Monday 20 August 2007 11:00pm - 12:30am on ITV1.

In his second inauguration address George Bush mentioned the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ 21 times.

But in his latest film, Bafta winning documentary maker John Pilger argues that far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress.

The War on Democracy explores the brutal reality behind America’s notions of ’spreading democracy’ – suggesting that America is actually conducting a war on democracy. And Pilger argues that popular democracy is now more likely to be found among the poorest in Latin America whose grassroots movements are often ignored in the West.

Pilger conducts an exclusive interview with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and goes to the United States to speak exclusively to former US government officials who reveal how the CIA waged covert wars in Latin America.

He talks and listens to the people of Chile, America’s ‘model democracy’ where the memory of General Pinochet’s dictatorship lives on, and investigates the so-called ‘School of the Americas’ in Georgia where Pinochet’s torturers were trained along with interrogators and death-squad leaders of other Latin American dictatorships.

Pilger argues that every Latin American country where democracy struggled to grow was influenced by graduates of this ‘school’ and goes to the US to speak exclusively to Duane Clarridge who ran CIA operations in Latin America in the 1980s.

The War on Democracy is Pilger’s first film for both cinema and TV. It is both a documentary and a panoramic feature film; the images are vivid and moving, from high in the Bolivian Andes to the shanties of the great cities that grew in the wake of the Conquistadores.

The War on Democracy, above all, is a hopeful film, for it sees the world not through the eyes of the powerful, but through the hopes and dreams and extraordinary actions of ordinary people. Although set mostly in Latin America, it is a metaphor for the entire world in 2007.