Research on Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán

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Movie
German title Research on Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
Original title Devils Don't Dream!
Country of production Switzerland
original language German , Spanish
Publishing year 1995
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Andreas Hoessli
production Espaces Film, Swiss TV DRS
music Unknown
camera Jürgen Partzsch

Research on Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (English Devils Don't Dream! ) Is a Swiss documentary film by Andreas Hoessli from 1995 about the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán , who was of Swiss descent and first also in Switzerland found asylum . In 1998 the film was broadcast on 3sat .

action

Based on interviews with contemporary witnesses , both from Guatemala and the USA , and a. President Vinicio Cerezo , Carlos Manuel Pellecer , Mario Sandoval Alarcón, José Manuel Fortuny , Arbenz bodyguard Guillermo Echeverría, the former CIA employee E. Howard Hunt and the Costa Rican widow María Cristina Vilanova de Árbenz as well as the montage of historical film and Hoessli reconstructed the events surrounding the CIA- staged coup against Arbenz in June 1954.

Hoessli develops the thesis that any pictorial representation of Arbenz was banned by the subsequent governments in order to erase the reform president from the collective memory , which is confirmed by a statement by Cerezo:

(Voice of the speaker from the off): The President says: Jacobo Arbenz has lost a war . Whoever loses a war will perish forever. That's history. It is the winners who make history, says the President. The winners made Jacobo Arbenz a monster , a devil . He thought a long time before saying that.

Hoessli's most important optical sources are film recordings made by a Guatemalan filmmaker who handed over his material, which had been hidden for decades, to Hoessli shortly before his death. Hoessli shows how the paranoia of anti-communism was able to generate an international mood that prevented the UN from resisting Operation Success , since no UN observers were sent to the crisis area, as the Arbenz government had demanded. Former agent Howard Hunt, who was later involved in the Watergate scandal , explains in detail how the coup was made possible by bribes : It is always easier to pay people to omit something than to take active action. In the case of Operation Success , the bribed Guatemalan officials and army officers simply did not have to take active action against the invading forces in order to ensure the success of the company. In addition, the radio station Radio de liberación, established by the CIA, had demoralized troops loyal to the government by spreading rumors .

At the end of the film, Hoessli doubts the official version of Arbenz's death on January 27, 1971 in Mexico City . The alleged suicide in the bathtub has never been formally investigated.

Production notes

Hoessli began the research back in 1988. In the course of the filming, numerous interviewees who had already accepted, dropped out for fear of reprisals .

criticism

... In impressions from today's Guatemala, the parade on Independence Day or the election of the beauty queen, the film author deciphered an atmospheric reverberation of the Arbenz tragedy. This method is aesthetically exemplary: Far from the inflationary image metaphorization and the texting of TV reports ... DEVILS DON'T DREAM is a strikingly optimistic film: It believes in the power of repressed images.

Stefan Reinecke in the Frankfurter Rundschau , quoted from artfilm.ch

... It is the winners who make (the) history. Hoessli's film has not just become a historical monograph by the failed reformer Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, but also a complex, skeptical essay on the difficulty of writing history.

Alexander J. Seiler , quoted from artfilm.ch

Awards

Lore

As far as is known, the film was never edited on VHS or DVD .

Web links