New York Times - January, 11 2006

Moving from the breathtaking beauty of the Peruvian Andes to the graceful sweep of coastal Lima, Pamela Yates’s harrowing documentary “State of Fear” chronicles 20 years of terror, brutality and repression.

Based on the testimony of more than 16,000 people to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the film begins with the rise of the Maoist leader Abimael Guzma?n and his Shining Path guerrillas and culminates in the collapse of President Alberto K. Fujimori’s government in November 2000, when Mr. Fujimori resigned during a corruption scandal. Between those events lie an estimated 70,000 dead and untold numbers scarred for life.

Simply constructed around moving personal interviews, “State of Fear” clearly illuminates the racism that shielded affluent Lima residents from the atrocities suffered by the rest of the country. Not until “high-class white people” were killed, says one person who is interviewed, did Shining Path become real. But for the indigenous population, forced to choose between joining the guerrillas or being tortured by the military, terror was an everyday occurrence. As archival film shows a dead child held aloft like a broken doll, and an ex-guerrilla calmly explains how, at age 11, killing “became an addiction,” the possible consequences of the United States’ campaign against terror become an uncomfortable subtext. This discomfort is only reinforced by “The Montesinos Media Buy,” seven minutes of surveillance video shot by Mr. Fujimori’s disgraced chief of intelligence, Vladimoro Montesinos. A damning record of the media bribery that oiled Mr. Fujimori’s counterterrorist campaign, the film is a shockingly funny accompaniment to “State of Fear” and a lesson on the hazards of choosing security over democracy.

State of Fear
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Pamela Yates; narrated in English and Spanish, with English subtitles, by Karen Duffy;
director of photography, Juan Dura?n; edited by Peter Kinoy; music by Tito la Rosa and Tavo Castillo;
produced by Paco de Oni?s; released by Skylight Pictures. Playing with a seven-minute short by Mr.
Kinoy, “The Montesinos Media Buy,” at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of
the Americas, South Village. Running time: 94 minutes. This film is not rated.

The Onion - January, 11 2006

Though it never explicitly mentions the elephant in the room, Pamela Yates’ documentary State Of Fear, about Peru’s bloody 20-year war against the Maoist terrorist organization Shining Path, is really intended as a cautionary tale for the current War On Terror. Some of the parallels are more relevant than others, but its central point is a powerful one: That eroding of democratic principles for the purpose of protecting them is not only ineffective in fighting terrorism, but leads to corruption and abuse of power at the executive level. Imposing media control and the heavy-handed use of the military, President Alberto Fujimori produced a climate of fear that was effective in controlling his people, but not necessarily effective in fighting the enemy.

Whatever its propagandistic purpose, State Of Fear draws out these contemporary resonances through a straightforward, four-square documentary style, patiently revealing its history lesson via the expected talking heads, archival footage, and photographs. Inspired by the Truth Commission, the independent council that sorted through testimony and evidence after the fact, Yates and her crew collect an oral history of their own: They interview a range of witnesses, from former Shining Path fanatics and military officials to the peasants who were oppressed and abused by both sides. Between 1980 and 2000, roughly 700,000 people were killed during the uprising, which started in the mountains and countryside as a Maoist revolution and gradually seeped into cosmopolitan Lima. Founded by Abimael Guzma?n, whose power over his followers made him a figure of quasi-religious devotion, Shining Path flourished in an area where Peru’s ostensibly democratic principles didn’t reach. After Fujimori was brought to office in landslide election, he used his mandate to dissolve Congress and step up an aggressive security campaign that wreaked more havoc than it contained.

State Of Fear builds to a key point about the consequences of democracies fighting terrorism by erasing its central tenets, but in doing so, it doesn’t underplay the horrors wrought by Guzma?n’s organization. Yates interviews a child soldier abducted into Shining Path’s cause, a peasant woman who watched the revolutionaries burn her grandmother alive, and an imprisoned true believer who appears brainwashed to this day. Yet the film hits hardest when examining the Fujimori dictatorship, which continued to tighten its grip on the country even after Guzman’s capture in 1992, using any terrorist activity as justification for its own atrocities. Fujimori exploited his extra latitude to bypass the rule of law, punish his political enemies, and bully a nation into choosing security over freedom. Remind you of anyone? 

Time Out NY - January, 12 2006

Terrorist attacks, military incursions, car bombs, assassinations, propaganda: Peru’s sordid 20-year cycle of violence and corruption provides a disquieting mirror of the current conflicts in the Middle East. This edifying new documentary makes the parallel explicit with an opening voiceover that solemnly proclaims: “Our story takes place in Peru, but in the age of terror, it could take place anywhere.”

Nearly 70,000 Peruvians died between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the nation’s civil strife, says a member of the Peruvian Truth Commission, which was a guiding force for director Pamela Yates as she traveled to the Andean mountains and Lima to examine the country’s brutal history. The film offers a balanced view of the atrocities: On one side, Shining Path revolutionary leader Abimael Guzman began a reign of terror in rural areas, torturing and murdering villagers and kidnapping children for his Maoist army. On the other, Peruvian armed forces took to the countryside, killing indiscriminately, unable to differentiate between Shining Path members and civilians. Caught in the crossfire, “We felt as if trapped in a cage,” an indigenous woman says. The film continues through the late 1990s and 2000s, when President Alberto Fujimori embarked on his own bloody counter terrorism campaign. Using unsettling testimonials from truth-and-reconciliation leaders and those who bore witness to civilian deaths committed by guerillas and the government, State of Fear presents a troubling chronicle of the “war on terror” and the all-too-familiar ways that countries bungle it. (Now playing; Film Forum.)
—Anthony Kaufman

New York Daily News - January, 14 2006

State of Fear
At Film Forum (1:34). Not rated: Adult themes, disturbing images. In English and Spanish with subtitles. Pamela Yates’ unblinking chronicle of recent Peruvian history paints a devastating picture of a people nearly destroyed by their own leaders.

Basing her research on the findings of the nation’s recent Truth Commission, Yates details decades of blatant corruption, extreme human-rights abuses and rampant terrorism.

Though the central villain is Abimael Guzma?n, the founder of the Maoist guerrilla cult Shining Path, there are few heroes to be found here. Even the democratically elected president who pledged to destroy Guzman, Alberto Fujimori, wasted little time in instituting a near-dictatorial reign.

The country’s ongoing problems, one observer contends, are the result of “a careful cultivation of ignorance and forgetfulness.” If that’s so, this powerful work ought to be screened yearly at every school in Peru.

Village Voice - January, 10 2006

Moody muckraking: State of Fear
State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism
Directed by Pamela Yates
Skylight
January 11 through 17, Film Forum

An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere’s most horrifying killing fields. Next to nothing, that is, except about the destitute nation’s free-market privatization “miracle"—the only barrier to which has been “Marxist guerrillas"—as discussed in the occasional New York Times/Washington Post story, regardless of the 80-plus percent unemployment and the 50,000-plus civilians killed during the Belaunde and Fujimori presidencies. We’re back in Noam Chomsky World, where the only data about a country that could possibly be of relevance to Americans are the investment opportunities that its resources and restructured economy provide.

Pamela Yates’s video doc is all about the real stuff, tracing Peru’s arduous path as a microcosm of Cold War embattlement—to paraphrase the old African saying about fighting elephants and the grass they trample, when Communist insurgencies and U.S.-backed governments fight, the real victims are the people in between. Without stooping to mention the name Lori Berenson, Yates outlines the rise of the Shining Path quasi-Maoist movement (itself responsible for over 10,000 murders), the struggle to lock down the entire highlands in order to combat it, and the rise of self-fashioned despot Alberto Fujimori, who, after Shining Path had been neutered by police work, persisted with a monster power grab that included media buyouts, death squads, and the dissolution of congress. (Accompanying Yates’s thorough record is a seven-minute short composed entirely of the leaked bribery videos—complete with coffee tables stacked with cash—that extinguished Fujimori’s career.) With unofficial ownership of the media, Fujimori maintained his grip through three elections, generating a phobic public response to a threat that was no longer there.

State of Fear does its own moody muckraking with portentous music and CARE-ad visuals, but thanks to Peru’s 2002 truth commission, Yates has tons of declassified video footage, of both Shining Path guerrillas and Fujimori troopers in the process of kidnapping, assaulting, and killing civilians. The pertinent lesson here is how the Peruvian power base, as in Iraq, Chechnya, Turkey, west China, and the Palestinian territories after 9-11, exploited the fact of terror to kick up repression and control by force. In a radical programming call-and-answer, see