It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...
Soon
enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to
this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat. It belongs
to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the
country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay. The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here. Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.
In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals. Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...
Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage. Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions. Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...
Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...
Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer. By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy. By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.
In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore. This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time. The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...
The students at a local university are not in denial, however. They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay. In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...
Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views. At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...
He seems aware of what's going on below the surface. By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples. In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses. The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.
In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him. It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness. In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months. Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.
Photo Credits: All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).