“Our Brand is Crisis” was quite an intriguing movie directed by Rachel Boynton.  It quickly details the story of how the political marketing firm of Greenberg Carville Shrum, tried to help sway the election in favor of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. They were successful in getting him elected, and then they stayed to try to help him lead the country through its political and financial crisis through the uses of poll data and focus groups. Ultimately they were unsuccessful in keeping him in power, as he was deposed just a short while after.

What is so interesting about this movie is that in a strange way, it closely parallels some of the movies that we watched earlier in the year. We saw how revolutions in Cuba, and political unrest was caused in large part by the American businessmen trying to export the American way of doing business and causing problems in the first place. The problems back then were created by Americans just not caring enough who was hurt or what people were run over in the process of making a profit. Here we have a little bit different story with the same principle.

In the wake of the failings of many of the Communist influence in Latin America, there was now an opening for a more democratic way of running the government.  John Chasteen notes in “Born in Blood and Fire” that, “Boosted by its association with the one remaining superpower, the United States, liberalism has returned to fill the vacuum.” (Chasteen p. 311) The group under James Carville was more or less on assignment from the White House, to come help the spread of this new liberalism in Latin America.

 The Americans came down try to help Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada become reelected, and then help him maintain his power by staying popular. They ultimately failed, because they didn’t really understand, or comprehend what the Bolivian people really wanted. The American’s came to Bolivia with the understanding of the American system of doing government. In the United States, the everyday citizen’s addition to the political system was to elect its officials, whether state or national, and then to sit back and let the officials run the country. This is a Democratic Republic. That is not how the average Bolivian wants it government to run. They see themselves as being part of the political process, specifically as part of the decision making process. Gonzalo was probably trying in earnest to make things in Boliva better, but as James Cypher in “The Slow Death of the Washington consensus, “in Latin America, “Increasing poverty, stagnant or fallin wages, and a further and steady widening of the distribution of income in virtually every nation has also become the omnipresent and largely ignored social context of the neoliberal era.”(Cypher p. 47) It didn’t matter if he had been able to get every person in Bolivia involved; they were not going to accept the measures it would take the country to get back on course. Ultimately, Gonzalo and the Americans were doomed to fail, because Latin America is not the United States, and trying to export an exact copy of our politics will likely succeed as much as trying to export our economic policy.

La virgen de los sicariosh

The film “La virgen de los sicarios” or “Our Lady of the Assassins” tells an interesting and somewhat convoluted story about cities in Columbia, and how they are trying to get along in the post-Pablo Escobar and drug cartel world that they find themselves in. The drug trade is very much still alive and active, but Barbet Schroder is showing the cities as they are struggling with the leftover violence that Escobar’s regime had inflicted on Columbia. This movie is somewhat unique from the last couple of films we have seen, though it is probably most closely related to the film “The City of God.” Very quickly in “Our Lady of Assassins” we are quickly clued into the depths to which Columbia has sunk. Thousand s of people are being killed routinely, bystanders are robbed at gunpoint, and as we see part of the way though, some are killed just for trying to resist having their property stolen. Human life has no more value to the members of the criminal element. What is shocking is how the people are portrayed as all being guilty or in some way deserving of the death that is handed out on such are careless and regular basis. The young man Alexis is guilty of this loss of value for life on many occasions. He showed that he would just as quickly “off” someone as he would any menial task in his life. Revenge for something as little as having been disrespected is seen as worthy enough of a reason to take someone’s life. In the writing of Ricardo Vargas, “State, Esprit Mafioso, and Armed Conflict in Columbia” he wrote that, “The esprit Mafioso is growing and is permeating Columbian society as a whole. Values such as vengeance and the violent settling of scores are an increasing part of everyday life.” (page 123)

The moral of the movie, by the end, seemed to be that no one in any of Columbia could be considered as innocent.  Fernando even indicated as much when the woman was horrified at the man being killed right in front of them, and he said there are no innocents here. Later it is even more striking when the dog is killed and Alexis is sad because he didn’t think that there was any reason for the dog to have to die. More value for a common dog than for a human being, that is how far Columbia had sunk and how bad an influence the mafia had had on the Columbian people. Forrest Hylton wrote in his book that, “In 1987-88 homicide had already become the leading cause of death among males” but that, “Social movements staged massive marches in the cities and the countryside.” (page 75) So while things were really bad in Columbia, the people were realizing the issues that they were facing and were finally trying to do something to return their country to having the basic level of respect for life, and finally putting all the mafia and gang fighting to rest.

Bus 174 was an unbelievably piercing documentary created by Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda. It details the story of a young man named Sandro do Nascimento who, on June 12^th of 2000, captured and held hostage a bus full of people. Part of what made this movie interesting is how it correlates to the film “The city of God” of last week. In that film, we saw how the murders and other crimes increased as the drug uses were increasing. The criminals occasionally committed crimes and murders for random reason, but mostly it was to either gain power or to gain more money. Bus 174 tells the story, in a way, from the other side of the drug war. What is portrayed, is a young man who is more or less broken. People look at what he did and judge him for the horrible actions that he committed. What Bus 174 does, is give an explanation for why he was who he was, and why he did what he did. Drugs had ruined what had once been the life of a promising young boy. He had people who were interested in investing in him, but his addiction to glue and later to stronger drugs ruined his future. While he was responsible for his actions and choices, the way that city life in Latin America had transformed, put pressures on young impressionable kids like him. Big impersonal cities with slums where drugs are rampant and families were torn apart by poverty preyed on young promising kids like himself. In Mark D. Szuchman’s work, “The city as Vision-The Development of Urban Culture in Latin America” he wrote that cities had shattered families, traditions, and small communities, which, in turn, have had to be reconstituted in the face of considerable odds and in an incomparably more impersonal environment.” (Page 25) Add to it the fact that he saw his own mother being murdered, then later witnessed the needless murdering of many of his friends, a picture begins to form of a young man who has been abused by his surroundings. True to the form of the rising cities, he was then mistreated in the prison system that was supposed to be for rehabilitation of guys like him. Instead he was the victim of yet another injustice. Szuchman addressed the public system when he wrote that, “It is one of the supreme ironies that urban areas with concentrations of poverty stricken folk and people of color are today effectively forbidden to public safety officers, the elites’ instrument of power and authority.”(Page 25) The people who were supposed to help a young Sandro were the same ones who were later responsible for having made the whole standoff last longer than it should have, and end it a much worse way that it had to. At the end of the day the movie is a great representation of the system that most Latin American countries deal with. There is a self-perpetuating system of breakdown, that continually creates stories like Sandros.