Kidnapping is big business in Brazil, a country with one of the world’s largest gaps between rich and poor. In Sao Paulo, where someone is kidnapped every three days on average, “Ransom City” explores a twist in Brazil’s dangerous crime fad as the mothers of five celebrity soccer players are abducted and held for ransom in a six month period. The film follows Sao Paulo’s anti-kidnapping squad as they risk their lives investigating these kidnappings, and also profiles kidnappers who explain the rationale behind their life of crime. As the Brazilian team winds down from the 2006 World Cup soccer championship, WIDE ANGLE captures the stark contrasts between the haves and the have-nots in this crime-ridden, soccer-crazed nation.

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.

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?