The War on Democracy

John Pilger, award-winning journalist and documentary director, has taken a trip to South America to analyse the relationship between Venezuela and its neighbouring countries – and, crucially, the USA.

He interviews Venezuelan President Chavez as well as common people and in doing so, exposes how Chavez - democratically elected and democratically ruling his country - was toppled by economic interests backed by America.
The President was later reintegrated thanks to the love of Venezuelan people.
However, it is clear to see how the USA have always tried to rule South America, now and in the past, by imposing military dictatorship in every country: the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in Chile and the subsequent military government by Augusto Pinochet being the most famous example.
Sleek-haired Pilger wanted to make a film that not only explains the past, but also talks about the present: “Substitute Iraq and Iran and Lebanon and you’ll see what I mean”, he declared.
In fact, what emerges from the documentary is alarmingly familiar: arrogance, greed (South America is an important source of gas and water) and media control.
A pivotal sequence shows how television made the coup d’état against Chavez appear as a people’s revolution by manipulating the images. 
Although Pilger is aware that injustice rules much of the world, his work as a filmmaker makes him optimistic: his documentaries, along with Michael Moore’s and Morgan Spurlock’s, are successful because people want to “Make sense of a world so often presented to them as an assembly line of … unrelated images.”
But in order to reach a mass audience, a documentary must be easy to follow: The War On Democracy aptly mixes  simple language and a classical  narrative structure with an urgent subject, and therefore deserves to be a hit like many others civil documentaries before.
And hopefully it will change a few minds about South America.   

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