So I had another appointment with Leonilda Zurita Vargas today, again at 6pm (she didn't say
en punto, which anyways I've decided means "when I wake up" in Spanish). But this time, I reconfirmed - twice. Once during the day, when the interview was still on (at least according to the folks in her office), and once right before Martijn and I headed to her office. But the second time, she hung up on both her cells and the office number went to the machine. When we got to the office, guess what? no Leonilda. She was in Congress. Obviously. So screw that, I'm finding a new senator to interview when I get back from Peru (actually, I think Martijn was angrier than I was. He was pretty pissed; I just laughed, because it's kind of what I've come to expect here). I don't even know that she knew anything about the gas issue anyways, I just knew that a friend of mine had interviewed her for a documentary on coca politics and said she was good. And I guess I knew she would tolerate a video camera. I was actually excited to have at least one woman on tape, as well. But she's lost her chance to be in the most fabultastic awesomist documentary humankind will have ever seen (if I don't decide editing is too much of a pain and say to Hell with it. Which probably won't happen, although I am sure that I will never want to see the inside of the editing studio at school again by the time this is all done).
At least yesterday I had an interview with the head of graduate studies in development at
Universidad Catolica, which was good. It was in English, too (he studied at University of Manchester), so it was much easier to probe and ask follow-up questions. The guy who gave me his name said that he was very critical of Evo's policies, but I would describe him as cautiously optimistic. At least I couldn't get him to really criticize the policy thus far. Basically, his opinion can be summed up by his response to my asking if Evo was the right man for the job: "I believe in good institutions, not good people. Having good people in power isn't enough." Essentially, what he was worried is that people in Bolivia, including Evo, will think that the switch to public control will be enough - private control was bad, so public control must be the solution (even though the opposite has happened in the past). But what needs to happen is there need to be better checks on institutions such as YPFB and the private companies, and there needs to be more transparency in the system, and there needs to be a set of incentives set up to make sure that individual players act in the public interest. And so basically his response to "gas nationalization: good or bad?" was "we'll see." So I guess I'm still waiting for my rabid, "Evo is the Devil," interview, but I expect to get that in Santa Cruz (if I can't get the people from the industry lobbyist group to be irrationally angry, I don't think it will happen).
It's hard though, because the more I do the more I realize that my documentary will be very far from professional. Maybe I need to start a lobby to get the Acadamy Awards to have the "documentary made all by one guy on no budget" award (and then we can change "best documentary" to "best documentary made by a huge group of people with professional equipment and a bunch of cash," and then people will feel like real lame-o's for winning it!). I guess in my mind I thought that I would get to have the same quality of interviews as you see on stuff like "60 Minutes" or "The Colbert Report," but really, my stuff has a lot to be desired. Most of my interviews have a lot of traffic noise in the background. The lighting sucks. The clip-on microphone is backwards in one, so the guy is wearing a giant green button instead of a professional-looking little silver mic tab (that was my first interview).
And really, I have no thesis and not much of a treatment/outline. I actually hadn't planned on making a decision about the gas policy for my viewers; I thought it would be better to present each side and leave it up to the audience (the last thing I want is Michael Moore-style film making, although I could probably make Evo look like he eats babies or that the CEO of Petrobras is a sexual deviant or something. It's not like Michael has bad ideas, so why does he have to be so manipulative in presenting them?). But the more I talk to people, the more complex things get. Am I trying to show the complex political situation in Bolivia, where the populace is violently divided and where the indigenous people have never had power? Am I trying to show the efforts of a new, inclusive government to lift its people out of poverty? Am I trying to discuss the regional implications of energy policy in the most disparate continent in the world? Is it about institutions? Power to the people? Smart business decisions? Of course, the answer is all of the above, but the more I look, the more I'm convinced that demonstrating causality in a country like Bolivia, where nothing is evident and transparency isn't even something you get in the water, is next to impossible. So I guess I'll have to balance all of those things I've listed, but how that will happen I'm not sure yet. Hopefully, as I talk to more people, ideas will become more clear.
One other thing that has been bothering me is that this isn't really such a serious exercise in policy studies or economics. I mean, for this to be a film, I can only present the most basic versions of the complex ideas at work. If I start discussing the differences between "concession" based contracts and "production sharing agreements," I know that I'll have the horrible responsibility of watching the eyes in the audience glaze over. So I guess the problem I face is making the material accessible enough to make the film fun and watchable - which, ultimately, is what I want, for the film to be popular and accessible. But there are times when I feel like I'm not really advancing my knowledge of my areas of study - but then on the other hand, it's undergraduate work, not even a thesis, and I should be able to have fun. If I want to bang out dry, tedious papers on relative approaches to hydrocarbon concessions, I can do that just as easily at home, I think. So yeah, screw you, academia!
Anyways, no more time to do stuff, interview-wise. I head to Cusco on Friday morning to meet up with friends for Inca Trail. But I'll be back in La Paz at the end of March - hopefully to interview: the vice-minister of hydrocarbons, the former minister of hydrocarbons, a senior MAS policy maker, someone from YPFB, and an economist in one of the universities. It'll be a busy two weeks, I guess.
