This short article about a Mexican documentary from The Economist reminded me of some of the issues of censorship we’ve been talking about in the context of Middle Eastern regimes in the past few weeks. “Presumed Guilty” is specifically the story of Antonio Zuniga, a Mexico City computer repairman who is astonishingly convicted of a murder for which he has an alibi, no connection to the forensic evidence and only highly suspect eyewitness testimony counting against him.
The film is as damning of the Mexican criminal justice system as anything could be, depicting a farce of a mistrial and twenty to a cell prisons. Two weeks after “Presumed Guilty” opened it was abruptly banned through court order, ostensibly because of a “dubious complaint” of privacy invasion by a prosecution witness. The ban appears to all to be politically motivated, however, and represents a feeble attempt at marginalizing a potentially politically powerful piece of cinema. In this case, that proved nearly impossible, in large part due to new media and new technology (during the ban, the film was widely sold as a pirated DVD and succeeded in making it onto YouTube). When the ban was finally overturned recently, the underground chatter that the ban had caused led to a million tickets sold.
This is no doubt an example of the feebleness of a legally imposed censorship regime, particularly censorship of film in the YouTube era, but could this story have happened the same way in the context of an authoritarian Middle Eastern regime? Quite possibly, but in the case of Syria, as we’ve been studying it this week, I think it would not be likely. Presumed Guilty‘s runaway fame seems to have been made possible by a democratic, if commonly corrupt, society in which cultural production is mediated by the courts or government only after the fact. The success of Syrian censorship is that everyone knows where the line is between innocent education or entertainment and what is adjudged to be politically incendiary- critiques of specific policies or government officials will be met with the full measure of punishment from the state, while more anonymous settings or characters allow for some critique of government- and everyone self-censors along these lines.
The political power of this documentary seems to stem so much from the specific images of officials behaving terribly- from the uncaring mistrial judge to Antonio’s girlfriend being harassed by prison guards. Mexicans can see specific proof of what needs to change in their criminal justice system, and the belief that the ban was politically motivated only served to double the film’s indictment of Mexican courts. When Syrians look to their public sphere, however, they are only allowed to see metaphor and vague insinuation, and don’t have an opportunity to challenge what their government allows them to see, read and hear. In fact, they likely don’t even know when censorship of a potentially incendiary work happens, because that’s exactly how the regime needs it to be.
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