<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Our Brand is Crisis</i> is a documentary on American political campaign marketing tactics that Gonzalo (Goni) Sanchez de Lozada used to get re-elected as the president for Bolivia. Directed by Rachel Boynton, it captures the campaign consulting firm Greenburg, Carville, and Shrum (GCS) in the election of 2002. Goni was raised in the United States, and served a full term as the Bolivian president from 1993 to 1997. His use of neoliberalism led to his demise in his new term, and he was forced out of his office (and country) a little over a year later.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Chasteen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Born in Blood and Fire </i>details the development of neoliberalism in Latin America. Neoliberalsim is a market driven approach to both economic and social policy that focuses on the efficiency of private enterprise, and attempts to maximize the role of the private sector in defining the economical and political priorities of the country. “For better or for worse,” this policy “reigned supreme in Latin America at the turn of the third millennium” (Chasteen 311). One of Goni’s big ideas was to open up the market for petroleum exportation into the United States, via a pipeline that runs through Chile, which was not received very well by the Bolivian public. In the film, members of the public wanted somewhat of an older type of government in which the economy faces more inward than outward. Chasteen writes about the same feelings, to return to “economic independence” from the state run corporations and public services created by the nationalists (Chasteen 312). Even though the public in the film were pretty clear about wanting a nationalist state of being, Goni continued to push toward the ideas of neoliberalism. And the GCS went along for the ride. (It’s what they are paid to do, anyways.)</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Goni is not the first politician to lie to the public, and will certainly not be the last. When he did not create jobs for the indigenous population of Bolivia, he outraged the masses. Goni won the election with only 22% of the vote, which shows he did not have the support of a majority to begin with. After breaking promises made to the 22% that did support him, the citizens were ready to remove him for good. In John Perkins’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions of an Economic Hitman</i>, he convinced the population of the third world countries that big projects, such as dams, would benefit the country economically. What he didn’t mention is that it would bankrupt the country. Perkins speaks about Ecuador, where oil companies had begun destroying the rain forests that local tribes had lived in for decades. When the democratically elected Jaime Roldos began siding with the tribes, he told the forien industries that if they continued without benefiting the population, their business was not allowed in Ecuador any longer (Perkins 183). Roldos was killed in a plane crash after making such threats. Coincidence?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Before Goni was re-elected, the U.S. government’s “Washington Consensus” began making these neoliberal connections to Latin America (Cypher 47). This relationship with Latin America caused the neoliberal ideas to spread across the region within the next decade. This lead to a unanimous increase in poverty, caused pay wages to decrease, and further separated the distribution of income in basically every nation (Cypher 47). With the help from the GCS, Goni was elected by a very short lead, and with his failure to produce jobs for the indigenous Bolivians he was shipped back to the U.S., where his neoliberal agenda developed.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4519892394579927293-2688984568930292503?l=jeremiahglass.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
