countries alone.”