As long as our political motivation is based on artificial "progressive ideas", instead of saying clearly "we want to eradicate poverty, we want to protect our environment, we want everyone to have place in our community", we remain selfish and weak in our momentum. I am hoping that this understanding come sooner than later from our sincere concerns and keen observation and rational conclusion, not much more from suffering and hunger and disaster.
I think momentum in Latin America political situation is actually amazing....
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/21/academy_award_winning_filmmaker_oliver_stone<snip>
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you here. Talk about why you chose to make this film.
OLIVER STONE: It chose me. I do feature films most of the time, but I do—I’ve done six documentaries and work—this is my fourth one. And it gets right to the point. You know, with a film, you take a year. It’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of actors, costumes, scripts. This is a much simpler way of going about it, and it keeps you humble. It keeps you in the field.
I’ve been going down to South America off and on for twenty years. I did Salvador there in 1985 with—about the Central America situation. I was shocked, what I saw. I just—I had been back from Vietnam for about fifteen years at that point, and I saw all these American soldiers down in Honduras, you know, fighting against the Nicaraguan government. I saw them in Salvador, and I saw them in—a form of them—in Costa Rica. I was shocked. And from that thing, I went back and saw Chiapas. I saw Commander Marcos. I rode with him a bit in the jungle. And then I went down there to Cuba. I had problems with Cuba, because my films were censored here. They were not shown. One of them was not shown; Comandante was taken off the air. It was shown in Europe. And then, so, Chávez—
AMY GOODMAN: Where wasn’t it shown?
OLIVER STONE: It was not shown on HBO. It was pulled from HBO. It was promoed, and then it was taken off the air two weeks before.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
OLIVER STONE: Because that was after 9—it was after that sort of that mindset of post-9/11, you know? There was a lot of hysteria in the air, and Castro had just arrested hijackers. They’d been in confrontation with Bush. So HBO kindly told me, you know, "We’d like you to complete the film and go back and ask him some other questions." I said, "No, this is my film. This is the way it’s finished. I’ll go back, and I’ll do another film called Looking for Fidel," which we ended up doing. So I asked him a lot of hard questions on Looking for Fidel, which was aired. But they never aired the—it’s a heartbreaking story for me, personally, as a filmmaker, because I really put a lot of effort into it. It’s a ninety-minute film. It’s played all over the world, except here.
So, Chávez was sort of a natural, because he was such a demonized, polarizing figure. But when I met him, he was not at all what I thought, you know, what we made him out to be. So I went on from talking to Hugo. He suggested, you know, "Go talk to other people in the region. You know, don’t believe me necessarily." So we went around, and we talked to seven other—eight other presidents—or seven other presidents in six countries. And we got this amazing unity in referendum saying, like, hey, these guys are changing the way Latin America is, and we don’t know this story in America, when you think about it, except Peru and Mexico—well, Peru and Colombia really are the two American allies in the region. So what struck me as a news, as something that’s historic, is that I’ve never seen these countries in South America, in a sense, unified by an idea of reform at the same time, because in the past, when Chile or Argentina or Brazil happened, we picked off the reformers one at a time, because they only happened—they didn’t happen in a unity. And this is the first time I’ve seen that since—what, since Bolívar, maybe. We haven’t—you know, going back to 1820s.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, what struck me also was, I think, the way you were able not only to present their viewpoints, in terms of how they saw the changes in Latin America, but also humanizing them, because for an American audience, the image of Hugo Chávez, of this firebrand, and then you have him on a bicycle in his—riding around in the yard of his former home, breaking the bicycle. And then—
OLIVER STONE: Yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I thought the most comic line in the whole film was when, after breaking the bicycle, he says, in Spanish, "Whose bicycle is this? I guess I’m going to have to pay for it."
OLIVER STONE: He’s not rich. His father is not rich, and he was also a military man. And he comes from a poor family. And he is what he is. He works for the people. I’ve never seen a man work so hard. I mean, he really cares. So do all of them, by the way. Every single one of them I met was elected duly, democratically, which Americans don’t know. And they serve the people, unlike a lot of the oligarchs and dictators who ruled prior and we supported. But we’re against these people. That’s what amazes me. Why is our—what is it about America that makes—needs enemies and makes enemies out of these people who are reformers in their country? Whether it’s Allende or the people in Argentina or Brazil, or Torrijos in Panama, or—the list is long. You know, why? Nicaragua.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You also center in on the IMF and the role of the IMF, which, again, most Americans know little about the operations of the IMF around the world. Yet, in most other countries in the world, the IMF is well known.
OLIVER STONE: Mark Weisbrot is with the Center of Economic Policy and Research, and he’s a co-founder of that, and he brought that element into this. It’s very important. And obviously Americans don’t care about economics as much; it’s hard to follow. But Mark points out that in the 1990s, there was about $20 billion in loans from the IMF to Latin America. Now there’s about a billion, which is interesting. They got rid of it, as Kirchner, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, is a real hero here. He did technically default on the IMF, but then he paid them off. And he defaulted on the corporate bonds, which was a big scandal, but yet Argentine economy, which was predicted to be a disaster, improved radically. So did Chávez’s economy for six years. I think the gross national product went 90 percent up, up 90 percent. Poverty was cut in half. So all these changes in all these countries have been positive since the IMF is out. They don’t want our money. They don’t want the loans. It’s important.
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