Evo Morales in Landes's film. (Courtesy Cocalero)

Scenes like these—intimate, apolitical, and unrehearsed—make Cocalero, Alejandro Landes’s documentary of Evo Morales’s presidential campaign, a compelling film. Since Morales’s election in 2005, American news outlets have covered his anti-American rhetoric and his friendship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, but they have failed to analyze Morales’s political successes or to mention how American foreign policy has contributed to his rise—precisely the issues that Cocalero considers. In an interview with the Globalist, Landes explained, “I met Evo in a way that you don’t really meet a president. On a very human level, what I found was a human authenticity and a clear desire of what he wanted.”

Landes, who followed Morales throughout his grassroots campaign, succeeds in showing the human behind the controversial public persona. For example, we learn about how Morales became interested in politics when the U.S.-led War on Drugs made coca illegal. Since coca is used to make more than just cocaine and was widely farmed in Bolivia, most Bolivians protested the policy and coca farmers, known as cocaleros, organized into unions.

Morales, himself a former coca farmer, recalls the effect the policy had: “During the dictatorship, we saw a brother being burned alive by government forces. Up until that day, I believed that the president was the father of all Bolivians. I had little education and no ideology. But we began to question.”

The disturbing origin of Morales’s political career provides a reason for his antipathy towards the U.S. and, at the very least, the film encourages us to question his image in the American media. Using footage from Movement for Socialism (MAS) rallies and interviews with farmers, Landes portrays the president as a defender of the rural coca farmer and a crusader for more equitable wealth distribution.

But Landes does not claim that Morales is a democrat. “He’s someone who very much concentrates power in his hands,” said Landes. “The same person who the film shows choosing pictures for the campaign posters is also making policies. He’s not someone who’s going to foment the growth of institutions.”

In Cocalero, MAS political operations dramatically reflect Morales’s autocratic tendencies. Failure to attend MAS meetings or vote for a MAS candidate is punishable by fines, jail sentences, or detention beneath the palo santo—a tree teeming with fire ants. The film is unclear about how widespread these practices are.

To Landes, Morales is both a gentleman and a demagogue. Some critics argue that Landes’s ambivalence is one of the film’s major flaws, but, as he explained, his film offers more than a black-and-white portrayal of the president. “American audiences in particular want to be able to meet film with a solid sense of what is right and what is wrong. I wanted to show a very human story, and humans are fragile and flawed.”

As Morales enters his third year in office, Cocalero remains a relevant and revealing film which suggests that beneath the firebrand façade is a man with principles and honor. Perhaps if Western leaders sought to understand the forces that drive leaders like Evo Morales into the political arena and examined their core beliefs, they would find more opportunities for cooperation with their counterparts in Bolivia and the rest of South America.”

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites