The War on Democracy, made for ITV by John Pilger, won the Best Documentary gong at last night’s Oneworld Media Awards in London.

The film, in which Pilger argues that far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress, was broadcast on ITV1 last August.

Jurors described it as “insightful and informative - on occasion, chillingly so”.

In The War on Democracy Pilger explores what he believes is the reality behind America’s notions of ’spreading democracy’, suggesting that America is actually conducting a war on democracy. In the film 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 conducted an exclusive interview with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and went to the US to speak exclusively to former government officials who revealed how the CIA waged covert wars in Latin America.

He talked to the people of Chile, America’s ‘model democracy’ where the memory of General Pinochet’s dictatorship lives on, and investigated 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 argued that every Latin American country where democracy struggled to grow was influenced by graduates of this ’school’ and spoke exclusively to Duane Clarridge who ran CIA operations in Latin America in the 1980s.

The War on Democracy was Pilger’s first film for both cinema and TV.

The message of the film was a constant theme in all of Pilger’s work: that great, rapacious power is far from invincible and that people power is enduring.

Producers Christopher Martin, Wayne Young, Michael Watt and sound designer Joe Frost were also recognised by the award.