Terrifying.

Fresh off her Best Picture win for The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow is talking about her next movie. It’s called Triple Frontier, a mistranslation of Triple Frontera, which is the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The area is famous for being a no-man’s land, where anything goes, legally speaking.

It’s also famous for getting the stink-eye from the U.S. government for fostering terrorism boogies. Wrote MSNBC in a totally objective, non-panic-inducing article from 2007:

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.

In the minds of geography-challenged Americans, South America is practically Mexico, which is practically Tucson, so, you know, run for your lives. The U.S. military sent troops to Paraguay in 2005, ostensibly for “joint military exercises,” but more likely to supervise some extra-judicial killing and torture, like in the good old days.

Since Bigelow says Triple Frontier is being written by the same journalist who wrote The Hurt Locker, I imagine it’ll have something to do with terrorism and U.S. military operations in the border region, rather than the piles and piles of other things that happen in Latin America, which again just goes to show that Americans are only interested in the rest of the world insofar as they can view it through the narrow lens of their own domestic preoccupations.

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