He is soft spoken, with a very friendly face, but his message is straightforward. John Smihula has a lot to say—and show. After losing 15 years of sleep thinking about the dangers of U.S. foreign policy, Smihula said “enough,” and decided to follow three veterans-turned-pacifists on the road to the annual SOA protest in Fort Benning, Georgia. Three years later, Smihula was finishing Hidden in Plain Sight, a powerful documentary about the controversial school in which Latin American military personnel learn how to fight their own people. 

Smihula has been an activist for many years, and with Hidden in Plain Sight he transferred this passion to film. He spent uncountable hours on the road, traveling between Reno, Nevada, where he teaches English, and San Francisco, where he edited the documentary. Smihula says, “At times people abandoned the project. Money dried up on a couple of occasions. A few people told me I should drop the project. I kept saying, ‘No, I’ve got to make it happen. We just need a couple of strokes of good fortune and it will happen!’ Perseverance paid off.” 

It sure did. Hidden in Plain Sight debuted during the 3rd World Social Forum in Brazil this past January. Since then it has been seen by audiences across the United States, and has received great reviews. Most important of all, it has accomplished a documentary’s main purpose: to make people wonder, question, think. 

How did you come across the SOA Watch? 
The film began as a story of three Vietnam veterans who were about to take a bus from California to Georgia to protest against the School of the Americas. One of them told me that I needed to be in touch with the SOA Watch. I got in touch with the organization, I got a lot of information from people, I videotaped a civil disobedience workshop, which was being held in preparation for the November demonstration. A number of people in the SOA Watch West in San Francisco proved to be very helpful to me. They were very encouraging. I showed them some rough cuts of various parts of the film to get feedback, to make sure that the information was accurate. 

You were already working on the movie about the SOA… 
I was beginning a different project. Then Viví [Letsou, the film’s producer], a close friend of mine, told me she knew a Vietnam veteran that became a poet and Buddhist, and who would be on this bus, going across the country to protest against the School of the Americas. I told her the SOA had been disturbing my sleep for 15 years! She knew I was trying to make a documentary and suggested this could be my project. “You can document the bus ride and these veterans, how they became peace activists after being soldiers.” Of course, she thought it would be a small project, a 20-minute video…but it quickly became a huge one! We ended up with over 60 hours of footage, 20 hours of B-Roll, 20 script revisions, and over 3 years of work. 

You said 15 years of your sleep were taken by the SOA. Why? 
I was becoming aware of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980’s, during the Reagan/Bush administration. I had known about the School of the Americas, and it disturbed me to know that we were training Latin American soldiers in this country, with U.S. tax dollars, and so many of these soldiers would go back to their countries and commit horrific human rights abuses. Once I met with Father Roy Bourgeois and the other demonstrators, and got involved with SOA Watch, I realized that I had the opportunity to make a powerful film that would provide a great deal of information and insight into U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Latin America. 

How difficult was the process of interviewing the SOA’s victims? 
We had Ana Chavez Fisher, whose husband was murdered in El Salvador in the early 1980’s. We had Hector Aristizabal, from Colombia—his brother was murdered in 1998. Sister Diana Ortiz was in Guatemala and she just published a book about her story. It was quite a powerful experience to see them telling the story. Ana had never said anything about it. She was eager to let the story out and let people know what happened in El Salvador. She gave us a lot of information, some of which we did not use in the film. She was a schoolteacher, and dozens and dozens of her colleagues were killed by the military, because the army felt that the poor should not be educated. They are supposed to remain poor; the schoolteachers were seen as subversives. It was a powerful experience for me and my cameraman, to listen stories about torture and murder. 

How do you feel personally? Is this a huge responsibility, to tell their stories? 
I feel responsible and lucky that I’m able to be the link between them and the public. Thousands of people have heard their stories through my film. I see it as a great opportunity to make Americans more aware of the nature of U.S. foreign policy. And the most important is to get the message across, not having necessarily a person like Noam Chomsky or Eduardo Galeano, scholars saying how terrible this policy has been for the people of Latin America, but to actually hear from the people who have been tortured, who have lost loved ones to death squads and paramilitaries. 

You show a lot of training footage. Did the military help you?
The military really didn’t cooperate. However, I was able to go to a reserve Air Force base in Southern California. I worked with an editor who actually was very happy to see me. He threw his arms around me and said, “It’s great to work with a liberal!” because he had been working with very conservative people. And here I come along, trying to make an artistic piece…He was very happy to work on such a project, and put out some time without charging me. I got a good amount of training footage from that Air Force base, but other footage I got from other filmmakers. I was glad that they were willing to let me have some of their images of military on the move, and massacre footage. We didn’t have that much money, so we couldn’t afford to buy 10 seconds of image for a thousand dollars from networks; we couldn’t afford to travel to Latin America…That’s what poor filmmakers do, they beg for footage from other filmmakers. Fortunately a number of them came through for us. We’re all on the same side, trying to expose the nature and consequences of U.S. foreign policy. We help each other out. I felt pretty good about that. 

Did you hear what you expected from the U.S military personnel you interviewed? 
Nothing really surprised me. The message I got from both the two military personnel and from the two conservative members of Congress I interviewed was the same; at times they were repeating the same lines, as if they were reading from a script. I got the usual bit, that we’re bringing democracy to Latin America, that we’re training troops to help their people…but based on any sort of scrutiny of history, what they are saying is not accurate. 

Do you think the SOA’s name change means anything? 
The whole idea of changing names is very suspicious…Back in 1947 we had a “War Department,” then the name was changed to the “Defense Department,” to try to fool people that we are not involved in war making, that we’re involved in defending ourselves. Here’s another example. The SOA came under a great deal of fire and criticism, so the power elite changes the name to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. It becomes like a game: If we change the name, maybe people will forget about the SOA…“New name, same shame,” that’s what SOA Watch says. And also, I think we need to look at the title of the school. The first couple of questions we should ask are: “Security” from whom? “Cooperation” among whom? Of course it’s security for the power elite and investors, and cooperation between the elites in the Latin American countries and the elites in this country. 

How is the documentary doing?
We’re making copies of the film available for universities, and we just finished a three-month tour…I was really surprised that there’s such a strong, enthusiastic response. There are a lot of issues out there to take people’s attention from a simple documentary, but we’ve had good audiences, great responses. Part of the reason is more and more Americans, I think, are waking up and opening their eyes and wondering, What are we doing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Middle-East, in Colombia?. My film is a way that they can access U.S. foreign policy. It provides a quick history lesson and some insight of what is happening in Latin America. I’ve been very pleased that people have responded so positively to the film. There are distributors who want to show it in theaters, to as many people as possible. 

In these times Americans are asking, “Why do they hate us?” Do you think issues like the SOA and the consequences of U.S. foreign policy could be one reason? 
We’re expected to believe that other people around the world hate us because of our freedom and liberty and so on. But no one can believe that. Just look at the Vietnamese. Well, their reason for hating us could be a very long war against them in which we killed three million, mostly civilians. We killed two million people in North Korea during the early 1950’s; well, the Koreans would have a pretty good reason to hate America. I don’t mean the American people, I mean the American government, the military industrial complex, that very arrogantly and imperialistically goes around the world seizing resources, seizing pools of cheap labor, dominating people’s lives. I think when we talk about hatred, a better term would be indignation, moral outrage at the aggressiveness of the U.S. military and government. A sense of moral outrage at the hypocrisy of the U.S. establishment, because while it always preaches about democracy, justice, and human rights, it does just the opposite. It brings injustice, dictatorship, and violence to other countries in the attempt to pacify and make them safe for American investments and American power.

What are your next projects? 
The great thing about documentaries is that there’s always a new one waiting to be made. Just walk out your front door and at any given day and you can think something to make a documentary about. Environmental, social problems—the material is never exhausted. The big film I would like to make…is about mysterious small plane accidents, which have claimed liberals and progressives…Documentaries are investigative pieces. Even if they don’t give any conclusions, at least they make people think. 

Fore more on the documentary, please visit www.hiddeninplainsight.org

Tanira Lebedeff is a journalist based in Los Angeles, and a co-coordinator of the LA chapter of SOA Watch. You can contact her at tanira@soaw-la.org.