Juanjo Pereira: Under the Flags, the Sun

The debut feature by a young Paraguayan filmmaker, whose work alternates between cinema and video installations, Under the Flags, the Sun (Bajo las banderas, el sol; Paraguay, Argentina, USA, France, Germany) is an essay-film entirely based on rare archival documents, covering 35 years of the regime of dictator Alfredo Stroessner who ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

Through its mechanism and quality, the film evokes the masterpiece of Romanian director André Ujică, Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu, 2010), which deconstructed the image of the Romanian dictator’s regime using its own fabricated propaganda images. Here, Juanjo Pereira does not limit himself to propaganda archives (although they occupy an important place in the film), but he also uses documents of different nature, such as foreign television reportages (from France, Germany and Brazil, among others), scientific documents, amateur footage, and even animated films. Through all these sources, Pereira develops a kaleidoscopic vision of his country under Stroessner’s regime, a form of visually rich jigsaw, allowing the viewers to think and build their own judgment on what they are witnessing. Thus, the director never intervenes himself through a voice-over commentary, and all the film’s sound sources come from archival material (propaganda speeches, interviews with various figures of the regime or its opponents, political analyses in the media).

Stroessner came to power in the mid-1950s with the support of the conservative party Colorado, of which he had been a member since 1951. From his election onwards, he amended the constitution several times to maintain in power indefinitely. In the context of the Cold War, he developed a strategic alliance with the United States, becoming one of their main supporters in Latin America, long before Pinochet came to power in Chile. He encouraged the establishment of large American companies in the country as part of an ultra-liberal economic policy that benefitted the ruling classes and significantly weakened the popular classes, particularly agricultural workers and farmers in rural areas. At the same time, he brutally repressed opposition movements (especially those of workers and peasants) by carrying out waves of arrests among the country’s communist leaders. Some spent years in prison, while others disappeared without trace.

One of the remarkable cases extensively analysed in the film is that of the construction of the Itaipu hydroelectric dam, considered at the time to be the largest in the world, a pharaonic project intended to glorify Stroessner’s image as part of his megalomaniac vision of himself and of the country as a leader in Latin-America. While propaganda images extol the merits of the project in the name of the prosperity it would bring to Paraguay, other images – by foreign reporters or amateur filmmakers – reveal the terrible reality behind the official version: thousands of peasants expelled from their lands, massive destruction of nature, fraud and corruption in the award of construction contracts to companies.

Another absolutely fascinating chapter in the film concerns the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, the horrific doctor of the death camps responsible for the mass murder of detainees, particularly Jews and Gypsies, using those peoples frequently for his medical experiments before ordering their assassination. With Stroessner’s direct complicity, Mengele, who found refuge in Paraguay after the war, obtained Paraguayan citizenship and lived quietly in the country with a false identity. Stroessner always denied Mengele’s presence in his country, but images from foreign news reports (French and German, in this case) prove the contrary. We see for example the couple Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, Nazi hunters who contributed to reveal the presence of many Nazi criminals in South America, courageously demonstrating in the capital Asunción against Stroessner and his state lie. Under the Flags, The Sun goes even further in showing that Stroessner’s own German roots are not unrelated to his complicity with former Nazis, possibly including relatives from the German branch of his family. These links are highlighted, among other aspects, in a reportage on the Paraguayan president’s visit to the small Bavarian town of Hof from which his family originates, and the joyous beer party that was organised in his honour on that occasion.

Under the Flags, The Sun begins with a few animated short films describing Paraguay’s small size on the world map and among the great nations of Latin America that surround it. The strength of Juanjo Pereira’s film lies not only in its way of deconstructing the image of this regime, relatively unknown in the western world compared to the dictatorships of Brazil, Chile or Argentina, but also in allowing us to meditate on the dynamic power that determines the relationships between the West, particularly the United States, and the Third World during the Cold War and, in some respects, practically up to the present days.

Ariel Schweitzer
Edited by Birgit Beumers
©FIPRESCI