‘SHORT CIRCUIT’: REVELATIONS OF WAR

Allan Francovich’s “Short Circuit” (at the Nuart Friday and Saturday only) is a 70-minute conversation with Col. Roberto Santivanez, former chief of El Salvador’s intelligence agency.

As Santivanez, a well-dressed, middle-aged man, sits at a window table at the Top of the Tower Restaurant in Arlington, Va., he talks in a matter-of-fact way of widespread CIA involvement in his country’s government, of the terrible death squads (which he says are financed largely by El Salvador’s richest families from exile in Miami and Guatemala). He names names in the notorious 1980 assassinations of Santiago’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Atty. Gen. Mario Zamora and four American missionaries. He states flatly that these murders took place with full knowledge of U. S. intelligence. (With an irony that’s surely deliberate, we can glimpse the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial in the vast panorama of Washington behind the speaker.)

Needless to say, Santivanez, who says he has received many death threats, gives us a chilling account, one that would seem all the more so had Francovich (best known for his “On Company Business,” a 1980 documentary on the workings of the CIA) provided a context for the colonel’s quite convincing revelations. “Short Circuit” (which takes its title from Santivanez’s remark that in El Salvador government agents must act as fuses, sacrificing themselves to protect their presidents) really needs the expertise of a political specialist to evaluate Santivanez’s remarks properly. Yet it makes its point loud and clear when it ends by stating that, except for three of the men involved in the rape and murder of the churchwomen, there have been no convictions in the estimated 50,000 deaths due to political violence in El Salvador over the last five years.

Playing with “Short Circuit” (Times-rated Mature) is Frank Carpenter’s Oscar-nominated, 75-minute “In the Name of the People,” which was shown at Filmex. Its forcefully stated premise is that El Salvador’s peasantry is so undernourished and exploited that it has no alternative but to revolt against a remorselessly oppressive government. Amid images of suffering and hardship, it inevitably raises the urgent and disturbing question of the U. S. role in Central America.