Chile-based Escala Humana Prods., led by Sebastián Brahm, is developing an ambitious English-language series titled “Golpe” about a little-known story behind the CIA’s involvement in the fall of Chile’s first Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
Intended for a U.S. audience and based on declassified U.S. government documents, the first season of the historical crime drama series, titled “The Abduction of a Commander-in-Chief,” will dramatize the CIA’s covert attempt to trigger a coup before Marxist candidate Salvador Allende assumes power in 1970 Chile and a CIA officer’s initial instinct to undermine it.
“It pits traditional corporate interest in U.S. interventionism against the ultra-liberal disciples of Milton Friedman that would later run the show, to whom the chaos of a communist regime was a necessary step before full-scale privatization; Chile was a global test case and ‘Golpe’ will tell the story,” said Brahm, adding that he reviewed the entire declassified [communication] traffic for that year and “put the sequence together, fictionalizing on top of a very detailed reconstructed chronology spanning from Sept 4, 1970 to Nov 4, 1970.”
“In the traffic, the CIA Station Chief Henry D. Hecksher, repeatedly voices his concerns about the operation, but in the end, he complies,” he added.
“Hecksher was not doing it out of a sense of humanity but because he was persuaded by his ultra-liberal Chilean acquaintances who orbited around his friend, informant and El Mercurio newspaper owner Agustin Edwards that it was best to let Allende wreck the economy and use the backlash to take over and change the entire economic system,” he noted.
According to the New York Times March 1990 obituary on Hecksher, “He was the C.I.A. station chief in Santiago, Chile, during the time the C.I.A. spent more than $8 million in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the election of Salvador Allende Gossens and later sought to make it impossible for him to govern once he was elected.”
Escala Humana has an informal agreement with a Chilean director working on big budget, big name series in streamers but nothing has been defined yet.
Benjamin Pinto, who just produced his first feature, “A Black Light” by Alberto Hayden, is boarding “Golpe” as an executive producer while Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (“To Kill a Man,” “The Play”) and Mauro Andrizzi (“Iraqi Short films,” “Glorious Accidents”) are script development consultants.
Escala Humana produced the dramas “Roman’s Circuit,” which screened at 2011’s Toronto) and “Sex Life of Plants,” which took a special mention at San Sebastián’s prestige New Directors section in 2015, both by Brahm. It’s currently developing the dramatic comedy “A New Man,” to be directed by Che Sandoval and Brahm, as well as the ethno-thriller “The Property” and the dark comedy “The Inheritance,” to be helmed by Brahm, who says they are in talks with a Mexican company to produce it there.
