Costa-Gavras already cemented his status as the premier political-thriller filmmaker by the time of his fourth feature in five years, State of Siege. He burst onto the international stage with his sophomore effort Z in 1969, Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film. The Greek born, French citizen followed with The Confession a year later. Both starred Yves Montand, who would also lead State of Siege.
Both films are based on true stories — Z is a fictionalized account of the real-life assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, a thorn in the side to those who later overthrew the king of Greece, Constantine II, in a 1967 military coup d’etat. The Confession is based on the autobiography of Arthur London, who endured the Kafkaesque show trial that tried to destroy him.
By the time of the American release of State of Siege in 1973, Costa-Gavras was being dubbed the “Hitchcock of the Left.”
“The past must be judged in the light of truths established today.”
— THE CONFESSION
Of Z, The Confession, and State of Siege, I found the latter visually and thematically mature, Costa-Gavras locked in on the documentary-style cinema verite, but in a manner stylized and technically accomplished that still is enjoyable to watch as a well-done genre piece. For the purposes of this article, however, State of Siege should be rediscovered in light of USAID’s current role in the news cycle. As of today, February 7, a federal judge said “he would order a short pause on an effort to put thousands of USAID employees on leave and rapidly withdraw employees stationed abroad,” The New York Times reported.
State of Siege is a thinly veiled dramatization of the August 1970 murder of USAID consultant Dan Mitrione in Montevideo, Uruguay. Mitrione, a fifty-year old American, Italian immigrant, and Catholic father of 9, was found dead in the back seat of a stolen Buick convertible, shot four times. In State of Siege, the Mitrione character is named Philip Michael Santore. While Uruguay is never overtly stated — the saga is set in an unnamed South American country — the film makes oblique references to Montevideo and the Tupamaros, the violent Marxist-Leninist guerilla organization.
The film actually opens on the discovery of Santore’s body and works backward, spending most of its dramatic tension between the kidnapped Santore and his young Tupamaros captives, particularly wild-eyed young Hugo who accuses Santore — and therefore USAID and the US government — of being a CIA front, whose mission behind the purported role of AID was to actually train police forces in torture techniques and organize repression efforts against revolutionary leaders.
Was there any truth to the Tupamaros claims? The CIA certainly had been in the business of coups in South America and worldwide: the successful Cold War-era coups in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the installation of Diem in South Vietnam, and later Allende’s Chile, where Costa-Gavras shot State of Siege in place of Uruguay. (Interestingly, the 1973 Chilean coup will become the setting of arguably Costa’s best known film, Missing, which won him a second Oscar, in 1982).
USAID was established by a President Kennedy executive order in 1961. State of Siege, when released in the U.S. in April 1973, endured intense controversy. The film was set to be screened at the John F. Kennedy Center by the American Film Institute in April, but was cancelled by AFI’s director, Oscar-winning director George Stevens, who said State of Siege “rationalizes an act of political assassination.” Writing in a nationally syndicated piece, Ernest Lefever, who later founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976, called State of Siege an “anti-American film.” It quotes Newsweek’s Paul Zimmerman who criticized it as “a melodramatic left-wing restaging of history.” Indiana senator Birch Bayh even had the Lefever piece published in the Congressional record.
Lefever put forth two questions in his sprawling deconstruction of the film as falsely depicting and muddying the good name of Dan Mitrione:
“1. Is State of Siege an honest documentary, a fictional thriller, an anti-US propaganda tract, or a combination?
2. Will it exert, as Judith Crist and others have suggested, a constructive impact on Washington’s policy toward Latin America by shocking US citizens into awareness of ‘torture and repression’ that the Agency for International Development (AID) allegedly carries out in its name?”
That Costa-Gavras and co-screenwriter Franco Solinas frame Philip Michael Santore as CIA working under the veneer of USAID is obvious. In real-life, Mitrione was a former police chief in Richmond, Indiana; he left that job in 1960 to be a public safety adviser for the federal organization International Cooperation Administration, which AID replaced. Lefever writes Mitrione’s job was to “help local police upgrade their quality and efficiency by providing technical advice, modern gear and, when in Washington, to train them in AID’s International Police Academy.”
Mitrione’s hometown newspaper, The Palladium-Item, mentioned the film as follows:
When it finally made its American debut, Roger Ebert gave State of Siege three-and-a-half stars out of four. Ebert, then 31, concludes his terse review thusly:
“The film itself is finally frustrating, as it was meant to be, and as “Z” was. The actions in the film seem futile, but no alternative course seems open. The government will continue to torture, the United States will continue to meddle, the urban guerrillas will continue their terrorism, and United Fruit and International Telephone and Telegraph will — continue.”
Mitrione’s kidnapping and execution occurred during President Nixon’s truncated second term. In 2010, secret cables published by the National Security Archive revealed intense pressure the Nixon White House was putting on the Uruguayan government during Mitrione’s ten days of captivity. On the surface, Nixon called for amnesty and offered ransom money. Behind the scenes, Nixon’s then-Secretary of State, William Rogers, cabled U.S. ambassador Charles Adair to consider the use of threat that the Uruguay government would kill Tupamaros leader Raul Sendic. Adair cabled back:
“Through indirect means, a threat was made to these prisoners that members of the Escuadron de Muerte (Death Squad) would take action against the prisoners’ relatives if Mitrione were killed,” referring to prisoners the Tupamaros were hoping to have released in exchange for returning Mitrione.
As arrests of Sendic and other Tupamaro leaders were underway and the Uruguay government refused the prisoner exchange, Daniel A. Mitrione was shot to death. When his body was found in the back of the stolen Buick, his body showed signs of being tortured. Sendic, who died in 1986, later said it was not the intention of the kidnappers to kill Mitrione.
Three months after State of Siege’s release in the U.S., Uruguay’s president Bordaberry closed parliament. A coup d’etat took place on June 27, with Bordaberry enacting a civic-military dictatorship, and ruling Uruguay alongside a military junta.