In India, outsourcing has sparked an economic boom, and those working in the industry are making new lives that balance traditional Indian family values with Western-style social and economic mores. But in India, as in the United States, the long-term impact of outsourcing is still unclear.

In San Salvador, El Salvador, 2,000 miles from Los Angeles’s Eighteenth Street, a gang known as “18″ governs its territory like an armed militia. In the mid 1990s, thousands of Salvadoran nationals living illegally in the U.S. were deported to their homeland. Some brought L.A. gang culture back with them to a country beset by poverty and awash in arms. Organizing support for gang members in need, meting out justice to those who would defy the gang’s code and waging an endless vendetta against its enemies, 18 is helping to make El Salvador one of the most violent and crime-ridden countries in the world.

ABOUT THE FILM

WIDE ANGLE’s film, 18 with a Bullet, follows the life of this notorious Central American gang for six months. By the end of the film, most of the gang members profiled – Slappy, Sochi, and 18-year old Travieso – are in jail serving long sentences for their crimes.

For the summer 2008 re-broadcast, WIDE ANGLE follows the film with an update that tells another side of this transnational story. Like many Salvadoran gang members, Travieso was separated from his mother when she went north to find work in the United States.

Today, she runs a successful cleaning business in the U.S. and holds a temporarily legal immigration status, but her sacrifices and the remittances sent home have not managed to give Travieso the better life she had dreamed for him. This mother’s story paints a nuanced portrait of one immigrant’s experience and the sometimes heartbreaking difficulties of life stretched across borders.

In Sub-Saharan Africa today, AIDS is not only a vast humanitarian tragedy, but also a dire threat to regional stability. As death rates from AIDS exceed the rate at which teachers, doctors, and security forces can be trained and maintained, whole nations may begin to collapse. Perhaps the only benefit from Angola’s long civil war is that the country now has one of the lowest HIV infection rates in Southern Africa. Strategically important because of its oil reserves, Angola is now coping with the problems of peace. As refugees and soldiers return home and transportation and trade resume, the spread of AIDS looms. In response to this new enemy the government has once again rallied its military forces. WIDE ANGLE explores the role of the military, the only functioning arm of the state, in its bold attempt to combat the AIDS pandemic. The challenges it faces offer an arresting portrait of a nation at a crucial moment in history.

The standoff came to a tragic end in a chaotic firefight in which several hundred children and adults were killed. In the premiere episode of its fourth season, WIDE ANGLE brings firsthand testimony and unprecedented video shot by terrorists inside the school, to examine the events that unfolded, the Russian government’s failed efforts to manage the crisis, and the legacy of the incident — for surviving hostages, bereaved families and Russia’s future stability.

Read this week’s briefing to learn about the historical roots of the Chechen conflict that led to the siege of Beslan and growing unrest in the region. Learn about the historic roots of conflict among the breakaway republics in the Photo Essay. Find out about the semi-autonomous republics of the North Caucasus in the Interactive Map. Read a firsthand account by Kevin Sim of his experience in Beslan in the Filmmaker Notes.

“Feel-good programming that makes you think, too”
–Canwest News Service

ABOUT THE ISSUE

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s deadliest place to give birth. Each year over a quarter of a million women die in childbirth in the region. But Mozambique is combating high maternal death rates by implementing unconventional programs.

After the country declared its independence from 400 years of Portuguese rule in 1975, a civil war raged for 16 years, killing a million people and wrecking the country’s infrastructure. By the time the war ended in 1992, the health care system was devastated and one in ten women were dying in childbirth. There were only 18 obstetricians for a population of 19 million. Since then, Mozambique has cut the maternal death rate in half.

As the figures now stand, the country is one of the few countries on track to achieve the fifth United Nations Millennium Development goal to reduce the maternal death rate by 75 percent by 2015. In 2004, Mozambique introduced a new health care initiative to train midwives in emergency obstetric care in an attempt to guarantee access to quality medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.

ABOUT THE FILM

The film Birth of a Surgeon follows Emilia Cumbane, one of the first midwives-in-training. She performs Cesareans and hysterectomies in makeshift operating rooms in rural Mozambique. We follow Cumbane from her home in the Mozambican capital Maputo, into intensive medical classes, through night shifts in the delivery wards, and watch as she fights for recognition of her surgical competence.

With more than half a million women dying in pregnancy or childbirth worldwide, Mozambique’s surgical training programs are being hailed as a model solution in confronting the maternal health crisis facing developing countries. The film captures one woman’s story on the frontlines of improving maternal mortality but it also demonstrates how low-cost, community-based health initiatives are changing the face of public health in Africa.

“I like to be a midwife,” Cumbane says. “I think it’s a good profession – to produce people.”

The first class of almost 30 surgical midwives trained in delivery techniques and advanced surgery graduate in July 2008. For the 2009 update, WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown travels to a rural hospital in Mozambique to meet with Cumbane to see how both she and the program are faring. Cumbane, now the head of the maternal ward, has a two-week-old baby herself, and Brown explores the successes and obstacles she has faced over the last year, as she has tried to juggle her personal and professional commitments, all the while working to help save women’s lives.

About the Film

In the new political landscape of Central Asia, U.S. troops are on the ground and Western military bases are under construction throughout the region. But now, the forces aligned against the Taliban and their terrorist allies find themselves in an uneasy relationship with the drug lords who control the cultivation of much of the world’s heroin. With the departure of the Taliban, the current opium crop in Afghanistan is among the largest ever. How will the world’s drug control authorities deal with this fact of Central Asian life? Can agricultural reforms be implemented that will equal the profitability of the opium trade? And how will the United States resolve a dilemma that pits the war on terror against the war on drugs?

Along the border between unstable and destitute Zimbabwe, and relatively calm and prosperous Botswana, a 300-mile, 8-foot high electric fence is being erected. Every night, Botswana’s armed soldiers try to stop border jumpers from climbing over or cutting through the fence in their desperate search for employment and food. “Border Jumpers” takes us inside the human drama behind this frontier flashpoint, profiling illegal immigrants threatened with repeated arrest and deportation, a cattle farmer who strongly supports the fence, and a journalist who reports daily on growing fears among Botswana’s citizens that their 1.7 million people could be overrun by Zimbabwe’s troubled 12 million.

About the Issue

As one of the most racially diverse nations in the world, Brazil has long considered itself a colorblind “racial democracy.” But deep disparities in income, education and employment between lighter and darker-skinned Brazilians have prompted a civil rights movement advocating equal treatment of Afro-Brazilians. In Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, blacks today make up almost half of the total population — but nearly two-thirds of the nation’s poor. Institutions of higher education have typically been monopolized by Brazil’s wealthy and light-skinned elite, and illiteracy among black Brazilians is twice as high as among whites. Now, affirmative action programs are changing the rules of the game, with many colleges and universities reserving 20% of spots for Afro-Brazilians. But with national surveys identifying over 130 different categories of skin color, including “cinnamon,” “coffee with milk,” and “toasted,” who will be considered “black enough” to qualify for the new racial quotas?

About The Film

“Am I black or am I white?” Even before they ever set foot in a college classroom, many Brazilian university applicants must now confront a question with no easy answer. BRAZIL IN BLACK AND WHITE follows the lives of five young college hopefuls from diverse backgrounds as they compete to win a coveted spot at the elite University of Brasilia, where 20 percent of the incoming freshmen must qualify as Afro-Brazilian. Outside the university, WIDE ANGLE reports on the controversial racial debate roiling Brazil through profiles of civil right activists, opponents of affirmative action, and one of the country’s few black senators.

Climate change is the “defining issue of our era,” according U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. But the question of how to slow global warming has stymied the international community and no consensus has emerged.

The Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997, set targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. To date, 182 countries have agreed to the terms — the U.S. is not one of them.

One of the primary mechanisms for reducing carbon pollution is a system of emissions trading. Countries that have signed the treaty are entitled to an assigned amount of emissions, and if they manage to use less, they can sell the excess to countries that have surpassed their limit on the new carbon market.

ABOUT THE FILM

Every hour in Indonesian rainforests, an area the size of 300 soccer fields is mowed down and burned. Often this clearing is done to make way for oil palm plantations. The resulting palm oil is used for cooking, cleaning and even as a biofuel. But the fires farmers set to clear their land have helped to make Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — exceeded only by the U.S. and China.

A 29-year-old Australian “green” entrepreneur named Dorjee Sun believes he has a solution to reduce those harmful greenhouse gas emissions. He has canvassed the world pitching the sale of Indonesia’s carbon credits to polluters in the West.

His business model would maintain the standing swaths of Indonesia’s rainforests by selling their carbon credits. Burning Season follows Dorjee Sun on a whirlwind trip into boardrooms around the world – from Starbucks to eBay to Merrill Lynch – as he tries to convince skeptical financiers that his proposal is viable.

To carry out his plan, local political leaders in Indonesia must also agree that their forests are worth more alive than dead. Small farmers like Achmadi, who makes a living by cutting down trees to plant oil palms, fear the layers of government officials will be the only profiteers from the carbon credit sale.

Burning Season kindles both sides of the climate divide and explores whether capitalism can step in where altruism has so far failed to succeed.

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

About the Film

Recently Mexico was startled by the murders of two young women lawyers, one from the political right and the other from the left. Both had fought to support human rights and legitimate protest, and to destroy the official and institutional corruption that has plagued Mexico for years — a system of bribes, debts and favors that has prevented the world’s tenth-largest country from fulfilling its political and economic potential. The election of President Vicente Fox in 2000 ended more than 70 years of single-party rule. This film examines the hopes that a new dawn has come in Mexico’s history, and the fear that graft and corruption are immovable.

As the world’s attention turns to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, WIDE ANGLE reports on how the next generation of Chinese leaders is being molded.

China Prep follows five Chinese students through their final high-pressure year at an elite high school in Sichuan Province. Eighteen hundred students vie for spots in Beijing’s top two universities. Last year only 59 made it.

Studying seven days a week, the students’ lives are regimented almost every minute of the day as they prepare for the end-of-year exam that can determine their fate. For many students from poor or rural backgrounds, a strong performance on the test is the only way to climb the social ladder and excel without connections. Competition is fierce and the majority of high school seniors will be relegated to vocational schools.

We meet Zhang Lie, who wants to study law and become a Communist Party member like her father; Mei Jiachin, a genius mathematician from a farming family; Chen Zhibo, a misfit science student with big plans to become China’s Bill Gates; and Gao Mengjia, a dedicated student who loves money and aspires to be a hedge fund manager.

Nicknamed the “I want” generation by the Chinese press, these only children – the sole focus of their parents’ and grandparents’ nurturing under China’s one-child policy – will be the new class of corporate managers, lawyers, and civil servants who are expected to propel 21st century China to surpass the United States as the largest economy in the world.

How do the ambitions of these teenagers reflect the realities of today and tomorrow’s China? Who among them will be most likely to succeed – the daughter of the Party official or the farmer’s son? Who will be the boss?

WIDE ANGLE cameras are on location in Morocco as history is made. In May 2006, an imam academy in the city of Rabat holds a graduation ceremony. But the class of 2006 is no ordinary group of students. Side by side with the male graduates are 50 women pioneers, among the first contemporary group of women to be officially trained as religious leaders in the Arab world. Empowered to do everything that male imams do — except lead Friday prayer in a mosque — the women will fan out across Morocco to work as spiritual guides in mosques, schools, hospitals, and prisons, even hosting their own television and radio talk shows.

The rise of new leftist leaders in South America has been swift and surprising. From Venezuela’s Chavez to Brazil’s Lula, from Argentina’s Kirchner to Peru’s Toledo, the swelling ranks of left-leaning governments have provoked fears among some conservatives. If the proverbial dominos are on the table — will Bolivia be the next to tip over? In recent years the country has been roiled by competing political forces, with the indigenous coca grower’s union (the “cocaleros”) becoming an unexpected powerhouse. Their hero is ex-Congressman Evo Morales, a former coca farmer from indigenous peasant roots, who rose up last year to defend the coca growers against the Bolivian military’s crop eradication program. Today Latin America’s highest-profile indigenous leader, Morales fell just 45,000 votes shy of the presidency in the country’s June 2002 election. This summer, as the standoff between the cocaleros and the government escalates, Wide Angle travels with Morales to the stunning highlands of Bolivia as he fights to expand the amount of coca that can be legally grown by farmers. The pitfalls of a drug-based economy — and the difficulty of finding suitable replacement crops to support peasant families — are all part of the story. We will profile powerful indigenous politicians working with Morales, a poor cocalero family whose survival is dependent on coca growing, a wealthy entrepreneur who is starting a chain of supermarkets, and a coca-eradication commander on a slash and burn mission. Cocaleros illuminates the shifting balance of power that’s underway in Bolivia — and spreading across Latin America.

“A heartbreaking doc…. What we see is a profoundly bitter confrontation
between the individual and the community.”
–Globe and Mail

How far can one young woman push a conservative culture? Duah Fares is an Arab-Israeli teenager and member of the Druze minority, a religious sect living predominantly in Israel, Syria and Lebanon. She longs to be an international superstar like Angelina Jolie.

But when she changes her name to Angelina and sets her sights on the Miss Israel pageant, her tight-knit religious community balks. Miss Israel requires a bathing suit competition, but to appear that way in public would disgrace her family and even put her in danger from those who would rather see her dead than see the community dishonored.

Contestant No. 2 follows Fares and her family as they navigate the boundaries of traditional values while she tries to achieve her dream.

This episode of WIDE ANGLE is the U.S. television premiere of the theatrical film Lady Kul el Arab.