a feature documentary by Rodrigo Gutiérrez Hermelo & Karen Robert
A dull green Ford Falcon drives slowly down a residential street in Buenos Aires. Its tinted windows hide the driver and the other shadowy figures inside. It doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere, just surveying its surroundings like a predator on the hunt. As its pace slows, passersby glance at it furtively and duck into doorways or head around the next corner. No-one knows when the Falcon’s doors will open, when the men in dark glasses and leather jackets will shove someone inside and suck them out of their lives forever. No-one wants to think about where the car takes its victims.
This is the Falcon, a nightmare on wheels for those who lived through Argentina’s military dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Falcons driven by Argentina’s security forces carried thirty thousand victims into the country’s network of clandestine prisons, where they were tortured and murdered in secret. Thousands more – an entire generation of activists and intellectuals – were detained and terrorized.
The Falcon nightmare had started out as a dream – the same dream first conjured up by Henry Ford in Michigan at the beginning of the century. It was the promise of mass car ownership. Of middle-class comfort and solid working-class jobs. Of rising wages and shared prosperity. That Fordist vision had enchanted Argentines of all walks of life in the early 1960s, when Ford Motors had started building Falcons locally for the country’s growing middle class.
It all went horribly wrong as Ford allied itself with the dark forces that came to power in Argentina’s military coup of 1976. Soldiers patrolled the assembly lines of a factory turned military camp. And Ford managers took advantage of that boundless power to do away with the shop-floor unionists who challenged their authority. One by one, they identified those men to the soldiers, who pulled them off the line and tortured them on the grounds of the factory. The workers were spirited away to secret prisons in the Ford cars and trucks they had helped to build.
Ford now faces a historic lawsuit for its complicity with Argentina’s dictatorship. The charge: that Ford management exercised ‘corporate terror’ within its Falcon plant, which housed one of Argentina’s notorious secret detention centres. That the company used calculated violence – abduction, torture, and murder – to crush union activism.
The accusations recall other dark scenes from Ford’s past, right back to the armies of paid thugs that kept the unions out of Henry Ford’s first factories in Michigan. Ford has been accused of using slave labour in its German factories during the Nazi regime and of bankrolling death squads in Brazil in the 1960s, but no other criminal charge has ever made it into the courts.
FALCON follows a group of survivors from Ford who has doggedly brought this landmark case forward. A dozen frightened and anonymous men taking on the corporation that invented modern industrial capitalism.
FALCON offers viewers a cautionary and universal tale of unrestrained corporate power. Corporations today wield greater influence over our world than ever before – greater even than many of the national governments that try to court their favour.
And though Ford is on hard times today, it remains symbolically the most important corporation of the twentieth century.
The Ford case exposes just how far a corporation can go when its power is unchecked. It raises urgent moral and political questions for viewers anywhere in our globalized world: What are the limits of corporate power? Who can enforce them?
Argentina’s generals went on trial for human rights crimes more than two decades ago. It’s taken that long for a multinational corporation to face the same charges.
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