L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (7/2/10), reviewing Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border, remarks in passing that "a recent piece in the New York Times pointed out numerous errors" in the film's discussion of Latin American politics.

Turan might have noticed that the Times' supposed debunking, by former Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, has itself been quite thoroughly debunked. But even more important when pointing out a filmmaker's "numerous errors" is to avoid making glaring errors of one's own, as Turan did when he recommended other documentaries similar to Stone's:

If you are interested in the fascinating events around [Hugo] Chavez's rise to power, you can see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, directed by two Irish filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, who were on the scene when the events happened.

And if you care about the groundbreaking election that brought [Evo] Morales to power in Ecuador...the film to watch is Rachel Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis, which shows how American political consultants tried in vain to get Morales' opponent into office.

The event Bartley and O'Briain were on hand to record, though, and the focus of their documentary, was the failed coup against Chavez in 2002--which took place more than three years after Chavez rose to power by being elected president.

And Morales is president of Bolivia, not Ecuador--and Our Brand Is Crisis doesn't depict him defeating a rival backed by U.S. consultants in the 2005 elections, it shows those U.S. consultants advising President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to victory in the 2002 elections.

In fictional film terms, Turan's review is like a critic saying that The Phantom Menace is inferior to The Empire Strikes Back, in which Yoda is revealed to be Han Solo's father.

New York Times reporter Larry Rohter turned in a factually challenged fact-check of Oliver Stone's new film South of the Border. So Stone and the film's co-writers Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote a devastating rebuttal. A reader passed along a link to that piece to Rohter, suggesting that he "should be embarrassed" by his review.

Unsurprisingly, Rohter would not seem to be embarrassed at all, judging his reply email, which FAIR has received:

Dear Mr. Fuentes:

Actually, it's Oliver Stone and company who need to heed your advice. I've been scrupulously honest in my reporting and writing, and they are offended and embarrassed at having their many errors and inaccuracies disclosed. Rather than owning up to those mistakes, they've chosen to double down and up the ante. Where they might merely have been mistaken before, they are now lying outright, the letter you link to below being the prime example.

Don't take my word for it. I urge you to go back and look at what Stone and his screenwriters are saying in that letter. As regards the issue of U.S. oil imports from OPEC countries, for example, go ahead and click on the two links that Stone & Weisbrot provide and look at the numbers contained there. You will see that the United States has imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Venezuela every year since 2000. So no matter how Stone and company want to slice, dice bend or twist it, the assertion they make in the film about U.S. oil imports is simply wrong. The numbers are clear and indisputable.

Same thing goes for the 1998 Venezuela presidential race. The numbers don't lie: Irene Saez got only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 40 percent for Henrique Salas Romer, yet she is Chavez's "main opponent" and he is not? Let's apply that same pretzel logic to some other elections and see what we come up with. Was George Bush's "main opponent" in 2000 Al Gore or Ralph Nader? Was Harry Truman's "main opponent" in 1948 Thomas E. Dewey or the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond? Was Jimmy Carter's "main opponent" in 1980 Ronald Reagan or John Anderson?

It's also worthwhile using a little bit of simple logic to analyze the issue of the Cochabamba water privatization. Tariq Ali's argument seems to be that there is no substantial difference between a sale and a 40 year lease. Granted that the notion of private ownership may be anathema to someone with his ideological leanings, and therefore his understanding of different property regimens may be flawed. But the outright sale of an asset is not the same as granting a concession to use that asset for a fixed period of time, as anyone who has ever leased a car knows well. The devil is in the details, and Stone and company have chosen to ignore those. I could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you, but I trust you get the picture from the examples I've cited. Thank you for writing.

Talk about doubling down.

Rohter, for some reason, decided that this passing comment in the film deserved to be debunked: "We import more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nations." As the film makes clear, that comment was made by an oil industry analyst in a 2002 TV appearance, though Rohter's Times piece oddly cited 2004-10 data to contradict him. Stone and co. cite 1997-2001 as a more relevant time frame; in that period, the United States did in fact buy more oil from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia (though in 2000-01, Saudi Arabia was the bigger supplier). In his emailed response, Rohter ignores this explanation, and says the links provided by Stone, Weisbrot and Ali don't support their point. It would seem that they do. It's a strange item to seize on, anyway; the filmmakers included the oil analyst to make the point that various business interests--including oil companies--supported the coup against Chavez, which is not at all controversial.

Rohter's complaint about Chavez's 1998 election is similarly tendentious. Irene Saez was considered by many observers to be Chavez's main rival in the presidential campaign. That's what reporter Bart Jones says in the documentary; it's also what the New York Times reported shortly after Chavez's victory (12/9/98):

Until last spring, Irene Saez, a former Miss Universe, had been leading in voter surveys, peaking at 35.7 percent to Mr. Chavez's 20.6 percent. Then the price of oil, which underpins Venezuela's entire economy, fell steeply. "We went from an optimistic country to a pessimistic one," said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Datanalysis polling agency.

The following month, Miss Saez accepted a lukewarm endorsement from one of the two traditional parties. The backing compromised her claims to being an outsider and her popularity ratings slid into the single digits.

On the debate over Bolivian water rights, the matter seems hardly worth reviewing; it comes down to how one chooses to characterize a deal that would hand a private company 40-year control over a nation's water supply. Apparently in Rohter's mind calling such a deal "privatization" is evidence that someone has the wrong "ideological leanings" to understand complex financial transactions.

Rohter assures that he "could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you." I think we've seen enough.

It's not a huge surprise that a correspondent for a newspaper that supported the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would dislike a film that offers a more sympathetic view of Chavez's politics.

That said, Larry Rohter's review (New York Times, 6/26/10) of the new Oliver Stone film South of the Border still manages to surprise-- mostly because Rohter's attempt to fact-check the movie is such a failure.

Rohter's first big catch is this:

Mr. Stone argues in the film that Colombia, which "has a far worse human rights record than Venezuela," gets "a pass in the media that Chavez doesn't" because of his hostility to the United States.

Rohter doesn't attempt to demonstrate that this is false; instead, he points out that the Human Rights Watch logo "appears on the screen. That would seem to imply that the organization is part of the 'political double standard' of which Mr. Stone complains. "

Well, that could be. Or it could mean that they've studied the human rights situations in both countries. Rohter goes to the group for a response. And here's what he got:

"It's true that many of Chavez's fiercest critics in Washington have turned a blind eye to Colombia's appalling human rights record," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of the group's Americas division.

So the movie suggests that Colombia's rights record gets far less attention that Venezuela's--a contention that would seem to be true based on the amount of press attention granted to abuses in each country (Extra!, 2/09).  Rohter goes to Human Rights Watch, and they... agree with the film's argument that Colombia gets a pass in Washington.

Rohter devotes a lot of space to discussing the 2002 shootings in Caracas that preceded the coup. He seems to insinuate that Stone is getting things wrong (arguing that one expert in the film is a biased source, for example), but if there's a lesson here in how Oliver Stone abused the truth-- Rohter maligns Stone's "tendentious attitude"-- I am unable to locate it.

The movie isn't just about Hugo Chavez; the point is to take stock of the leftward political shift in Latin America. Rohter finds problems here, too (the Ali referenced here is Tariq Ali, who co-wrote the film with economist Mark Weisbrot):

Trying to explain the rise of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia who is a Chávez acolyte, Mr. Ali refers to a controversial and botched water privatization in the city of Cochabamba.

The problem with that? Rohter explains:

In reality, the government did not sell the water supply: It granted a consortium that included Bechtel a 40-year management concession in return for injections of capital to expand and improve water service and construction of a dam for electricity and irrigation.

Oh, they didn't sell the water supply; they granted a private corporate a "a 40-year management concession."

Stone, Weisbrot and Ali have written a letter to the Times responding to the review. They point out that even some of the more mundane criticisms of the film are wrong:

Accusing the film of "misinformation," Rohter writes that "a flight from Caracas to La Paz, Bolivia, flies mostly over the Amazon, not the Andes. . .."  But the narration does not say that the flight is "mostly" over the Andes, just that it flies over the Andes, which is true.

But they also point out that Rohter's fixation on the shootings and coup might be explained by the fact that Rohter's reporting on those subjects was so problematic:

Rohter should have disclosed his own conflict of interest in this review. The film criticizes the New York Times for its editorial board’s endorsement of the military coup of April 11, 2002 against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, which was embarrassing to the Times. Moreover, Rohter himself wrote an article on April 12 that went even further than the Times' endorsement of the coup:

"Neither the overthrow of Mr. Chavez, a former army colonel, nor of Mr. Mahuad two years ago can be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup. The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president's supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended." – Larry Rohter, New York Times, April 12, 2002

These allegations that the coup was not a coup--not only by Rohter--prompted a rebuttal by Rohter's colleague at the New York Times, Tim Weiner, who wrote a Sunday Week in Review piece two days later entitled "A Coup by Any Other Name" (New York Times, 4/14/02).

South of the Border aims to give viewers a glimpse of Latin American politics that could serve as as antidote to the one-sided, propagandistic treatment in the corporate media. Reviews like Rohter's only remind us of this fact.