Mark Corcoran, a reporter and producer for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent, responds to an item from this morning's Linkage (in which economists rate the plausibility of Bond villain plots):
Read the list of Bond villain plots with great interest. The most plausible is, I agree, Quantum of Solace:
Plot: Scheming environmentalist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) wants to dam Bolivia’s fresh water supply to create a monopoly. Then, he’s going to help a Bolivian general stage a coup d’état, but not before he forces the general to sign a contract making Greene’s company the sole water supplier of Bolivia, at much higher prices.
Plausibility: “This is another plot based on history,” Dethier says. “There were a lot of privatizations of the water supply systems in Latin America some years ago. Many of them were bought by a French multinational. It didn’t work. They realized it was impossible to manage. They had huge problems with poorer communities, and eventually had to withdraw. There was so much opposition, and people were constantly disrupting the infrastructure these companies were trying to control. There’s actually a very good film about this, set in Bolivia, called Even the Rain, starring Gael Garcia Bernal.”
Of course loyal viewers of ABC-TV's Foreign Correspondent program will recall some remarkably similar themes in the July 2007 report Bolivian Meltdown, broadcast a year before the release of Quantum. The ABC story was also broadcast globally on CNN International. Although the reporter, floundering about in the thin mountain air of the high Andes, was more Austin Powers than Daniel Craig.
We're still waiting for the royalty cheque from the Bond scriptwriters...
