Branding in Bolivia.

Pity the forlorn figure of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Bolivian presidential candidate in 2002 and the tragic figure of Rachel Boyntons new film, Our Brand Is Crisis. He wants to be the FDR of Bolivia. He hopes to carry out an economic strategy that will privatize half of the country's national industries and create 500,000 new jobs in the process. Problem is, the average Bolivian doesn't believe in him, and he's behind in the polls.

So who's de Lozada, affectionately known as "Goni," going to call? Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum (GCS), a Washington-based consulting firm that sends James Carville, Jeremy Rosner, and Tad Devine to rescue him. They represent what Boynton feels is the quintessential American combination: "political idealism meets the profit motive." With Rosner for the most part at the helm, the D.C. dream team changes Goni's slogan from "La Solucion" (The Solution) to "Si Se Puede" (an old United Farm Workers chant that means "Yes, it can be done") and brands him as the man who can ease the country out of its economic and political crisis.

Our Brand Is Crisis has obvious resonance with The War Room, the 1993 Chris Hegedus/D. A. Pennebaker behind-the-scenes doc about the first Clinton Presidential campaign. Here, too, Carville appears, devising strategy as if he were teaching an intensive screenplay-writing seminar. But, showing some flair for local color, Boynton successfully gives the film the feel of a Hollywood thriller set in a fictitious Latin American country veering toward chaos. When a representative of GCS announces the campaign must use dirty ad tactics against Goni rival Manfred Reyes Villa, the shady mayor of Cochabamba, it feels like The Sopranos meets Syriana.

Most of the film's drama centers on Goni's image as arrogant among Bolivians who are leaning toward Reyes Villa. GCS does relentless polling and focus-group work to try to turn the tide. Goni, who was raised in the U.S. and speaks Spanish with a remarkably awkward American accent, gives the impression of a detached, if benevolent, chief executive (he previously served as Bolivian president from 1993 to 1997). We see him fretting about a meet-and-greet with the national political journalists at a swanky countryside villa. Later he is annoyed by an indigenous practice of rubbing confetti into his scalp after a campaign rally in a remote pueblo.

GCS's Rosner charges into the fray with starry-eyed Stephanopoulos-like rapture, convinced that Goni is Bolivia's last best chance for a sensible, free-trade-compatible democracy. Sounding like he's read his Eduardo Galeano, Rosner acknowledges that the landlocked, resource-rich Andean nation is, after all, one of the "have-nots of globalization," whose "500 years of oppression" goes back to the Spaniards ripping off the silver mines of Potosi. Enter the focus groups, which he observes secretly, accompanied by a translator. The film's most ecstatic moments come when he sees how GCS's strategies begin to push voters away from Reyes Villa (painted as a corrupt protofascist military type) and toward Goni.

Boynton made a conscious decision to focus on the exploits of GCS, since she was originally drawn to making this film because of U.S. consultants she had been following in Colombia, Argentina, Nigeria, and Israel. As a result, Our Brand Is Crisis skips over some critical economic, political, and social context that would provide a clearer understanding of Bolivia's turmoil. The film doesn't explain Goni's "capitalization" strategy, hardly mentions the IMF's suffocating debt-service policies, and fails to elaborate on the increasing demands for constitutional reform.

The Cochabamba water crisis, a highlight of the excellent documentary The Corporation, and a clear example of the people's dissatisfaction with globalization, is mentioned only briefly in the context of the negative campaign against Reyes Villa.

"The water crisis never came up," Boynton tells me. "Part of the point of these campaigns is that issues are so simplified that fundamental issues don't get discussed."

It's precisely this focus on branding and bottom-line poll numbers that betrays the promise of democracy in Bolivia, just as it spells doom for

it in the United States. Goni squeaks out a narrow victory in 2002, but when he imposes a drastic income tax increase the following year, the Bolivian people force him to resign with violent protests in La Paz. Rosner flies back, and he and his translator share a moment of staggering pathos while the streets outside are in chaos. What went wrong? Goni and GCS were ultimately out of touch with the bottom line of what the majority of Bolivians needed.

As Our Brand Is Crisis creeps towards its conclusion, it becomes clear that the one candidate not seen as a threat by Goni, the consultants, and, to an extent, the film itself would burst into sudden prominence. You may have heard of him, Evo Morales, the newly elected president of Bolivia. And although you could argue that Morales was the inevitable product of a growing indigenous movement and the rise of the left in Latin America, his triumph also reflects the obliviousness of these consultants and the revolt against branding and business as usual.

"Americans contributed in a certain way to Evo's rise," says Boynton. "In order to get Goni into office GCS needed to fracture the vote against him, and in that sense Evo was very handy for them. I don't think they objected to Evo rising to a certain extent if it wound up taking votes away from Manfred, whom they saw as a real threat." As it turned out, the consultants were missing the real threat entirely.

Ed Morales is the author of "Living in Spanglish" and contributes to Newsday, The New York Times, and the Progressive Media Project.