An enormous statue of Paraguay’s dictator, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, used to dominate the capital metropolis of Asunción. Now, all that continues to be on the web site are his metal boots. Stroessner’s monumental likeness was minimize off on the ankles after he was deposed in 1989 following virtually 35 years of army rule.
“It’s loopy. It’s nonetheless there,” feedback filmmaker Juanjo Pereira. “It’s nonetheless there and can be there for a few years.”
The folks, celebrating Stroessner’s downfall, severed the top, torso and the legs of the statue. But, the bottom stays – the inspiration. Maybe that symbolism is most crucial to grasp from Pereira’s new documentary Underneath the Flags, the Solar, which performed on the Thessaloniki Worldwide Documentary Competition in Greece Monday evening. It received the FIPRESCI critics prize within the Panorama part of the Berlin Movie Competition final month, the place the documentary premiered.
“It was the final [right-wing] dictatorship to fall in Latin America,” the director famous throughout a Q&A after the screening.
Paraguay’s army ruler, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, circa 1975
FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Pictures
Stroessner seized energy in 1954, promising “peace, progress and fraternity,” however delivering repression beneath the guise of virulent anti-communism. Throughout his reign, virtually 20,000 perceived political opponents have been tortured, and a whole bunch have been “disappeared.” A regime like that doesn’t invite scrutiny, limiting what footage exists. However Pereira’s analysis situated about 120 hours of footage around the globe, which turned the idea for his movie.
Included are newsreels, propaganda movies, and a few materials shot by French journalists, “revealing the hidden mechanisms of energy behind Stroessner’s rule,” because the Thessaloniki competition describes it. There’s additionally footage of Stroessner visiting President Lyndon Johnson in Washington within the Sixties, the place he was warmly greeted as a helpful American ally within the Chilly Struggle.
Human stays, believed to have been buried within the Seventies through the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, found within the outskirts of Asunción, Paraguay on March 19, 2013
NORBERTO DUARTE/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Cameras didn’t doc the torture of commerce unionists and others in Paraguay. However, helpfully, the dictatorship did maintain written data of its actions which have been found in 1992. These “Archives of Terror,” as they’ve turn into identified, turned an essential supply for Pereira.
“The Terror Archives is without doubt one of the most essential archives in Latin America,” Pereira mentioned. “It’s free to go [and see], and it’s there within the Ministry of Justice.”
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner (left) salutes with Alejandro Agustin Lanusse Gelly, president of Argentina, in 1972
FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Pictures
Between the paperwork and grainy, principally black-and-white imagery, the movie reveals how Stroessner dominated all features of Paraguayan life, rendering many strange folks apparently incapable of pondering for themselves. He created a strongman’s cult of character and surrounded himself with an obsequious court docket (parallels to Trump 2.0 could leap to thoughts, however that’s outdoors the scope of this documentary).
As soon as he reached his mid-70s, nevertheless, Stroessner appeared to lose a step and the Colorado Occasion he had tightly managed shoved him apart, in favor of one other army man, Andrés Rodríguez Pedotti, who had as soon as been Stroessner’s closest confidante.
“In a means, the top of the dictatorship was not a revolutionary second. It was a change of command,” Pereira noticed. “The Colorado Occasion wanted to vary its picture… It’s not the folks taking energy.”
L-R Producer James Costa, moderator, and director Juanjo Pereira communicate at a Q&A following a screening of ‘Underneath the Flags, the Solar’ in Thessaloniki, Greece
Matthew Carey
Pereira described himself as a “youngster of democracy. I’m born after the coup d’etat [of 1989].” However fielding a query from the viewers, he questioned whether or not Paraguay’s type of authorities right this moment actually represents the folks.
“I don’t know if we’re dwelling in a democracy in Paraguay,” he mentioned. “The final election [the Colorado Party] received 80 p.c [of the vote] and the federal government is filled with Colorado folks. We don’t have opposition in Paraguay. So is it a democracy? I dunno, possibly it’s as much as us to grasp that. Yeah, there aren’t any extra disappeared folks, however we don’t have [the ability] to decide on [leaders]. It’s difficult to say that that is democracy. Possibly we have to discover a new solution to say what’s the world we’re dwelling in now.”
Pereira advised Stroessner has been scrubbed from his nation’s historical past. “In class we didn’t examine this era of the nation. So I completed faculty at 18 and I didn’t even know who was this man,” he mentioned. “And at 20 or 21 I began to go looking extra about this era. I began to go looking extra in regards to the historical past of cinema in Paraguay after which I discovered extra in regards to the dictatorship and in a means, I studied the dictatorship by the archives.”
Describing Underneath the Flags, the Solar, Pereira mentioned, “The movie is opening questions, proposing questions. That is my fundamental purpose.”
He added, “We all know so little about this era. For me, it’s like we solely know fragments and the film is about fragments… I take all these fragments and I make this sense of reminiscence.”
