In advance of our trip to Patagonia in 45 days, and at the request of my friend Faraj, who will be going with us, I have put together a series of 22 films about the region. These are movies about Chile, Patagonia, Argentina, Cape Horn and the Drake Passage as well as the Falkland Islands. I took the task seriously and tried to find an array of representative films that would capture what we were going to be seeing and experiencing on our trip. As I went about it I realized that capturing the essence of a region is so very difficult. We will be on a ship sailing past a lot of geography, but is that what defines a country or region? Historical films also have their limitations. The horrors and cruelties of imperialistic exploration and exploitation rarely get told truthfully. Conquering the West in America was not really about wagon trains and Indian attacks, but was about a shameful genocide that accompanied our manifest destiny of dominance and expansion. There were untold hardships on all sides and that world was very brutal and unforgiving. Chile and Argentina have their own version of that history and few us us Americans know it very well as it’s not part of our normal school curriculum. What’s unclear is whether tourists who don’t want to know about the transgressions of their own national past have any interest in learning the truth about the development of the country they are visiting and whether they want to take home a true understanding or just some nice typical souvenirs. I’m not sure I would trust the answer I would likely get if I asked since one sounds pretty grizzly and the other sounds kind of trite.
I the right balance can get struck with movies like The House of the Spirits, The Adventurers and Evita. Those movies have lots of production value and star appeal and while they tend to tell a more romanticized version of the truth, they are also not all Gunsmoke and Bonanza either. There is some brutality and truth to those stories and certainly a sense of the disappointment in the inhuman nature of man as he moves forward towards his version of civilization.
I have on my list of movies on Chile, one called The Cordillera of Dreams. It won a Cannes Film Festival award. What drew me to it was its focus on the Cordillera of the Andes that run the entire length of Chile, 2,670 miles from the Atacama Desert in the north to Cape Horn. The country is only about 100 miles wide on average and yet 50 of that is comprised of the Andean Cordillera or spine of rugged mountains. That unique long and narrow topography makes Chile a country clinging to the edge of a very steep shelf. It is characterizable as a country between the Devil (the Andes) and the derp blue sea of the Pacific. I have flown down this spine on every visit to Chile and we will fly the same way, arriving in the early morning in March and will witness the sun rising over the Cordillera, one of the most spectacular travel sights I have ever witnessed, rivaled only by flying over the North Pole while the Aurora Borealis is in full bloom. This is why I recommended The Cordillera of Dreams, since it pays homage to this wondrous and dominant geography that literally defines the visual and cultural soul of this interesting country.
What I didn’t realize is that the film is not just about the geography, but also about the last fifty years of Chilean history, a very turbulent and yet instructive time that is as dramatic as any country’s history and is both deeply intertwined with American history and even my own personal history…not to mention perhaps our near term future. The documentary suddenly shifts mid-stream into a documentary about the Chilean coup in 1973. The coup overthrew Salvador Allende, the duly elected Communist Party leader of Chile. There was significant U.S. involvement, though attributing direct causation will always be debatable. Declassified documents show that the U.S. government, particularly under Nixon and Kissinger, took several actions that contributed to destabilizing Allende’s government. The CIA conducted covert operations aimed at preventing Allende from taking office in 1970 and later undermining his presidency. The U.S. imposed economic pressure through various means, including blocking loans from international financial institutions. U.S. officials maintained close contact with Chilean military officers, including Augusto Pinochet, who would eventually carry out the coup. To be fair, there were also plenty of severe economic problems in Chile, including hyperinflation, that were driving the coup. There was growing political polarization within Chilean society and opposition from Chilean business sectors and some middle-class groups that gave rise to tensions between Allende and the Chilean military. The actual coup was carried out by Chilean military forces under General Augusto Pinochet, though they did so knowing they had U.S. support. The coup’s aftermath saw U.S. support for the Pinochet dictatorship, including backing its economic policies and initially downplaying human rights violations. Therein lies the hidden story in this Cordillera film.
I had studied the Chilean Revolution and Coup on a real-time basis during college. Then, in 1985 and for the remainder of the 80’s, I traveled regularly there to recoup a boatload of Chilean sovereign debt owed to my bank. We were the first to negotiate with the Chilean government, the government of Pinochet, to do debt-to-equity conversions that led to us owning the largest life insurance company and pension fund in Chile. We became the largest foreign financial institution in Chile, a role we never had in any other country. I actually met Pinochet on several occasions and regularly dealt with his fellow Junta general who ran the Central Bank and his Minister of Finance, who was a young Chilean economist, Hernan Buchi, who was fresh out of the University of Chicago. Buchi was crafting the new political economy of Chile and, I thought, doing a wonderful job of it. Nobody like the atrocities that came with the coup, but that was in the distant past and it seemed that what mattered at the moment was getting Chile on a sound economic footing for all the people. I became a firm believer in the Chilean economic miracle and my bank benefited greatly from it, even though we eventually sold our Chilean companies back to local Chileans, as one would hope we would. We got what we wanted (our money back…and then some) and they got what they wanted, which was a modernized and productive local economy.
My view was that Chile was the best country on the continent with the broadest and most economically egalitarian middle class. That may have all been true, but this Cordillera movie showed a very different side to that story. The story it tells of improved economic conditions for most Chileans, but an impoverished underclass of society which still wallows in abject poverty. The contrast with the wealthy ownership of much of the country’s natural resources and beauty (the coast, the mountains and the southern lakes) has become a stark reminder that the patrimony of Chile is now mostly in private hands both domestic and foreign. The story that this movie tells was an eye-opener to me. It shook me to my core understanding of one perception of reality in modern Chile. It will certainly give me food for serious thought during our upcoming travels to the Cordillera.