If you get a chance to see "The Judge and the General" which just played on PBS

[Lydia Leftcoast]

DO IT!

It tells how a conservative judge who was asked to investigate the crimes of Chile's General Pinochet gradually came to understand the full horror of that regime.

Most striking is the ending, in which democracy has been restored, and a woman who was tortured under Pinochet's government has been elected president.

Then Pinochet dies under house arrest, and the new president refuses to declare a day of morning. The Chilean version of freepers (they even look and act like them) hold demonstrations, yelling things like "Lower the flag, bitch" and "Communist faggot scum." Then they start chanting, "You never condemned him, you never condemned him" (i.e. he was never found guilty in a court of law). It doesn't bother them that their "hero" and his henchmen killed over 3,000 political opponents and cooperated with the dictators of other Latin American countries to extradite one another's dissidents.

Sound familiar? I bet we'd have scenes like that in the U.S. if anyone ever arrested the Bush cabal for war crimes.

[pnorman]

1. Here's the trailer:

http://www.westwindproductions.org/trailer.html

Looks good! Hopefully, it'll come on-line or be available as a DVD.

pnorman
On edit: Here's a fuller description:

"I saw my own writing when I was investigating these cases,” says Judge Juan Guzmán, “Now, 30 years later, some of my witnesses filed those petitions.” He’s talking about the “more than 10,000 habeas corpus petitions” rejected during Augustus Pinochet’s regime, petitions filed in search of answers, or at least some rudimentary legal assistance, in learning the fates of over 3,000 Chilean citizens who had disappeared. Three decades later, Guzmán is appointed to investigate Pinochet, to bring to light the system of imprisonment, torture, and execution that was for so hidden. “It’s a denial of justice of the judiciary didn’t do anything, “ he says of the petitions he and other judges signed.

Guzmán ‘s sense of tragedy and culpability is laced through Patricio Lanfranco and Elizabeth Farnsworth’s The Judge and the General, which airs 19 August as part of PBS’ POV series. The film follows his inquiry, which, under the Chilean system is categorically his: as Eduardo Contreras, attorney for families of victims, explains, “The same person investigates, tries the case and delivers the sentence.” Guzmán began with precious little background. Monica Gonzalez, a journalist imprisoned under Pinochet, recalls, “He began asking me questions and I realized that he knew almost nothing. He’d created his own world and submerged himself in it.”

Though Guzmán was given very few resources to conduct his work (for the first two years, he had only an old typewriter, no computer), because “the top judges didn’t want his investigation to move forward,” he perseveres, and eventually indicts the former general and president, as well as hundreds of his agents.

The process, begun in 1998, takes years, and the film opens with images on TV that reinforce its difficulty. Guzmán is watching footage from a demonstration following the announcement of the Pinochet indictments, and the rage and fear are much the same as demonstrations surrounding the 1970 coup d’etat that put Pinochet in power, a coup that was made possible, the film indicates, by the U.S., hoping to remove the democratically elected communist Salvador Allende ("Nixon was determined not to allow in his backyard another Castro,” says law professor José Zalaquett). “Communist fagots!,” the furious protestors shout, “They killed your relatives because they were losers!” Guzmán sighs later, “They haven’t learned anything. They don’t care what he did.”
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http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/62271/pov-the-judge-and-the-general/

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. I would especially recommend this film to anyone who

wasn't alive in the 1970s.

This chapter in Latin American history--military dictatorships all over the region, with Nixon, Ford, and Reagan supporting them as "anti-Communists"-- is not well known today.

Even many people who were alive at the time ignored these stories or bought the U.S. government line that said that Pinochet, Somoza, the Argentine junta, the Uruguayan junta, and the "Fourteen Families" of El Salvador were "bulwarks against Communism."

Only people who read the leftist press really understood that the U.S. had instigated and supported a military coup against a democratically elected government in a prosperous country with a history of democracy, just because the Chilean people made the "wrong" choice.

(Throughout my childhood, the official U.S. line was that "no country has ever freely elected a Communist government." This was such a part of political folklore that when the Chileans did elect a Communist president in a free and fair election, the Nixon administration, especially Henry Kissinger, went ballistic.)

(BTW, this is another instance in which the "looney left" was right. The leftist press said that the CIA had instigated the coup against Salvador Allende, and the MSM dismissed this as Communist propaganda. But in just a few years, the Church Commission, led by Idaho's Frank Church, revealed that the "looney left" had been correct all along.)

[alphafemale]

2. k & r