THE WAR ON DEMOCRACY (Parts II and III)
THE WAR ON DEMOCRACY (II & III)
A film by John Pilger (2007: 94 minutes)
Return to Part I
PART TWO (31:10)
JOHN (PTC): President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to leave the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history - hidden history, suppressed history, history that explains why we in the West know a lot about the crimes of others but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is empire, the existence of an American empire is rarely acknowledged or it’s smothered in displays of jingoism that celebrates war and an arrogance that says no country has a right to go their own way unless they way co-insides the interest of the United States. For empires have nothing to do with freedom, they’re vicious. They’re about conquest and theft and control and secrets. Since 1945 the United States has attempted to overthrow 50 Governments, many of them democracies. In the process 30 countries have been attacked and bombed, causing the loss of countless lives.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/1: In my lifetime, the following countries in Latin America have been assaulted by the United States, directly and indirectly, their Governments replaced by dictators and other pro-Washington leaders.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/1: One of the first to be attacked was Guatemala, one of the small countries of Central America known dismissively as banana republics.
COMMENTARY: This is Guatemala city as seen from the air. People who live in this city dress very much like the people in our own Southern states. There are many churches and people go to church regularly. They speak Spanish of course, because most of them are of Spanish descent.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/3: In fact most of the people of Guatemala are not of Spanish descent. They’re indigenous Mayan people and very poor. In the 1950’s, 2% of the population of Guatemala controlled the natural wealth, in collusion with giant US corporations like the United fruit company which dominated banana-growing.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/4: On the board of United Fruit was John Foster Dulles, who happened to be US Secretary of State. His brother Allan happened to run the CIA. Both were Christian fundamentalists who regarded any opposition as the work of communism and the devil.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/5: In 1950, this man, Jacobo Arbenz, became the first Guatemalan leader to be democratically elected by a majority of his people who saw in him the hope of social justice. He was the Hugo Chavez of his day.
GREG GRANDIN: What was going on Guatemala is that is that there was a democratically elected president in 1950, Jacobo Arbenz who sought to institute a series of new deal style reforms in which the state had a greater role in both developing the economy and redistributing wealth and the centre piece of that was a land reform.
JOHN VO Pt2/6: Arbenz was far from radical. His land reform policies were modest. But Washington was having none of it. Howard Hunt was then working for Allan Dulles’ CIA.
HOWARD HUNT: They said a decision has been made at the highest levels of our Government to rid Guatemala of the Arbenz regime and we would like you to participate in it. You will be chief of propaganda and political action.
GREG GRANDIN: In Guatemala what the CIA did was mobilise every facet of American power, it didn’t just isolate Guatemala militarily and diplomatically but it used the techniques of social psychology in a nearly yearlong campaign which created a sense of crisis in Guatemala.
HOWARD HUNT: What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of WW2.
JOHN VO Pt2/7: And that’s what they did - so that the US could control the economy of Guatemala, destroying the dreams of its people.
HOWARD HUNT V/O: We sowed confusion through the countryside.
HOWARD HUNT – IN VISION: …And of course by this time we had aircraft flying over and dropping leaflets and doing a little harmless bombing.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/8: A little harmless bombing and a CIA terror campaign cost thousands of lives.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/8: Arbenz, the democrat now branded a communist, was humiliated, stripped naked and photographed before being forced into exile
JOHN (VO) Pt2/9: Richard Nixon, then vice president of the United States, flew in to congratulate the new dictators.
RICHARD NIXON: Guatemala is going to enter a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people together with liberty for the people.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/10: General Rios Montt was to be one of Washington’s faces of liberty. During his time as President in the 1980’s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads, most of them indigenous men, women and children. His guns and helicopters came from the United States. President Regan flew in to warmly endorse the General, whom he described as “a man of great personal integrity”.
PHILLIP AGEE: In the CIA we didn’t give a hoot about democracy. It was fine if a Government were elected and would co-operate with us. But if it didn’t, then democracy didn’t mean a thing to us, and I don’t think it means a thing today.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/11: The crushing of Guatemala was Washington’s blueprint. Four years later, Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida, threw down the first direct challenge, ending Cuba’s humiliation as a North American colony: a playpen for drug barons and the mafia.
ARCHIVE FILM OF FIDEL CASTRO GIVING A SPEECH: They now know that the Cuban revolution knows how to fight and win battles.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/11: Washington would never forgive Fidel Castro
RICHARD HELMS: Under the Government aegis we had task forces that were striking in Cuba constantly. We were attempting to blow up power plants; we were attempting to ruin sugar mills, we were attempting to do all kinds of things during this period. This was a matter of American Government policy, this wasn’t the CIA.
JOHN V/O Pt2/12: Cuba’s achievements, in health care and education are widely respected. However, for not bowing to the greatest power on earth, the Cuban revolution has paid a high price- a 45-year economic war waged by the United States and the loss of vital democratic freedoms.
JOSE SERRANO: How dare you at ninety miles from my country, last forty five years with a different form of government how dare you haven’t allowed American corporations to buy you out. How dare you continue this arrogance that says you will never succumb to us. Don’t you know who we are? Don’t you know who these corporations are? Don’t you know your life would be better if you could drink coca cola every day?
JOHN (VO) Pt2/13: What justified the attacks on Cuba and other Latin American countries was the so-called Red Menace.
TEACHER: We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous since it may be used against us so we must get ready for it. First you duck, and then you cover, and very tightly you cover the back of your neck and your face.
JOHN (V/O): Propaganda like this excused every American invasion, every toppling of a government, every assassination, every act of terrorism. The real threat was an orchestrated paranoia in the United States that became a super-cult called anti-communism.
PHILIP AGEE V/O: The true goal of the United States government is control and they feel that if the United States did not control the governments of Latin America, then somebody else would. (IN VISION) And the principal of government by the people, for the people, of the people - that is just silly.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/14: This is Santiago, the capital of Chile. In 1973, the National stadium was turned into a concentration camp as a military coup, backed by the United States, overthrew the democratically-elected Government of Salvador Allende. The leader of the coup was a fascist, General Augosto Pinochet, who rounded up Allende supporters and brought them here. A young medical student Roberto Navarette was one of them.
JOHN: These changing rooms were used as what when you were imprisoned here?
ROBERTO: They were used as places where people were kept inside here, 50 or more. You can see there was actually no room for people to move around here, even though these places were full of people sleeping here, and there were no blankets or anything. Even some people actually slept here, there was very little room.
JOHN: When they started to torture you all, what did they do to you then?
ROBERT: The techniques they used were, beating you especially in places where it could become very painful, with a rubber truncheon, especially in the genitals and the souls of the feet and the arms and various places.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/15: Over 2,000 people were confined here, many of them never to be seen again.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/16: Victor Jara was Chile’s greatest balladeer. His songs had celebrated the popular democracy of the Government of Salvador Allende. He was taken to the stadium, where he was a source of strength for his fellow prisoners, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. In his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium, he wrote, “What horror the face of fascism creates, they carry out their plans with knife like precision. For them, blood equals medals. How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror. In which silence and screams are the end of my song.” After 2 days [of torture], they killed him.
JOHN: How old were you?
ROBERTO: I was 18.
JOHN: The fear that you experienced then, is that something that imprints itself on the rest of your life?
ROBERTO: Yes, because we felt it was part of what we were trying to build in this country.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/16: What they were trying to build was a just, equitable democracy that took control of Chile’s economy from the United States and its proxies. For the invisible people of Latin America, Chile under Allende became an inspiration.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/17: In Washington, President Nixon secretly plotted to destroy the Chilean economy. “We’re going to make the economy scream!” said Nixon.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/17: In Santiago, General Pinochet, America’s man, sent in his British-made bombers against the Presidential Palace. It was September the 11th, 1973, a date that held an infamy and irony 28 years later.
NATHANIEL DAVIS– SOME IN V/O: “My wife and our children were at the house and they had a marvellous view of these planes winging over and then dipping down and sending their bombs into the Moneda.”
JOHN (VO) Pt2/18: From inside the Palace, Allende refused to leave. True to his promise, not to surrender the Government for which the ordinary people of Chile had voted. He broadcast this last message, then he shot himself.
ALLENDE VO – SUBTITLED TRANSLATION: Workers - I have faith in Chile and its destiny. For knowing, sooner rather than later, avenues will be open which free men will walk to build a better society. Long live Chile, the people, and the workers.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/19: With General Pinochet in power, Washington again denied it had destroyed another democracy.
HENRY KISSINGER: We have no contact with any of the people who have already carried out the military coup and therefore the coup that over threw Allende was done without conduct, contact with the United States.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/20: A very different story is told by these secret documents. In October 1970, the CIA cabled its man in Chile: ‘’It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup’’ When that happened three years later, a US official cabled back to Washington, “Chile’s coup d’etat was close to perfect.’’
JOHN: Fascism is a word that is often misused but you’ve experienced the real fear.
ROBERTO: Yes, I think so
JOHN: When did you realise that you were ensnarled by fascism, when did it manifest itself?
ROBERTO: I think it was evident from the very beginning. Just the velocity, the sheer brute force that they used, the disregard for any sort of human dignity. Their aim was really to make you into a thing, I think in order to protect themselves. Because if they made you into a thing then they didn’t have to have human feelings towards you, they de-humanised you, from the very beginning.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/21: Once again a Latin American elite was delighted to be rescued by fascism.
WOMAN IN BLUE: A country has to be well set, has to be well run, well worked. That’s if everyone does the work, because if they don’t, then that country goes to the dogs. And this [Pinochet] is the one man that’s been able to hold them. I don’t believe there’s any torturing being done in this country because you have to understand one thing, why torture somebody when you can shoot them?
JOHN (VO) Pt2/22: This is [one place] where they tortured and killed them. Villa Grimaldi was once a palatial home in a suburb of Santiago. Under Pinochet, it became a place of horror. Today it is a memorial to its many victims. Sarah De Witt, then a student activist, is a survivor.
JOHN SYNC: What was the date you were arrested. Do you remember?
SARAH: Oh yes, I was picked up on the 3rd of April, 1975, 7 o-clock on the dot.
JOHN: So the Junta had been in power for about 18 months.
SARAH: Yes. So when I realised someone had what I had imagined was a gun on my back and saying to me, “Don’t make any noise, don’t try to run because we will shoot you. You are coming with us,” [I couldn’t do anything].
JOHN (VO) Pt2/23: In a strange wooden tower like this, in spaces the size of a dog’s kennel, people were tortured to death.
SARAH (VO): They took me to this room; you know they were pinching me, hitting me, grabbing my nipples, telling me I was a whore. So they asked me to take off my clothes and they tied me and then they hooked me up to electricity. Now, the electricity was all the time inside my vagina, my breasts, and then it was going round, you know, round my body, my legs, my arms. And when they did that, they would start asking me questions and then touching me everywhere, shouting abuse and then they would go and they would continue with the electricity.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/24: Duane Clarridge was head of the CIA Latin American division in the early 1980s.
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Chile, the only reason it exists is because of Pinochet.
JOHN: At a huge human price.
DUANE: What human price? Give me a break!
JOHN: The thousands who were disappeared and murdered.
DUANE: Thousands? You count them? What thousands? And don’t talk to me about truth commissions.
JOHN: I’ve seen their names in the cemeteries in Santiago. You’re saying their fakes?
DUANE: There aren’t thousands, there aren’t thousands, aren’t thousands, sir!
JOHN VO Pt2/25: There are thousands, each name documented by human rights organisations, some of them remembered here on the memorial wall at Villa Grimalda.
JOHN: You have a couple of friends [listed] there, like Jacqueline?
SARAH: Yes, yes I have friends [listed there] - mainly people from my training. There is a girl there, Jacqueline Rugee, another one Cecilia Labrim, she was pregnant, Cecilla was 3 months pregnant when they took her. They took another woman, Elizabeth Reja, she was 7 months pregnant. She went missing as well.
JOHN: Doesn’t bare thinking about does it?
SARAH: No, because sometimes, I think about what were they feeling when they were being killed and why. And you know, and well sometimes I think too much [about it] and I start feeling, you know, the pain, and what you feel when you are being killed in such a way. I find it frightening really because you wish you could have done something for them. The isolation, you feel totally, I don’t know…l
JOHN VO: Alone?
SARAH: Yes, very, very much alone…
JOHN: It was a period in which almost everybody in the present situation regards as a dark time, in which the CIA played a major role.
DUANE CLARRIDGE: That’s right. They played a major role in overthrowing what’s his name.
JOHN: Ah what’s his name was Salvador Allende.
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Err yup, fine, okay.
JOHN: He was democratically elected.
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Right, okay.
JOHN: Is that okay to overthrow a democratically elected government?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: I have no… it depends what your national security interests are.
JOHN: Are you denying that Pinochet caused huge suffering in that country?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Huge.. I don’t buy. That he committed crimes, I agree.
JOHN: Its worth it.. Is that what you are saying, that those crimes are worth it?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Yeah, sometimes unfortunately things have to be changed in a rather ugly way.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/26: By the late 1970’s, most of Latin America was controlled by dictators including those, like Pinochet, who were openly fascist. All of them were backed, directly and indirectly, by the United States.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/27: They sent their henchmen to be trained here, at the School of the Americas, in Georgia. Officially it was described as a little bit more than a Boy Scout camp, teaching American values, such as the respect for human rights.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/28: In fact, from these manuals were taught interrogation and torture techniques. Major Joseph Blair taught at the school of Americas in the early 1980’s.
JOSEPH BLAIR: The Doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, you use false imprisonment, you use threats to family members, you use virtually any method necessary to get what you want.
JOHN V/O: Torture?
JOSEPH BLAIR: … and killing.
JOHN V/O: Killing?
JOSEPH BLAIR: Killing. If there’s someone you don’t want [around], you kill them. If you don’t, if you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate ‘em, and youassassinate ‘em with one of your death squads.
JOHN VO Pt2/29: This is a death squad in action in El Salvador, actually it’s the national police, many of whom were trained at the School of the Americas. Here, on the steps of San Salvador cathedral, they are gunning down mourners attending the funeral of Archbishop Romero who was murdered as he said mass on March 23, 1980. This man Robert D’Aubibisson, gave the order to kill the archbishop. Major D’Aubisson was Washington’s dirty secret in El Salvador. He was trained at the School of the Americas.
JOHN: According to the [United Nations] Truth Commission and a whole swathe of human [rights organizations]…
DUANE (INTERRUPTS): Come on John… if this is where we’re going, you’re wasting my time. That’s all bullshit. Those people all had agendas.
JOHN: So it was bullshit that the Salvadorian Military were murdering tens of thousands of people in Salvador…
DUANE (INTERRUPTS): No. Not tens of thousands. I bet you can’t count more than 200 in the whole ten or twelve years.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/30: We can count [many more than] 200 in this one village alone. They were mostly women and children, systematically murdered in just one day and night in December 1981, in the village of El Mozote. The killers belonged to a special battalion of the El Salvador army trained by the United States. There were few survivors.
RUFINA AMAYA: [ SUBTITLED TRANSLATION] V/O: “I saw the women clinging to each other, crying and screaming at them not to kill them.
IN-VISION: I fought for my children; I didn’t want to let them go. I said I would die with them but they wrenched them from my arms. We heard them killing the children – they killed them at night – you could hear their screams for their mothers and fathers.
DUANE CLARRIDGE: You are taking the stuff from these propaganda mills and I’m not interested in it.
JOHN: What are the propaganda mills?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: All these things, this truth thing and all that, they’re nothing but propaganda mills.
JOHN: Do you really think they’re…?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: I know so!
JOHN: Are they all conning us, liars? Amnesty International...
DUANE CLARRIDGE: Amnesty International is right in the middle of it.
JOHN (VO) Pt2/31: During the 1980’s, the years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, a trail of carnage and grief was blazed across Central America. I reported on America’s war against Nicaragua – [a country] which had the temerity to overthrow a Washington-backed dictator, Somoza. The CIA attacked Nicaragua with death squads known as the Contra. Why did Washington attack such tiny countries? Because the weaker they are, the greater the threat. People who can free themselves against all the odds are sure to inspire others.
JOHN: What right have you, when I mean you, I mean the CIA, the United States government, or any foreign power, what right do you have to do what you do in other countries?
DUANE: National security interests
JOHN: But then, that’s a divine right isn’t it, because people that you do it to have no say in this?
DUANE: Well that’s just tough, we are gonna protect ourselves and we are gonna go on protecting ourselves because we end up protecting all of you. And let’s not forget that!
JOHN: Right, right, no I won’t.
DUANE: We intervene whenever we decide it is in our national interests to intervene. And if you don’t like it. lump it. Get used to it world, we are not going to put up with nonsense. And if our interests are threatened, we’re gonna do it.
JOHN VO Pt2/32: In Guatemala, the United Nations described the Washington-backed campaign against the Mayan people as genocide. An American Roman Catholic nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, experienced this at first hand as a missionary. In 1989 after speaking out about the brutal treatment of the indigenous people, she was kidnapped.
DIANNA ORTIZ: In 1989, November second, I was abducted and I was put in a police car, blindfolded and taken to a military installation in Guatemala City, known as the Polytechnica, which still exist today. I was taken to a basement and… I still remember to this day, upon entering, the building, the clandestine prison, hearing the screams of people being tortured. Can we stop [can’t go on]?
JOHN VO Pt2/33: For 24 hours, she was tortured and gang raped. During her ordeal, she identified the leader of the gang rape as a fellow citizen of the United States.
DIANA ORTIZ: I came out a totally different person. But also with new eyes, and more attuned to the hurting, the brokenness, the oppression, the deceit of my government. I’ve heard people say that what happened in Abu Ghraib is an isolated incident and I have to just shake my head and say, you know, are we on the same planet? You know, aren’t you aware of our history? Isn’t history taught in the classroom about the role of the US government in human rights violations?
END PART TWO (1:09:40)
PART THREE (23: 10)
JOHN VO Pt2/34: By the late 1980’s, Washington’s policy changed. Dictators like Pinochet were seen as an unnecessary embarrassment. A new and innovative way of controlling nations was launched.
ARCHIVE: REGAN SPEECH: “Good morning and welcome. It’s good to have you all here to help celebrate the launching of a programme with a vision and a noble purpose. The National Endowment for Democracy is, we’ve been told, more than bi partisan. The establishment of the National Endowment goes right to the heart of America’s faith in democratic ideals and institutions. It offers hope to people everywhere.”
JOHN (VO) Pt2/35: Like any new brand it had a snappy name – democracy. It was largely fake, an illusion of marketing and spin. This brand of democracy meant that whoever you voted for, the policies would be broadly the same and your country’s economy would be in step with the United States. Washington would be your closest friend - or else.
JOHN VO Pt2/36: In the 1990s, these democracies in name replaced dictatorships in Latin America, with Chile providing the model.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/1: This is the commercial centre of Santiago, Chile. On the surface today, everything seems normal, modern, prosperous. To the Bush administration, Chile is the very model of economic success: “a laboratory experiment”, according to the magazine Business Week. Much of life has been privatised. There are now billionaires and the rich are getting richer.
DUANE CLARRIDGE V/O: Pinochet fixed the country.
JOHN: Who said this? The United States said this?
DUANE CLARRIDGE: No, no. The World Bank says. The inter American Bank says. Everybody says it. He bought about an economic miracle in Chile. Not saying he had the brains for it but he had the brains to hire all these people, Chileans, who had studied at the University of Chicago who knew something about real economics.
JOHN VO Pt3/2: “Real economics” were advocated by Milton Friedman, an extreme right-wing economist at the University of Chicago. Friedman was invited to perform his “laboratory experiment” on the economic life of Chile. The families of the tortured and disappeared were silent witnesses. Without irony, he called his experiment “shock treatment”.
PRESIDENT BUSH JNR: “Please be seated. Thank you all very much. It’s an honour for me to be here to pay tribute to a hero of freedom, Milton Freidman. He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision. We have seen Milton Freidman’s ideas at work in Chile where a group of economists called ‘The Chicago Boys’ brought inflation under control and laid the groundwork for economic success.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/3: This is the other side of the economic miracle. Chile today is a deeply unequal society. This shanty town is just minutes from Santiago’s smart hotels.
HERMANIA [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: There are so many unemployed, there are thousands unemployed. And those who work, their pay isn’t enough, so how can they pay for electricity? How can they pay for water? They have to buy gas [and other necessities] – everything must be paid for. Every day a mother asks, “How am I going to feed my children?’ How can I afford it?
JOHN VO Pt3/4: We found this couple living and freezing in a shanty town, they’re homeless and have a week old baby.
INTERVIEWER [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: What’s it like to live in these conditions?
YOUNG FATHER [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: The cold at night is hardest for the baby.
INT [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: Do many people live like this in Chile?
YOUNG MOTHER [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: There are plenty, and worse off than we are. They don’t get any help from anyone.
INT V/O [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: Where will you go?
YOUNG FATHER V/O [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: Back to the streets. We’ve slept rough before.
INT [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: Abroad, in Europe, and the USA, it’s said that life in Chile is rich and comfortable, is that so?
YOUNG MOTHER [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: It’s true for the well off, but not for us.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/5: Chile is a democracy now, in theory. A complicated voting system splits the vote and discourages real reform. It’s a product of General Pinochet based on a constitution that’s also a product of Pinochet. The General may be dead, but the power of the military remains. It’s all very modern. The media is safe, and many believe it’s wise to be silent, like the graves of their forgotten compatriots. It’s Washington’s ideal democracy.
FELIPE: [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: The dictatorship was a great success in Chile in that it established the political, economical and social model that prevails to this day. Because in essence, the Constitution imposed in 1980 has not changed.
HERMINIA CONCHA [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: We don’t have a democracy because that word has been so badly used. It’s not understood. Here, it means a persecution against the poor, and not just in Chile. But this is happening all over Latin America. I think educated people realise that this is reaching a breaking point.
V/O: I believe the people will wake up and say, “that’s enough!”
JOHN (VO) Pt3/6: This is Bolivia, another laboratory experiment. The majority of the population of this spectacular, brutalised country high in the Andes have also been invisible until recently. The indigenous people, the Aymara and Quechua, carry memories of a culture and civilisation and wealth long before the Spanish arrived 500 years ago. They remember how a single hill of silver underwrote the entire Spanish empire while they became the poorest [of nations].
JOHN V/O: This is the National Congress of Bolivia. Until recently the faces here were almost all white… the decedents of a tiny Spanish elite which plundered the nations’ riches and reduced the indigenous majority to serfdom. It was a pattern of control repeated all over Latin America. The pattern has been broken[ recently] in Bolivia with a rise of social justice movements of a kind never seen before and whose democratic home is not Westminster or Washington or any other so-called model, but in the streets, the minds, the barrios, the fields. Governments that defy this popular power, this true democracy do so at their own peril.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/7: This is El Alto, the highest city on earth and perhaps the poorest; the occupants of this cemetery on the roof of the world are mainly children. Protected, they say, by the sacred mountain Illimanu, El Alto overlooks Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, has lived here for most of his life.
JUAN DELFIN V/O GV’S [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: This is Villa Ingenio. It’s the cemetery of the north area in El Alto. TO CAM: [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: There is a sorrowful bitterness here. Our brothers, our children, our grandparents are dead and buried here.
V/O: There was one family that poisoned themselves - the whole family, because of lack of work and lack of money. First the husband poisoned his wife and children and then he poisoned himself. We have seen [many] cases like this.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/8: When I first came to Bolivia in the 1960s, El Alto barely existed. The million people living here are peasants run off their land and miners made redundant by policies similar to those imposed in Chile. Infrastructure that didn’t make a quick buck was privatised. The message was clear: sell it, strip it or scrap it. The indigenous people were scrapped.
JUAN DELPHINE V/O [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: We wonder, why? If I am Bolivian, born rich [in a country with wealth], why am I begging?
JUAN DELPHINE – TO CAM [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: We have the sea, silver and gold. We have everything, why are we still suffering?
JOHN (VO) Pt3/9: And yet the people here have held together their sense of identity and community.
JOHN V/O: In the year 2000, the people of Bolivia’s second largest city, Cochabamba, fought an epic struggle to win back their most basic resource – water - from a foreign consortium dominated by the American corporation, Bechtel. And they won. Three years later, in 2003, Bolivia’s power brokers were about to get another shock.
JOHN VO Pt3/10: This is Gonzalo Sanchez De Losada. Known as Goni, he was brought up in Washington. His English is better than his Spanish, they knew him here as El Gringo.
ISABELLA [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: I saw him as a fat man sitting on a golden chair. Arrogant... perhaps he was arrogant because of the power he had which was his wealth.
JOHN VO Pt3/10: When Goni was elected President of Bolivia in 2003, he backed a law that amounted to a fire sale of the countries resources. Almost everything was up for grabs including Latin America’s second biggest gas reserves.
JUAN DELFIN [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: We know we have[much natural] gas and it is being sold abroad to the almighty US, yet still I use wood for cooking. This is why the war [opposition to government policies] starts. We will block, strike, and demonstrate until we get a response.
JOHN VO Pt3/11: The people of El Alto fought back, blocking the roads leading into La Paz.
ISABELA V/O [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: There were callings to start blockades. Not even a fly would move.
IN VISION: We stopped traffic and so on, but it gradually… what’s the word? It gradually intensified.
JOHN VO Pt3/12: Goni’s response was the traditional Latin American way – he sent in the army to crush dissent. Scores were shot dead. Many were brought to Juan Delfin’s church.
DELFIN: [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: The tables were here. The bodies were here. They removed the bullets with nails even. It was sad to see this… The place was full. There were doctors everywhere. The smell of death was intense. All the orphans were crying and shouting: “Dad!, Dad!, Daddy!”
JOHN (VO) Pt3/13: Tens of thousands of people poured down into La Paz. Like the people of Venezuela’s barrios demanding the return of their president, they demanded their country back. If the rich and powerful of Latin America had a nightmare, this was it.
JUAN DELFIN v/o [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: We suddenly heard that goni was going to resign.
IN VISION [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: With one down we felt inspired. It gave us strength. That was the aim. To make him resign.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/14: Goni fled to the United States and is today living in a rich suburb of Washington. In October 2004, the Bolivian congress ordered his arrest on charges of “bloody massacre”. George Bush has said, “Governments that harbour terrorists are as guilty as they are.”
JOHN v/o Pt3/15: This extraordinary mural was painted by Juan Delfin. It’s a cry of freedom from an entire continent.
JUAN DELFIN INFRONT OF MURAL [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: They have been killing us for years, but we defend the Aymara people with our voice, with our fist, with the flag we wave, the Whipala, against the United States. This is the United States flag. We are against this because they have put us in the situation we are in. The fist is very important. That’s how we are – [angry and defiant]. That’s us.
JOHN (VO) Pt3/16: In 2005, the people of Bolivia took an historic step. For the first time ever, an indigenous person was voted President in a landslide. Like Chavez in Venezuela Evo Morales offered a new democracy and a new beginning.
ARCHIVE: EVO MORALES [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: “We ask everyone to start working together. The party [only for the rich] is over. The honeymoon is over. It’s over forever – let’s work for a new Bolivia.”
CHAVEZ V/O [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: There is no doubt that it is growing. It is propagating itself over the whole continent of Latin America, of the Caribbean too, but mainly in South America. I go around Latin America from Buenos Ares to Brasilia and to Montevideo and La Paz, and there is a fervour sparking off everywhere, there is a fervour.
JP V/O Pt3/17: In Latin America, there’s now a host of leaders offering new beginnings. Of course, history is crowded with heroes who offer new beginnings. The respectability of great power and its games and deals and plunder always beckon. If these new leaders succumb, their biggest threat may not be from Washington but from the people on the hillsides….
MARIELA [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: The future is for my children, for our young people. This isn’t just Chavez’s struggle – it’s our struggle. What Chavez has unleashed is a recognition of this struggle and we are in it together, and we’ll carry on fighting. So the empire’s struggle isn’t with Chavez – it’s with us.
CHAVEZ [SUBTITLED TRANSLATION]: The great awakening has arrived. And I think Victor Hugo, let’s end with him, I’m with him on this. Victor Hugo wrote this: “There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The American empire has reached its end. And the world must now be governed by the rule of law, of equality, of justice, of fraternity. Thank you very much John. [in ENGLISH]: See you again.
JOHN (PTC): What happened here at the National Stadium here in Santiago, Chile has a special place in the struggle for freedom and democracy throughout Latin America and the world. The vow is never again. And yet it has happened again at Guantanamo Bay and all the other secret places where imperial power regardless of its democratic pretensions, hides and tortures it’s perceived enemies. The questions raised in this film are urgent, are the lives and dreams of the ordinary people of Chile, like the people of Venezuela, like the people of Bolivia, like the people of Nicaragua, like the people of Vietnam, and Iraq, Iran and Palestine expendable, worth only a few seconds on the news if they’re lucky? The answer is no, and those who see the world through the eyes of the powerful should be warned. People are rising from the tyranny and oblivion that we in the West have consigned them. Indeed, their resistance is well underway as this film has shown. I would say it never stopped and is unbeatable.
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