Mauricio Minotti

As the third installment in an ongoing series of muckraking documentaries by Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas that investigate various sociological aspects of South America's second-largest nation (following 2004's Memoria del saqueo and 2005's La Dignidad de los nadies), Latent Argentina springboards from a truth little-known to most of the titular country's residents: Argentina owns more wealth and more innate natural resources than almost any nation on its continent. The possessor of a bountiful shoreline, endless acres of tillable farmland, the fourth largest metal reserves on the planet and a remarkable space program (the fourth in the world to send a human being into space), Argentina nevertheless remains a prisoner of backward and disadvantageous economical, political and social systems.

The history of the Argentine railways, from 1857 until the crisis of the current transport system. The closing of branches of the railway lines turned towns whose main source of work was the train into ghost towns. The privatization of the lines caused the dismissal of tens of thousands of workers as well as the deterioration of public service, causing in turn the increase of motor transport and the multiplication of automobile accidents.

After Memoria del saqueo, La dignidad de los nadies, Argentina latente and La próxima estación, Solanas begins with Oro puro a diptych on the plundering of mineral resources (metals and hydrocarbons). This remarkable and powerful documentary denounces the open-pit cyanide mining operations carried out by multinationals in the northwest with the support of politicians, exposes the progressive contamination of soil and water, and exalts social resistance movements through moving individual and collective examples.

The epic of popular resistance to the privatization of oil in Argentina and its tragic consequences: thousands of layoffs, poverty and environmental pollution. It was one of the biggest scams and failures of national history: the country was self-sufficient in oil and gas reserves and twenty years later, you must import them.

As an act of reparation and remembrance, victims and survivors of state terrorism recount how the clandestine detention center operated at the 4th Police Station in the city of Santa Fe during Argentina’s last civil-military dictatorship. Those who were detained there recount how, at that police station, the provincial police tortured, raped, murdered, and disappeared young people who had been abducted during illegal operations carried out in the city, in surrounding areas, and in northern Santa Fe.