Screening films in Bolivia: Where the movie villains are from the US

On my first trip to Germany, shortly after college, I learned the power of media conditioning. I had grown up watching World War II movies on television, filled with villainous Nazis. "You vill tell us vat ve vant to know. Ve haf our vays to make you talk." Surrounded by German speakers, whom I had only ever heard as menacing movie stereotypes, I felt my heart rate gallop. An evening at Munich's Hofbrau Haus, where beer drinkers hoist liter steins and occasionally break into song, felt like the ominous prelude to a putsch. Wasn't this how National Socialism got its start? Had I visited Japan then, my reaction surely would have been the same, since two-dimensional "sneaky Orientals" were also staples of war and post-war era US movies. Now I live in Bolivia, where the most treacherous movie villains in local films are from the United States. Hollywood movies show here too, but in Bolivian productions US characters are violent and diabolical. For instance, currently playing in Bolivian theaters is Antonio Eguino's "Los Andes No Creen En Dios" (The Andes Don't Believe in God), set in the mountain mining town of Uyuni in the 1920s. Germans in this film are savvy, industrious prospectors. The sole British engineer is a pompous drunk. But the US characters are rough, unshaven, gun-toting spaghetti-western thugs. Three gringos rob a mining payroll, blow up a train and shoot the passengers. The robbery has historical resonance with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After fleeing the United States, they stole a mine payroll in southern Bolivia and died in a shoot-out with Bolivian authorities in 1908. If the desperado is one stock US villain, another is the corrupt US official. "American Visa," released in 2006, tells the contemporary story of a Bolivian schoolteacher named Mario who wants to go to the United States to see his son in Miami. Like many other Bolivians (and Latin Americans), Mario must endure expensive, humiliating procedures to obtain a visa. When the US consul sneeringly refuses him, Mario turns to the black market, where an illicit US visa goes for $5,000. Mario pawns his gold jewelry, then desperately decides to rob the pawnshop. When he finally buys the black market visa, he is appalled to learn that the person supplying it is the US Consul himself. "Don't worry, teacher, the visa's good," the Consul tells him. But Mario, undone by the theft he has committed to procure the visa, never goes to the United States. "American Visa" is cinematic revenge against US bureaucrats who stonewall Bolivian visa seekers in the belief that they intend to stay and work illegally. Like many developing countries, Bolivia depends on remittances sent home by nationals working abroad, legally or not. In a real-life act of vengeance, the Bolivian government recently imposed a visa requirement for US citizens visiting their country. US officials are more flamboyantly corrupt in Rodrigo Bellot's movie, "Quien Mato a la Llamita Blanca?" (Who Killed the Little White Llama?). In Bellot's satirical road picture, the DEA official in charge of cocaine eradication in Bolivia is also a major drug trafficker. He hires a pair of indigenous, small-time hustlers to drive a shipment of cocaine to the Brazilian border where he intends to have them busted. This cynical, hypocritical gringo is awarded the country's highest honor. Bellott presents the US war on drugs as an elaborate ruse to make huge profits and set up Bolivian fall guys in order to look virtuous in the process. Though Bolivian President Evo Morales has not joined Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in calling President Bush "the devil," contemporary Bolivian movies depict US characters as various sorts of demons. Such heavy-handed portrayals reflect a long-term cultural distrust of US motives in South America and a frustration with US attempts to dictate terms of assistance to Bolivia. Only now those sentiments are expressed in movies, not just graffiti scrawled on adobe walls. Someday, a Bolivian visiting the United States may feel nervous to find himself surrounded by the scheming, soulless gringos he knew about only from Bolivian movies.