Latin American Authoritarianism

The program for the Latin American Film Festival is a comparative program of the disappeared both in Chile and Argentina. It is also a comparative between the films made by United States directors and some that are actually from Latin American directors. Both countries, Argentina and Chile have gone through a military coup in the early 1970s. It was a way of of “more modern forms of authoritarianism” compared to other countries such as Paraguay which had more of a traditional authoritarianism (Military Rebellion in Argentina, p.2). When we observe the four different movies, we see the importance of the military in the everyday life, we see the authoritarianism that is affecting the civilians even though some of the movies have been made with

Some might be more realistic than others as for example, the movie Missing is based on a true story. But they all reflect actual events. When we observe the difference of point of views of all of these movies, we see that we learn a lot about what has happened.

In La Historia Official, we have the point of view of the wife, who has had a daughter for now five years, and has actually no idea where she came from. It shows the upper middle class lifestyle, where people are given many things, which have been forcefully taken from others. It shows how the upper middle class, because they other work in the government, have the children of the missing with no other information.

If we look at Imagining Argentina, we have the point of view of the husband who is searching for his wife who went missing but also, we see the torture the wife and daughter go through. It shows both aspects and point of views. This shows more the side of the middle class, and what happened to people who protested, who wrote the truth. And yet, we wonder why did the husband never go missing as he acquired psychic power to see the future and what had happened to each person who had gone

Some tried to denounce the history and others focused on the disappeared and how it was so fluent in Latin America. This Film Festival shows the different opinions and point of views of the disappeared, how it has affected many families, some that were aware, some who were not, some who were upper middle-class and some in the lower class. It is also very important to say, that depending on the class, it would affect whether you would become disappeared or not… All the families who were upper middle-class, as the movies La Historia Official and Cautiva, both have upper middle-class families and therefore have children they adopted. Whereas, Imagining Argentina, is a couple in the middle class and due to the fact of being journalist, Cecilia went missing. It could be said, that if you were in the upper class, you were more likely to be in government or a military work which would make you less likely to question the government and the military