Old Mission

Augusto Pinochet

Recently at San Simon University here in Cochabamba, Lynn and I viewed the Michael Winterbottom film based on Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine.¹ This was our first  experience with this work, but we are aware of the protests at the School of the Americas in Georgia (we heard Roy Bourgeois speak, I believe, one evening at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Nashville, Tennessee), have heard in retrospect about the horrors of the Pinochet regime in Chile (I saw an excellent dramatization of this in Costa Gavras' film Missing (1982) and certainly can understand the father's anguish in seeking answers about his son's unexplained disappearance), the adoptions in Argentina of disappeared parents' children by couples allied to the ruling elite, and so on.  Regarding the film on The Shock Doctrine², I learned about the relationship between the electroshock experiments of Ewen Cameron and the CIA's resulting Kubark Manual). The film's thesis that power elites maneuver populations by capitalizing off of engineered (such as inflationary economic policies) and natural (such as Hurricane Katrina in the US) catastrophies was interesting.  However, I think that in the film the case for this would have been better presented with more detailed evidence for the level of connectedness that it suggests. I don't say this to challenge the truth of the film's position. Naomi Klein's objections about the film's documentation of its assertions were published in the UK Guardian.

Regarding the presentation, I was amazed at the large number of people that turned out for the film on a mid-week night. The film may have been a for-credit assignment in the Sociology Department of San Simon University.  I believe it was sponsored by the office of the Vice President of Bolivia. Regardless, despite a two-hour delay in starting (delays are common, I hear) the classroom was filled, additional seats were shoved in through a window aside the adjoining corridor, and people were leaning their heads in through the doorway to hear. ³ If the film were a register of anti-neoliberal policies and anti-capitalistic sentiment in the UK and US, citizens of those countries should be concerned about the extent to which those elements serve as their dominant representation in foreign countries.
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¹ It is difficult for me to resume topics from an earlier blog post because by the time I sit down again I have other activities I want to write about or other work that must be done. However, maybe this will force me to be concise. Besides, I'm listening to Old Mission, a nice cut from the album Alone I Admire, by Auburn Lull.
² A full-length copy of the movie The Shock Doctrine is available for viewing on YouTube. Also a shorter, Spanish-subtitled version is listed there.
³ I wish we could get this sort of turnout at the Filmanía series that Lynn and I are assisting with at the Pastoral Juvenil here in Cochabamba.