Ed Maltby reviews the War on Democracy
John Pilger has created a film which is informative, shocking and timely. The sheer amount of footwork involved in the production is impressive â he has travelled the length and breadth of Latin America to film it â and the constant stream of interviews Pilger throws at the viewer gives the film a fresh and authoritative feel. And yet somehow, despite it all, Pilger has managed to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory. He has taken solid research, verve and wit and put them together to create a flabby, directionless disappointment of a film.
Pilgerâs film is a potted history of US imperialism in Latin America. Starting with a lengthy look at Venezuela, Pilger takes us on a whirlwind tour through some of the brutal coups dâĂ©tats engineered by the CIA in Latin America: from the 2002 coup which briefly ousted ChĂĄvez in Venezuela, to Pinochetâs 1973 coup in Chile; from the 1954 coup in Guatemala to the Contrasâ war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It ends on the upheaval surrounding the attempted privatisation of Boliviaâs natural resources. The filmâs great strength lies in its interviews, in which spies, activists and slum-dwellers tell the story of American intervention in Latin America with breathtaking power and immediacy. A torture victim recounts his time spent in one of Pinochetâs concentration camps. The events of the anti-ChĂĄvez coup are related to us by inhabitants of Caracas slums whom Pilger meets in one of ChĂĄvezâs new Misiones. We are talked through coups in Central America by a CIA agent who speaks with unexpected candour about Washingtonâs attitude towards democracy (âthatâs just sillyâ) and a teacher from the infamous School of the Americas.
In fact, Pilgerâs film does a very good line in grotesques: the filthy rich bourgeois Venezuelan who fawns over his chandeliers and the greasy Washington spin doctor who lies through his teeth about the 2002 coup (âThe United States did not support that coupâ) hold a particular grim fascination as does the ageing CIA operative who spits bile at Pilger and declares, âWe will intervene whenever we decide itâs in our⊠interest to intervene, and if you donât like it â lump it.â
The problem with it all is, though, that grotesques, horror stories and disapproval of America is all that the film offers. Pilgerâs film claims to be celebrating popular resistance to American imperialism, but itâs rather hard to take it seriously on that front. For one thing, he never mentions the working class. He talks about âthe invisible people of Latin Americaâ, he mentions âthe poorâ and people sleeping rough and living in slums. He romanticises the indigenous peoples in Bolivia, to the point where he would seem to suggest that Evo Moralesâ greatest virtue as a politician lies in his being of indigenous descent. Indeed, Pilgerâs studied failure to see the centrality of working-class struggle in the social upheavals he documents is quite impressive. According to Pilger, the Venezuelan people defeated the 2002 coup by having a big demonstration, whereupon he heavily armed bourgeoisie gave in. Strikes, and the response of organised labour to the coup is passed over. The heroic efforts of the Venezuelan oil workers to keep the oil flowing despite management paralysing the computer system, for example, didnât get a mention. Pilger performs a similar operation on the workersâ movement in Bolivia. He prefers to think of it as a âpeopleâs movementâ. The COBâs general strike in September 2003, the regional strike committees which co-ordinated armed resistance against soldiers and police during the blockade of La Paz, the miners who led the movement in El Alto, all take a back seat. Instead, we are treated to lots of shots of Aymara flags, people in traditional costume, and, as in Venezuela, big demonstrations which miraculously topple a government, with not a union banner in sight.
It is this political weakness which scuppers the whole film. Pilger refuses to look at the class dynamic of grassroots movements in Latin America, seeing only an amorphous, âpopularâ mass which occasionally goes on big marches. For this reason, he cannot criticise Morales or ChĂĄvez â he sees them as being a part of the great, undifferentiated âresistance movementâ.
For Pilger, the story of Latin America is not one of the self-organisation of the working class, but of peopleâs movements against imperialism. We canât interrogate their class character or intervene ourselves, all we can do is cheer them on, and feel outraged and guilty about, as he puts it, âthe misery to which we in the West have consigned themâ. Pilgerâs film thus degenerates into an extended hand-wringing session about the evils of American imperialism (while capitalism and bourgeois democracy get off scot-free) without positing any kind of positive class-struggle programme. Funny, I watched this straight after leaving the SWPâs Marxism event, and it all seemed oddly familiarâŠ