America’s war on drugs hasn’t been going a whole lot better than any of the other wars we’ve fought lately. When our government pressured Bolivia to destroy their coca crops, it still failed to remove the scourge of cocaine from our city streets. But it did succeed in decimating the livelihoods of the cocaleros, Bolivia’s coca leaf farmers, sending them into despair and violent unrest. Preaching an anti-American line with wit and occasionally distressing persuasiveness, Aymara Indian and union leader Evo Morales launched a historic and successful bid to become his nation’s first indigenous president. First-time filmmaker Alejandro Landes’ 2006 documentary, Cocalero, follows Morales’s uphill battle to power, as he travels Bolivia and charms rich and poor alike. In addition to assassination threats against Morales and an endlessly shifting election date, the film’s crew was forced to deal with their subject’s sometimes grudging cooperation—at one point, he accused them of being spies sent by the CIA. The film has won kudos for its evenhanded approach, offering Morales and some of his detractors a chance to tell their side of a very complex story. Cocalero will be presented in Spanish with English subtitles. A Q&A session will follow with Aymara international affairs liaison Mayra Gómez.The screening kicks off “Dreams and Realities,” this year’s Latin American Studies Film Series at California State University Long Beach. The series continues on Thursday the 20th with Claudio Dabed’s 2005 dark comedy Pretending, about an attractive, Chilean woman who decides to start her life over as a homely girl in hopes that she’ll be taken more seriously. It’s followed on Septmeber 27th by a restored print of the 1960 sports docudrama Little Giants, (not to be confused with the woebegone, 1994 Rick Moranis/Ed O’Neill family sports comedy) and concludes October 4th with Rodrigo Triana’s 2006 A Ton of Luck, a fact-based, 2006 drama about four soldiers from the anti-guerrilla “Destroyer” battalion who discover $46 million.

Tags: cal state long beach, evo morales, latin american film, war on drugs