By Marcela Valente
Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oct. 8 (IPS) — The manager of
a cinema owned by local authorities in the northeastern Argentine province
of Salta cancelled the screening of a film on the damages caused by
deforestation in neighboring Chaco province.
According to Salta filmmaker Alejandro Arros, the decision was based
on the fear that showing the film could be interpreted as a hostile
act against similar environmental policies followed by the local government.
Arros told IPS that his production company had invited his colleague
Alejandro Fernández Mouján to show Sólo se escucha
el viento (Only the Wind Can Be Heard), a short documentary that graphically
exposes the impact on the forests and local residents of Chaco of the
bulldozers used to clear farmland for planting transgenic soy.
Arros had invited Fernández Mouján to attend the Oct.
6 showing that was cancelled. He was to participate in a discussion
with the audience after the documentary, to talk about the effects of
deforestation in Argentina’s entire northeastern region.
“They told me not to go because my film would not be shown due
to pressure from the (provincial) government,” Fernández
Mouján explained to IPS in a telephone interview from Chaco,
where his film on the destruction of forests was recently presented
to the provincial legislature.
“Many people who were planning to go were indignant, and told me
so in e-mail messages,” he added.
The filmmaker already showed the documentary in Buenos Aires and Villa
María, a farming town in the central province of Córdoba
where genetically modified soybean crops are expanding at the expense
of traditional crops and cattle-raising activities.
In the film, “I show the effects of monoculture agriculture,”
said Fernández Mouján.
The Salta government, headed by Governor Juan Carlos Romero, vice-presidential
running-mate on former president Carlos Menem’s ticket in 2003,
successfully pressed the provincial legislature to strip a 22,000-hectare
nature reserve of its protected status this year.
The reserve was created in the 1990s, during Romero’s previous
provincial administration, to preserve the native forest and endangered
species of flora and fauna. The reserve is home to subsistence farmers
and Wichí Indians, who survive on what they can gather and hunt
in the forest.
In the past few years, increasingly large extensions of land in Argentina
have been cleared to make way for soybeans, of which this country is
the world’s third-largest producer. It is also the second largest
producer of transgenic crops, mainly soybeans.
Environmental and local grassroots organizations, with the support of
members of the academic community, filed lawsuits to block the decision.
Since the cases are still pending, the new “owners” of the
land in the reserve have not been able to go ahead with clearing the
forest.
The pressure of the legal action and protests, combined with the declining
price of soybeans, prompted one of the agricultural producers to pull
out of the business deal.
Fernández Mouján, said his film shows the desperate situation
of the local indigenous people, their land destroyed and their belongings
strewn along the road.
Arros explained that actress Ana María Parodi, who selects the
films to be screened in the Auditorium cinema, which belongs to the
Salta provincial Ministry of Social Welfare, cancelled the showing of
Sólo se escucha el viento on Oct. 5, the day before it was scheduled
to run.
Arros’ production company had hired the Auditorium to show the
film, as part of a broad range of activities opposed to the sale of
the nature reserve in Salta.
Parodi canceled after Arros sent her a small publication in which the
documentary was advertised in such a way that it likened the deforestation
in Chaco to what was happening around the nature reserve in Salta.
“I don’t have any evidence that she was threatened by the
government, but she says the showing of the film had turned into a political
event and that she feared reprisals from the (provincial) authorities,
like the loss of her job,” said the filmmaker.
