Recipient of multiple awards – including the UN Media Peace Prize – John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and factual film-maker who began his career in his native Australia before moving to London. He has been a foreign correspondent and frontline war reporter since 1967, and is a regular contributor to a wide range of international broadcast and print media. As a passionate critic of foreign military and economic ventures by Western governments, Pilger uncovers shocking truths about the political forces that manifest themselves worldwide; leaving no stone unturned, he treads where many journalists fear to go.

In this powerful documentary he explores the brutal reality behind America's notions of 'spreading democracy'. He interviews President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and speaks exclusively to former US government officials about the CIA's covert wars in Latin America; he talks and listens to the people of Chile – America's 'model democracy' – and investigates the 'School of the Americas' in Georgia, which trained the interrogators and death-squad leaders of Latin America.

Pilger argues that far from bringing democracy to the world, US intervention has stifled its progress, and suggests that popular democracy is now more likely to be found in the grassroots movements of the poorest in Latin America.