Using the interrogation of a US counterinsurgency agent as a backdrop, the film explores the consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas.
In Uruguay in the early 1970s, an official of the US Agency for International Development (a group used as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods) is kidnapped by a group of urban guerillas. Using his interrogation as a backdrop, the film explores the often brutal consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerillas.—Erich Schneider <[email protected]>
This closely follows a true account of Cold War US black-ops in South America preceding Operation Condor launched by Augusto Pinochet in Chile following the 1973 CIA-orchestrated coup against President Allende and his death by probable assassination. Costa-Gavros also directed Missing, a film about this event starring Jack Lemmon and Sissie Spacek.
The historical figure played by Yves Montand in State of Siege was Dan Mitrioni, a former Indiana police chief working in Montevideo within USAID's Office of Public Safety, which in fact was training civilian police in kidnapping, torture and assassinations of suspected Communists parallel to School of the Americas training of South American military personnel. The film opens with the American found dead in the back of a car. We subsequently learn how and why this came about. The Tupamoros, a popular Uruguay insurgency that robbed the rich and gave to the poor, had captured and interrogated the American "trainer" at length about his actions and motivations. The captive-captors interactions that take the form of a trial are the heart of the film, revealing the motives and objectives of the insurgents and the defensive rationalizations underlying violent American interference in Latin American governments. The American never breaks and confesses, so they are left with no alternative but to execute him for his many capital crimes.
Both Contra-Gavras films provide important history lessons that Americans receive from neither their schools nor their media. Missing was a major box office success, but State of Siege provides the clearest understanding of US Cold War operations and their impacts on targeted societies.
