It’s very sad that Americans know nothing about the amazing political transformation that is currently taking place in South America. Our media simply won’t allow it, and for good reason – the last thing the elite oligarchy that runs this country (and owns the media) wants is for average people to start getting ideas about their own welfare. They don’t want anyone in this country looking south and saying “Wow, look what they’re accomplishing!” What they want us to do is watch our TiVos, play with our X-boxes, worry about Lebron James, and dismiss everything happening south of the border as “Communism” forced on people by “evil dictators.” That will ensure, among other things, that wealth will continue to surge unabated, from us to them!

I think that the movements down there are the cutting edge of hope for the world, and Oliver Stone has made a documentary to begin properly introducing us to this remarkable array of populist leaders. What happened down there is that the common people woke up and elected individuals who would actually try to make their lives better in real, concrete ways. These new leaders are not the egg-headed patrician elite that we elect here in the US (like Obama, Clinton and the Bushes.) These guys being elected down there are working-class folk: soldiers, farmers, priests, union organizers. They are from the lower classes, and rule on behalf of the average man. This is absolutely unthinkable in the US right now – we can’t even come up with a serious candidate of this kind, let alone elect one!

Stone does a fairly good (and entertaining) job of showing how our media endlessly villainizes these leaders. The bit about our media declaring Chavez a drug addict because he chews coca leaves is pretty funny. It also does a good job of showing each of these leaders as thinking, feeling people who are really trying to help their countries. Stone hits all the important basics. The US-backed coup attempt against Chavez, and how the New York Times and all other US media supported it enthusiastically; the attempted sale of Bolivia’s water supply to a US-based company, and the accompanying law that it was now illegal for Bolivians to drink rain water; the incredible and ongoing US aggression against Cuba. He also touches on crucial history that is still not widely understood in America (like what we did in Chile and Guatemala in the last century.) Stone rushes the issue of the IMF a bit, but does discuss the basic concept that we are the IMF, and we lend these countries money in exchange for political policies that hurt their people and enrich our multinational elites. It also discusses how Argentina and Brazil finally rejected this.

Most of the time is spent on Venezuela and its Bolivarian Revolution, and Chavez is portrayed as the maverick that inspired all the others. A surface tenet of the Bolivarian Revolution is that governments should act to benefit their own people, and not super-rich people in some other country. South of the Border does a decent job showing this. It talks about how Venezuela took its oil profits and invested them in the infrastructure of the country – agriculture, education, heath care – to give its people a chance to work toward a better life. But it doesn’t get into very many details, which is disappointing.

But the deeper, more interesting tenet of the revolution is the decentralization they are struggling to bring about. Chavez knows that when push comes to shove the US can take him out in the blink of an eye, and will. It’s messier (not harder) now that he has allies in the region, but it could still be done pretty easily, via Columbia and our “drug war” for example. And we can always send the B-52s down there to “encourage” the population of Venezuela to elect a different leader. The only way to preserve the gains Venezuela has made is if they become decentralized and firmly rooted in the population itself.

This was the concept behind the Bolivarian Circles, and later the Communal Councils, and it’s the concept behind Chavez’s emphasis on education and on people actively owning their new constitution. It’s a fascinating issue: How do you set things up so that a super-power can’t in a single stroke destroy what you’ve built just because Exxon bonuses weren’t high enough last year? Chavez knows he must become less and less central to the revolution, contrary to what our media tells us his ambitions are. It would have been really nice to hear some discussion about this topic, but I guess Stone felt it was too much, too fast. Perhaps he is right. We in the US have a lot of catching up to do – Stone’s agenda for this movie seems limited to convincing Americans that these South American leaders do not have horns, scaly red skin, or barbed tails, and they do not breathe fire or reek of decomposing bodies. Let’s hope he succeed.

I had to laugh at the very end, when Obama had to publicly reassure the American people that he is not endangering America by shaking hands with Chavez. Good God in Heaven!!! Remember in 2006 when Chavez offered us a permanently fixed $50 a barrel for oil if we helped them develop their extra heavy crude oil reserves? It makes you wonder: What is the real cost of vilainizing this guy?

See South of the Border, even if you are convinced Chavez is Satan himself. For even better documentaries, see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, about the Coup attempt against Chavez, and Naomi Klein’s The Take, about the incredible “occupied factories” movement in Argentina. They are both really terrific and thought-provoking.