Global IssuesCHILE: Ex Political Prisoners in Therapeutic Theatre
A group of former political prisoners in Chile will become actors and actresses this month to heal the wounds left by the 1973-1990 dictatorship. They will be performing a cycle of plays written in torture camps and in exile.
'I think awareness of life becomes more intense when you’re facing death,' said renowned Chilean actor and playwright Óscar Castro, the director of the plays being performed on Jan. 16, 17, 23 and 24.
The plays will be put on at the Teatro de la Memoria in the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park, a former detention and torture centre during the dictatorship of the late General Augusto Pinochet, now converted into a human rights memorial.
The plays are 'Casimiro Peñafleta, preso político' (Political Prisoner Casimiro Peñafleta), 'Érase una vez un Rey' (Once Upon a Time There Was a King), 'El vuelo del Cuervo' (The Crow's Flight) and 'El exiliado Mateluna' (The Exile Mateluna).
Castro wrote the first two in the Ritoque and Puchuncaví detention centres in Chile, and the last two in exile in France.
On the inaugural day of the theatre cycle, a concert will be given by the Inti Illimani folk music group and singer-songwriter Isabel Parra, the daughter of iconic Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra (1917-1967).
After the military coup that toppled the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), Castro, the founder of Teatro Aleph in the 1960s in Chile, spent two years in four of the country's concentration camps.
In 1976 he went into exile in France, where he still lives today. He re-established the Aleph Theatre Group in Paris and consolidated his career as a playwright.
A few months ago he was invited by former political prisoner Pedro Alejandro Matta to hold a 'theatrical demonstration' in Villa Grimaldi, Castro said.
'I told him I was interested, so long as we used the plays we performed in the concentration camps, with the same prisoners as actors. I got in touch with them and they all agreed to recreate the experience,' Castro told IPS.
'Back then, we were all between 25 and 35 years old, and now we are 60 to 75. That's why I called this group the Grimaldi Social Club,' the playwright said, laughing, referring to the Buena Vista Social Club, the legendary group of Cuban musicians put together by U.S. guitarist Ry Cooder.
'It was important to me to put on the plays in the place where all of the actors suffered torture and witnessed forced disappearances,' he emphasised.
Castro's personal experience is a powerful illustration of the human rights abuses that thousands of Chileans -- and some foreigners -- were subjected to during the 17-year dictatorship, when over 3,000 people were murdered or forcibly disappeared and 35,000 people were tortured.
Castro and his sister Marieta, arrested for harbouring a member of the insurgent Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), were eventually freed.
But their mother and Marieta's husband were not so fortunate. They were seized while visiting the Castro siblings in prison in the Tres Álamos centre, and have not been seen or heard of since.
'I was held in Villa Grimaldi, and I am a witness to the last time Óscar Castro's mother, Julieta Ramírez, was seen alive,' Alejandra Holzapfel, one of the former political prisoners who will be acting in the plays, told IPS.
At the age of 19, Holzapfel was held for four months in the detention centres of Villa Grimaldi, Venda Sexy, Cuatro Álamos and Tres Álamos. She returned to Chile from exile in 1987.
The plays 'have been a healing process for us, a way of going into Villa Grimaldi feeling calm, of indulging in a little humour, which was something we did a lot when we were imprisoned and that helped us to overcome the horror we lived through at that time,' she said.
'If we hadn't been able to laugh at ourselves in the detention centres, we would all have gone mad,' she said.
'I am very grateful to Óscar, because I had no idea that this was going to do us so much good. Previously, it was very difficult for me to go to Villa Grimaldi, and whenever I went there my hair stood on end. But now we're rehearsing nearly every day, and we go in there thinking about other things,' she said.
In some prison camps, the International Red Cross organised one day of cultural activities a week, Castro recalled. On those days, the cells or dining halls became stages, he said.
'Political Prisoner Casimiro Peñafleta' is a monologue that Castro wrote while he was at the Ritoque centre. He wrote it 'so as not to go insane,' one day when he was all alone in his cell. All his fellow prisoners had appeared on the list of those to be freed. 'I was wondering why I wasn't getting out, and why the others were,' he said.
'Once Upon a Time There Was a King' is a play in which Hernán Plaza and Carlos Genovese, both survivors of the detention camps, are acting.
'There are three penniless vagabonds who invent a game in which they will each take turns to be king for a week, so they will have people to order around. But one of them, after his week as king, invents a war, so he can't possibly vacate the throne, and then he gets himself declared president. So he never steps down,' Castro said.
The third play, 'The Crow's Flight', written in exile, portrays Castro's life in the theatre world, while 'The Exile Mateluna,' also written in France, has among its cast relatives of victims of the dictatorship.
'Some are women who were in detention camps with my sister, others had husbands who disappeared, and there are also children of exiles who live in Chile now,' the playwright said.
The performances will be filmed and the documentaries donated to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which is due to open in November, and to the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park, as a historical record of the theatrical activity that took place in the detention camps under the Pinochet dictatorship.
The cycle of plays is opening amid controversy in the country over people falsely presumed to have disappeared, but who have now reappeared.
In December 2008, the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet admitted that four people had been wrongly classified as 'detained-disappeared.'
This caused concern among human rights organisations, and exchanges of politically motivated recriminations between the centre-left coalition that has governed the country since 1990 and the rightwing opposition alliance.
On Jan. 5, legislator Karla Rubilar of the rightwing National Renewal party told the government there were three further cases of persons mistakenly classified as 'detained-disappeared.' But it was immediately proven that two of them were, in fact, victims of the dictatorship whose bodies have not been recovered.
Rubilar’s claim drew howls of outrage from the families of victims of the dictatorship and criticism from political leaders across the spectrum, especially when she admitted to having contact with a lawyer for Manuel Contreras, the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the dictatorship's notorious secret police, who is now in prison for multiple convictions on charges of human rights violations.
The lawmaker said she had acted in good faith, and blamed the scandal on the government for having made public the information she had handed over confidentially for investigation.
Nevertheless, on Jan. 14 Rubilar was voted out of her position as chair of the Human Rights Commission in the lower house of Congress, by eight votes to five.
'Our reunion (for the cycle of plays) is such a wonderful experience that the controversy (about those wrongly considered disappeared) becomes just part of the everyday political goings-on in the country, where both sides try to make political capital out of every situation that arises,' Castro concluded.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service