OLVIDADOS LINKS AMERICA’S OPERATION CONDOR WITH TORTURE OF LEFTISTS
When Olvidados begins, soldiers from six dictatorships in Latin Americas are being trained at an American base in Panamá to engage in Operation Condor, which aimed to eliminate the supposed threat of Soviet communist efforts to overthrow military regimes during the 1970s and 1980s. The film centers on aging General José Mendieta (played by Damián Alcázar), who is penning a confession of his role in Operation Condor to his son after collapsing on seeing one of his victims in public. Many frames feature the roundup of leftists, including far too many minutes of torture sessions. Some of those tortured disappear from public records, whence the title, which means “forgotten ones.” (They were then called “the disappeared.”) Mendieta’s son Pablo (Bernardo Peña) then arrives in Buenos Aires to comfort his father on his deathbed, not realizing that he will become the recipient of the missive. Director Carlos Bolado, however, focuses mostly on the arrests, protests, detentions, and tortures rather than providing an informative historical narrative. If the effort is to show the extreme lengths to which authorities obsessively demonize individuals considered threats, then the parallel is obvious with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, where Americans practiced what they preached at the training base in Panamá. But that analogy is not provided amid the chaos of the portrayal of Operation Condor. A title at the end applauds the decision of the Argentine democracy in 2013 to prosecute those involved in the excesses, perhaps as if calling out the U.S. government for failing to allow similar prosecutions of Americans, as identified on www.uswarcrimes.com. MH