ViewsOfArt.com Mónica Núñez Luis

“South of the Border” (2009), by Oliver Stone, illustrates the changes in recent Latin American history, and the crucial role played by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, in these developments. Chávez is the central character in Stone’s documentary, which examines the achievements of his 10 years in power, and the Venezuelan and U.S. media campaigns against him. Disparaging news items speak of the impossibility of accepting Chávez’s thinking, which they present as being at least as dangerous as that of Bin Laden, Hitler and Castro. These comparisons, which are unsurprising when coming from U.S. sources, are hard to take seriously, not just because of their implications but also because of the Citizen Kane-esque tone of the news items.

In this masterfully filmed documentary, Stone works hard to show Chávez’s worth from a complacent and benevolent point of view, which would come as a surprise were it not for the fact that the filmmaker saw only one side of Venezuela, guided, as it happens, by Chávez and his entourage. As a spectator, I do not demand that Stone follows the purist rules of documentary-making, but it is a pity that he did not have the chance to see, and to show us, both sides of the coin.

The film insists on the often admired, anti-imperialist stance adopted by Chávez, which has been ratified by six of the region’s leaders, as he is the only one to have stood up to Washington and the IMF. However, since his triumph, Venezuela has risen from the 17th to 5th position on the list of the United States’ commercial partners, a fact which is probably due to the consistency of his media image. Stone tells us that Chávez has brought about a “fantastic change” in his country, a claim which he supports with footage of his “bolivarian” missions and additional data which, unfortunately, have not been fact-checked against international sources. The one-sided reality witnessed by Stone cannot escape its limitations, and it is this oblique interpretation, this tenuousness of proven facts, that gives rise to my criticism.

Although it is true that Chávez has been confirmed as president, in the words of F. Fukuyama, “Legitimacy is not justice or right in an absolute sense; it is a relative concept which exists in people’s subjective perceptions” (1), an opinion which is confirmed by the thousands of people who oppose Chávez, and whom Stone did not meet. When a country with a population of 28 million reports 13,000 crime-related deaths each year, and where freedom of expression is constantly under attack, where the government threatens private property and poverty levels increase by 20 points and people have to deal with a scarcity of basic foods, it seems impossible to think about “fantastic” changes.

Undoubtedly, Mr Stone, your documentary follows the same lines as the analysis by M. Foucault of R. Magritte, particularly with regards to Foucault’s observation that, in the artist’s work, “[…] the essence of rhetoric lies in allegory” (2), i.e. in saying something which represents or means something quite different. No one doubts that Chávez is a force of nature, but this is partly the result of his character as a demagogue and a megalomaniac of unprecedented proportions, which is something that is not shown in this documentary.

(1) Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. 4th reprint. Editorial Planeta. Barcelona, 1994, pp. 44.

(2) Foucault, Michel. This is not a pipe. Essay on Magritte. 5th edition, ‘Argumentos’ collection. Editorial Anagrama. Barcelona, 1999, pp. 34.

 

Edited: Artecontexto.com. September 2009.

 

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