New Martyr | Profile

On January 9, 2011, I was in Monterrey, Mexico, spending a long hungover holiday at a friend’s house when I came across some shocking images. The fire broke out at the Tocumen Prison Center in Panama. This date was not trivial. That day, we commemorated Martyrs Day and remembered the students who lost their lives at the hands of American police in 1964 for planting flags in the Canal Zone. Due to this national outrage, diplomatic relations with the United States were severed, and the path to the Torrijos-Carter Treaty, which would give the canal to the Panamanian government, began to take shape.

47 years later, new martyrs emerged, but this time they were prisoners, locked-up criminals that the system decided to “purify.” This fact started a debate full of contradictory versions, with no one in charge. Since then, I began the creative process that led to Implicados.

Creating fiction by starting from reality is a risk. Because it makes you wonder how much has changed. But I understood that being able to put the audience in a different place and ask questions beyond that meant I could ask the question, did this happen, or could this happen? This is where fiction wins, because it not only exposes the facts, but also allows us to reacquaint ourselves with them. And that’s where a lot of the edges come from, where real events start to resonate with other realities and cultures.

That fire triggered a universal question. Why are we able to watch someone suffer and even enjoy their pain without intervening? I wanted to write a story about characters who are detestable from a distance, but who, up close, could be any of us. If this is happening, we have failed as a society.

The world today is saturated with images of war and catastrophe that we consume with selective indifference. I always ask myself. What do we do about it? Where do we position ourselves? Theater gives me the opportunity to ask uncomfortable questions about power, which is the root of corruption and social violence. We all experience power to some degree, and that experience changes us. Latin American history is a labyrinth of mirrors and is based on this acquisition of power. That is the organizing force for everything.

I’m thinking about the “Bukele effect”. Millions of dollars were invested in prisons to lock up gangsters. Has the problem been resolved? That bubble will burst sooner or later. These people have children who repeat this cycle because they haven’t worked on the roots. But it creates the illusion of safety. Governments invest more in punishment than prevention because they need fear to manipulate us. That system gives you votes, votes are money, and money is power. But while we tend to see power as something foreign, something that only happens in high places, this is not the case.

I’ve been doing theater work in prisons for years, and I’ve seen how crime is organized from within, in collusion with the state. Detainees and prisoners face similar conditions of confinement and are plagued by violence and injustice. That vulnerability made me think that anyone could commit atrocities under other circumstances.

Implicados’ challenge was to write a story of human characters with tenderness and contradictions that transcend their actions. This allowed the work to travel, resonate in different contexts, and be understood by other audiences.

Now it’s Buenos Aires’ turn. It is both a challenge and a dream. Argentine theater is demanding, with an analytical and critical audience. Its aim is to challenge viewers beyond ideology, move them and make them ponder the thin line between reality and fiction. It contains a raw and sensitive depiction of a universal problem where violence, power, and indifference are intertwined with our collective responsibility.

*Author and director of Implicados. The play will be performed at El Extrangelo Teatro on Fridays in November at 8:30 p.m.