*****Warning Long-winded up ahead*****
Zara's comments needed some insight and possibly a different take on things. I saw him rant here the same way in other posts about this film, and just needed to itch that scratch.
Zarathustra_777 said:He cuts way too much slack to the rebels, while portraying ARENA members as drunken bullies... Studying Central American politics and history, ARENA has to be the most professional and responsible political party in the region... (and the kicker: my note) atrocities were commited on both sides.
First off, the movie was based on Richard Boyle's life, so before you go attacking Oliver Stone you have to acknowledge there was some cooperation in how the story was going to be told from more than just Stone's spin on the situation in El Salvador.
If you have seen the documentary within the DVD, which I highly recommend to fans of this film, you will see among many other things, that Stone wanted to initially cast Richard Boyle to play himself in the movie, but it did not work out that way mainly because Boyle was getting drunk all the time and plus he wasn't a real actor. You also will learn that pretty much everyone on the set of making the movie were unhappy with each other and basically didn't see eye to eye on many issues while making this film. For example, Oliver Stone and Richard Boyle wanted to make this movie in El Salvador, but when their advisor to the movie got shot there, James Woods was the one who insisted in making the movie somewhere in Mexico because he did not want to be next or work under those conditions.
I say all of this to illustrate that making this film was made independently from Hollywood (as Oliver Stone comments on the irony of MGM Studios owning the DVD of his film in the Director's Commentary Audio), it did not get released in wide release in U.S. theaters, it got nominated for an Academy Award, and it has been one of Oliver Stone's most enduring films. Why?
It chose to show what was really going on in El Salvador, but also to connect the relationship and influence the U.S. had in everything that was occurring in El Salvador, including the training of death squads in the "School of the Assassins" that gave us the death of Archbishop Romero in the film(http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1118-12.htm), and through direct military and economic aid that funded the Salvadoran government's cause that claimed the lives of some 75,000 people and caused about a million or more people to flee this war, leaving their homeland behind, and starting from scratch in unknown lands to learn new languages.
This was not and never is a popular view to express, and you're usually labelled a communist, conspiracy theorist, or someone who is out of their mind to show the key relationships between some of the most ruthless dictatorships around the world (terrorists in their own right) and U.S. Foreign Policy. It's an anathema for Americans to think that their government is responsible for the misery that occurs in other countries, which this country's media dutifully either ignores, reports in passing, or spins in the opposite direction as was the case with El Salvador and the story of El Mozote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre).
As you can see, both this film and the actual events that took place at the beginning and throughout the Civil War of El Salvador were not events that were reported accurately, so we have a huge gap that leaves people who do not know anything about the events portrayed in this movie feeling clueless or misinformed. I will agree to an extent with Zarathustra's view that a lot of the movie had an editorial feel to it via Oliver's shaping of certain scenes, like the cavalry charge into Santa Ana, the various inaccuracies in how Archbishop Romero was actually murdered, and perhaps other scenes that were not 100% factual. However, as an audience member of a film, you have to realize that it is hard to get all the facts of a real life event into a film, and since everyone sees things differently both in real life and in the movies, you will have various perspectives. That is the only real discrepancy in this film, and it should not take away from your enjoyment of the film, as much as it not take away your enjoyment of films such as these: the film 300 because the Spartans were not really the ones who won the battle of Thermopylae, but rather the decisive battle fought by the Athenian navy at Salamis, or because the film Walkout starred a light-skinned Latina instead of a Filipina, as it was in real life, etc..
Now onto the specific remarks made by Zarathustra. Obviously we all have agendas and biases that affect our opinions of everything, so it should be no different in discussions about a film. What I find disturbing in Z's comments are a few glaring inaccuracies in his comments. Maybe some of these facts and figures will illustrate the "other side" of what really occured in El Salvador.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador
"One of the victims of the war was Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who, through his message of peace and equality for all Salvadorians, is believed to be one of the greatest apostles of the poor in Latin America. He was assassinated by Rafael Alvaro Saravia while celebrating mass on Monday, March 24, 1980. Saravia had left the Salvadorian military in 1979 and began working closely with Roberto D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson, in conjunction with elements of the Salvadorian armed forces and far right Salvadorian civilians in El Salvador, Guatemala and the United States, founded the far-right political party ARENA, currently in power in El Salvador. D’Aubuisson organized death squads composed of civilians and military figures that systematically carried out politically-motivated assassinations and other human rights abuses in El Salvador.
According to the 1993 United Nations' Truth Commission report, over 96% of the human rights violations carried out during the war were committed by the Salvadorian military or the paramilitary death squads, while 3.5% were committed by the FMLN."
There's so much literature and these and many other topics concerning El Salvador's Civil War, but I put this out here so people can realize that sometimes people are in denial of the truth because they distance themselves from the reality of the suffering and attrocities of those they despise. In El Salvador, those affiliated with the right-wing parties saw their "enemies" in priests, unions, rural and poor people, students, and anyone who either by their own will or because they had no choice decided to take a stand to a decades long repression in El Salvador.
When you see your enemy in your own people, you need to make it about their politics or other differences like race, religion, etc, you augment your own point of view, diminish theirs, or aggrandize the excesses of the opposition. Anything to not conceded a point. This is true in Iraq, Sudan, or any other country undergoing civil wars or ethnic cleansings. In El Salvador's case, it was simply about not letting communist-affiliated parties or people fighting for more rights and access to a better standard of living into power. This has been and will be the case for El Salvador for decades more to come, as it is in many countries in Latin American countries, primarily because it is not in the United States economic and political interest to allow for this to happen, and also in large part to the oligarchies and their tools of repression. It's easier for the U.S. to do business with fascist regimes because they understand that brute force is much easier to handle than free and democratic government that might decide to interest themselves in their own people first and helping their country improve, as was the case with Salvador Allende in Chile in the 1970's, as is the case today with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. When those countries who rule with an iron fist that are allies of the U.S. stop cooperating, the battledrums of war begin to beat for overthrows and occupations, as it has happened in Iraq this new millenia, and as it happened with Noriega in Panama, the contras in Nicaragua, and various similar coup-de-etats from the previous century.
This is all pretty standard historical, academically verifiable facts that most people around the world understand how the United States operates outside its borders. Its the spoiled, TV/internet zombified, and "living in a bubble" citizenry that first do not know, and if they hear of this in passing, without checking news articles, taking a class in American Foreign Policy, or even just sitting down and watching a film like this, they will pass judgment on it as false propaganda that does not merit even mere acknowledgement that it could be true. This is why films like Salvador are so important to understanding to understanding current events and how they are inter-connected with similiar themes, and hopefullyl some people will pick up on that and be able to discern when a movie is trying to get to the truth or when it's merely made for the purposes of self-serving propaganda.
Zarathustra is right that the world is complicated and neither black and white, but he has failed, in what I have read of his comments, to acknowledge the reality of what happened in El Salvador, and perhaps films like these remind him that the either purposely or because of indoctrination to a certain framework of ideology cannot accede or see that very inhuman and grotesque attrocities occured under the watch of his beloved ARENA party, and that they in conjunction with the United States basically turned the clock back on El Salvador by a few decades in terms of civil rights, social mobility, and in terms of education. A personal anecdote on the subject of education. My cousin in El Salvador has her Dentist's degree but cannot practice it yet in El Salvador. Her fate is the same of many professionals who cannot practice their profession simply because their country is in a state of shambles. This often forces these desperate well-educated individuals to leave their homeland for a country where they can make a living doing what they studied their whole young lives for, a process called "brain drain" by immigration scholars who study the different types of immigration patterns that occur.
I'm willing to admit that the rebels committed some exccesses during the civil war and that they are partly to blame for the resultant violence that has ensued the very fabric of El Salvador to this day, but I qualify that by saying that when compared to the right-wing government's attrocities during the Civil War and post Civil-War their return to the status quo that fueled the clash between the classes in the first place, which has resulted in more street gangs from the United States setting up shop all around the country, larceny, and kidnappings for ransom, and basically outrageous homicide rates that the burden of responsibility for the most part has always rested squarely on their shoulders.
Then again this is a movie discussion on a forum. I would die if Zara came around on the topic. Just hope others don't eat that brand of Puppy Chow if you know what I mean. Ruff ruff!
Traveler, there is no road;
the road is made as you travel.
-Antonio Machado
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