3 Nov 2010 | Americas, Mexico
Las Aparicio, a telenovela produced by Argos Comunicacion, the cutting-edge Mexican production house headed by Epigmenio Ibarra and his wife Veronica Velasco, has managed to anger both the Mexican church and Venezuelan president. Called “immoral” by Hugo Chavez and Mexican prelates, the series finished in September on the free-to-air television channel Cadena Tres in Mexico. Its critics were angered by “open scenes of lesbianism,” and a strong dosage of realism. The programme is about a clan of women who only have daughters and turn that curse into a strength. The characters include ghosts, a lesbian couple and divorced professional women and the women have sex and look to life after divorce. A typical Argos recipe for breaking taboos in Mexican television. After having initially pulled the programme from schedules at the prodding of local church officials, 11 Mexican cities eventually got to watch the show and Chavez finally relented and allowed the series to be shown on Venezuelan television at midnight.
Mexico is the home of the telenovela. The genre in the 1940s. There are various storylines, but the most popular ones are the telenovela rosa, which always involves the story of a poor woman who falls in love with a rich man, and the evil woman who tries to stop the love from flourishing. When I first moved to Mexico, I spent the first year watching these telenovelas to see if they have anything to say about Mexican culture. They don’t.
Epigmenio Ibarra is the antithesis of a rosa producer. At the beginning he was seen as an anti-christ just for producing a different type of story. Television owners think that people want stories of chivalry and traditional values that put religion at the top of the heap, says Epigmenio, a medium built man with glasses who has a penchant for staring down at his interviewer. I met Epigmenio in Central America as he reported the news for the Mexican news agency Notimex. A clever man, he managed to find sources on both sides of that vicious civil war — he was loved by both army generals and guerrilla leaders. He remains close friends with former guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos who teaches at Cambridge.
Seventeen years ago, Epigmenio returned home after the Central American wars ended. He tried to continue reporting on the Gulf War and the Balkan wars, but it did not feel the same. He decided to take a stake in the now-changing Mexico, which was in the throes of moving from a one party system, run by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). He met his wife Veronica Velasco, a television reporter, and tried to get into the national television business. In Mexico there was only room for two news networks, Televisa, which is the second largest media conglomerate in Latin America after Consorcio Globo, and Television Azteca. “They closed the doors on us,” he recalls. “So we started doing telenovelas.”
Epigmenio and his wife started working with Azteca, as Veronica was a former television star who had worked with one of the chain’s channels. They did a series that investigated crime and justice, but they broke big when they produced political drama Nada Personal a thinly veiled critical look at the political soap surrounding former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With Nada Personal, the socially conscious telenovela was born.
Since that first hit, Argos has produced a series of groundbreaking programmes that have taken on lesbianism, womanising priests, philandering politicians and strong women. The house’s most recent series, Capadocia — which it produced with HBO — deals with women in prison, and chapters are inserted with real life “hijuelos” or bastards, capturing real stories of drug trafficking, political corruption and social upheaval, which Argos introduces in the weekly or daily episodes, making the series uncannily close to real life.
“We are not interested in making a telenovela that features women who cry but still have perfect makeup. We look for a thinking viewer who does not want to be fed a story,” says Veronica Velasco, a tall, dark-haired striking woman.
Argos Comunicacion, the couple’s production company launched in 1992 — is today a sort of family business, with Epigmenio and Veronica at the helm, and other family members working in key positions, including one of Epigmenio’s daughters, Erendira, who played a lesbian in Las Aparicio. They have other business partners, including Mexico’s richest man Carlos Slim, who has invested in their production house. But the couple controls the content of Argo’s productions.
Epigmenio and Veronica recount the awards their series have obtained in the last 17 years, more out of awe at having conquered all odds than out of ego. “We won five awards in the recent International Festival of Telenovelas in Argentina,” adds Epigmenio, as we sit around a large square table in his spacious office. It is here in the Casa Azul — a turn of the century large mansion in Colonia Condesa — that he runs a production/talent scout and drama school conglomerate. Aware that many of the telenovela or Mexican starlets come out of the drama schools run by the two large television networks, he has also focused in trying to create more sophisticated and focused talent.
“It is the first time one telenovela has won all those awards in the festival in Argentina,” he continues. “We use the same writers TV Azteca uses, but they don’t win awards there,” tells Veronica. Cadena Tres was less of a struggle for Argos, which has had legendary falling outs with TV Azteca, its old outlet. Cadena Tres is a smaller media conglomerate. This new network is run by another Mexican millionare, Olegario Vasquez Raña, who owns hospitals and a newspaper.
Epigmenio continues to be involved in politics. He supported Andres Manuel Obrador the candidate on the leftist Partido Revolucionary Democratico (PRD), who ran for president in 2006 and lost to current president Felipe Calderon, amidst charges of vote fraud. On his twitter account, he writes anti-government messages. But one thing he learned being a war correspondent is that peace should be kept at all times. He says El Salvador’s biggest achievement was to reach peace after twelve years of war.
Argos’s latest plan are to produce a new soap called “The Weaker Sex”, a parody of a group of men who are abandoned by their wives and girlfriends. It is an old story in the United States and Europe. But this is a serious topic in a society that it is still dominated by the macho man and his virgin girlfriend telenovela that the other networks produce.
Still, Epigmenio and Veronica continue to be the outsiders who learned how to be insiders in Mexico. Their number one lesson from all the years producing telenovelas and series is: “You can’t touch the church and its values. We learned that when we tried to write about a womaniser priest. So we have figured out how to work out socially important stories without elaborating much on the church.”
Mexico is a very religious country, says Epigmenio. “We were told all priests were good when the Maciel scandal was at its height.” [Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative catholic sect, was exposed as a sex offender and has subsequently been formally denounced by the Vatican].
“We believe that the analysis commercial television uses to measure what Mexicans and Latin Americans want is wrong,” says Epigmenio “Lets not assume entertainment is something vacuous…television should also take risks,” he concludes.
7 Oct 2010 | News and features
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel prize in Literature 2010, explains in an article published in Index on Censorship in 1978 why Latin America’s writers became the most reliable interpreters of political reality
The Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas killed himself on the second day of December 1969 in a classroom of La Molina Agricultural University in Lima. He was a very discreet man, and so as not to disturb his colleagues and the students with his suicide, he waited until everybody had left the place. Near his body was found a letter with very detailed instructions about his burial — where he should be mourned, who should pronounce the eulogies in the cemetery — and he asked too that an Indian musician friend of his play the huaynos and mulizas he was fond of. His will was respected, and Arguedas, who had been, when he was alive, a very modest and shy man, had a very spectacular burial.
But some days later other letters written by him appeared, little by little. They too were different aspects of his last will, and they were addressed to very different people; his publisher, friends, journalists, academics, politicians. The main subject of these letters was his death, of course, or better, the reasons for which he decided to kill himself. These reasons changed from letter to letter. In one of them he said that he had decided to commit suicide because he felt that he was finished as a writer, that he no longer had the impulse and the will to create. In another he gave moral, social and political reasons: he could no longer stand the misery and neglect of the Peruvian peasants, those people of the Indian communities among whom he had been raised; he lived oppressed and anguished by the crises of the cultural and educational life in the country; the low level and abject nature of the press and the caricature of liberty in Peru were too much for him, et cetera.
In these dramatic letters we follow, naturally, the personal crises that Arguedas had been going through, and they are the desperate call of a suffering man who, at the edge of the abyss, asks mankind for help and compassion. But they are not only that: a clinical testimony. At the same time, they are graphic evidence of the situation of the writer in Latin America, of the difficulties and pressures of all sorts that have surrounded and disoriented and many times destroyed the literary vocation in our countries.
In the USA, in Western Europe, to be a writer means, generally, first (and usually only) to assume a personal responsibility. That is, the responsibility to achieve in the most rigorous and authentic way a work which, for its artistic values and originality, enriches the language and culture of one’s country. In Peru, in Bolivia, in Nicaragua et cetera, on the contrary, to be a writer means, at the same time, to assume a social responsibility: at the same time that you develop a personal literary work, you should serve, through your writing but also through your actions, as an active participant in the solution of the economic, political and cultural problems of your society. There is no way to escape this obligation. If you tried to do so, if you were to isolate yourself and concentrate exclusively on your own work, you would be severely censured and considered, in the best of cases, irresponsible and selfish, or at worst, even by omission, an accomplice to all the evils — illiteracy, misery, exploitation, injustice, prejudice — of your country and against which you have refused to fight. In the letters which he wrote once he had prepared the gun with which he was to kill himself, Arguedas was trying, in the last moments of his life, to fulfil this moral imposition that impels all Latin American writers to social and political commitment.
Why is it like this? Why cannot writers in Latin America, like their American and European colleagues, be artists, and only artists? Why must they also be reformers, politicians, revolutionaries, moralists? The answer lies in the social condition of Latin America, the problems which face our countries. All countries have problems, of course, but in many parts of Latin America, both in the past and in the present, the problems which constitute the closest daily reality for people are not freely discussed and analysed in public, but are usually denied and silenced. There are no means through which those problems can be presented and denounced, because the social and political establishment exercises a strict censorship of the media and over all the communications systems. For example, if today you hear Chilean broadcasts or see Argentine television, you won’t hear a word about the political prisoners, about the exiles, about the torture, about the violations of human rights in those two countries that have outraged the conscience of the world. You will, however, be carefully informed, of course, about the iniquities of the communist countries. If you read the daily newspapers of my country, for instance — which have been confiscated by the government, which now controls them — you will not find a word about the arrests of labour leaders or about the murderous inflation that affects everyone. You will read only about what a happy and prosperous country Peru is and how much we Peruvians love our military rulers.
What happens with the press, TV and radio happens too, most of the time, with the universities. The government persistently interferes with them; teachers and students considered subversive or hostile to the official system are expelled and the whole curriculum reorganised according to political considerations. As an indication of what extremes of absurdity this ‘cultural policy’ can reach, you must remember, for instance, that in Argentina, in Chile and in Uruguay the departments of Sociology have been closed indefinitely, because the social sciences are considered subversive. Well, if academic institutions submit to this manipulation and censorship, it is improbable that contemporary political, social and economic problems of the country can be described and discussed freely. Academic knowledge in many Latin American countries is, like the press and the media, a victim of the deliberate turning away from what is actually happening in society. This vacuum has been filled by literature.
What was, for political reasons, repressed or distorted in the press and in the schools and universities, all the evils that were buried by the military and economic elite which ruled the countries, the evils which were never mentioned in the speeches of the politicians nor taught in the lecture halls nor criticised in the congresses nor discussed in the magazines found a vehicle of expression in literature.
So, something curious and paradoxical occurred. The realm of imagination became in Latin America the kingdom of objective reality; fiction became a substitute for social science; our best teachers about reality were the dreamers, the literary artists. And this is true not only of our great essayists —- such as Sarmiento, Martí, Gonzáles Prada, Rodó, Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui — whose books are indispensable for a thorough comprehension of the historical and social reality of their respective countries, but it is also valid for the writers who only practised the creative literary genres: fiction, poetry and drama.
We have a very illustrative case in what is called indigenismo, the literary current which, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the first decades of our century focused on the Indian peasant of the Andes and his problems as its main subject. The indigenist writers were the first people in Latin America to describe the terrible conditions in which the Indians were still living three centuries after the Spanish conquest, the impunity with which they were abused and exploited by the landed proprietors — the latifundistas, the gamonales — men who sometimes owned land areas as big as a European country, where they were absolute kings, who treated their Indians worse and sold them cheaper than their cattle. The first indigenist writer was a woman, an energetic and enthusiastic reader of the French novelist Emile Zola and the positivist philosophers: Clorinda Matto de Turner (1854-1909). Her novel Avel sin nido opened a road of social commitment to the problems and aspects of Indian life that Latin American writers would follow, examining in detail and from all angles, denouncing injustices and praising and rediscovering the values and traditions of an Indian culture which until then, at once incredibly and ominously, had been systematically ignored by the official culture. There is no way to research and analyse the rural history of the continent and to understand the tragic destiny of the inhabitants of the Andes since the region ceased to be a colony without going through their books. These constitute the best — and sometimes the only — testimony to this aspect of our reality.
The participation of the Latin American writer in the social and political evaluation of reality has been decisive. Frequently, and often very effectively, he has taken the place of the scientist, the journalist and the social agitator in carrying out this mission. He has thus helped to establish a conception of literature which has penetrated all sectors. Literature, according to this view, appears as a meaningful and positive activity, which depicts the scars of reality and prescribes remedies, frustrating official lies so that truth shines through. It is also directed towards the future: it demands and predicts social change (revolution), that new society, freed from the evil spirits which literature denounces and exorcises with words. According to this conception, imagination and literature are entirely at the service of civic ideal, and literature is as subordinate to objective reality as history books (or even more so, for the reasons already discussed). This vision of literature as a mimetic enterprise, morally uplifting, historically fruitful, sociologically exact, politically revolutionary, has become so widespread in our countries that it partly explains the irrational behaviour of many of the dictatorships of the continent. Hardly installed in power, they persecute, imprison, torture and even kill writers who often have no political involvement, as was the case in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina not long ago. The mere fact of being a writer makes them suspicious, a threat in the short or long term to the status quo. All this adds considerably to the complexity of something which in itself is difficult to explain, the misunderstanding at the back of all this.
This is an extract from an article first published in Index on Censorship in Nov/Dec 1978
8 Sep 2010 | News and features, Volume 39.03 Autumn 2010
Daniel Barenboim tells Clemency Burton-Hill why music provides a model for living and governments continue to fear the power of its influence
(more…)
20 Apr 2010 | News and features, Uncategorized
Dirty War abductions: A case involving the adopted heirs to an Argentinean media empire has reignited a row about press freedom. Ed Stocker reports
In a twist worthy of a telenovela, Ernestina Herrera de Noble, owner of Argentina’s largest media empire, Grupo Clarín, is at the heart of a court case that has reopened old wounds from the country’s 1970’s ‘Dirty War’.
De Noble stands accused of adopting two children of the ‘disappeared’— those tortured and murdered by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The case, which has already taken eight years, is aimed at determining the true identity of her adoptive children and whether they are two of the 500 children estimated to have been illegally taken from their parents by the military.
De Noble’s media group owns Clarín, the most widely read newspaper in Argentina. Some commentators claim its high-profile owner has affected the paper’s coverage of the case but the newspaper denies the accusations.
Now the argument has moved onto whether journalists have compromised their credibility by working for the newspaper. On Friday posters appeared around Buenos Aires featuring 12 journalists who work for the media conglomerate. Above their individual photos a slogan asked: “Can you be ‘independent journalists’ and work for the owner of a multimedia company who is accused of appropriating children of the disappeared?” So far no group has claimed responsibility for the posters.
Posters in Buenos Aires accusing Grupo Clarin journalists. Photograph: Ed Stocker
Clarín was quick to respond. In its Saturday edition the paper called the posters an “anonymous attack”. Gabriel Michi, president of the Foro de Periodismo Argentino (Argentine Journalism Forum) called the fly-posting a cowardly act, adding that it generated “a climate of pressure that could descend into much worse situations.”
The Senate approved a law in November 2009 that allows the compulsory collection of DNA in cases involving children of disappeared (1976-83). The posters surfaced after judges on 9 April rejected a legal application by Herrera de Noble’s adoptive children, Marcela and Felipe, aimed at preventing their DNA from being compared to samples in the National Bank of Genetic Data. The database preserves the genetic data of relatives of disappeared children; so far it has identified more than 100 children. Meanwhile the case is still working its way through the courts, and a decision about when the examination will take place is pending.
The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, an organisation of mothers of the disappeared searching to identify their adopted grandchildren, celebrated the ruling as an important step. Abuela Buscarita Roa, reunited with her own granddaughter in 2000, said that she believed Clarín’s coverage, questionable in the past, had become more open in the last few months. She added: “Clarín has a very special power, as much economic as it is political. Due to this, censorship does exist.”
For Diego Martinez, journalist at the left-leaning daily Página 12, both Clarín and La Nación, Argentina’s other major newspaper, are guilty of obscuring the truth. He said: “Self-censorship in the de Noble case is evident as much in Clarín as La Nación which always twists the facts to fit in with the lawyers of the accused.”
A La Nación article on the Herrera de Noble case on 11 February stated that “the young children were adopted legally”, brushing over “Supposed irregularities” in the adoption proceedings. Clarín, too, has frequently printed interviews with lawyers representing de Noble’s adoptive children while denying a forum to those who question the children’s identity.
Martinez argues the papers report the story but fail to mention the “gross irregularities” surrounding the adoptions, including the fact that de Noble claims she found one child in a cardboard box on her doorstep.
Those opposed to Clarín and La Nación cite the papers’ close alignment with the military dictatorship that ran from 1976 to 1983 as one of the reasons they are reluctant to confront contemporary stories linked to the abuses of the past. For Buenos Aires-based journalist Juan Salinas, the papers were “accomplices and benefactors of the dictatorship.”
President Cristina Kirchner introduced a new media law in October 2009 aimed at breaking media monopolies, including the Clarín empire. Although approved by the Senate, the legislation is currently being held up by the courts, which caused thousands of protesters to take to the streets of the capital on 15 April in support of the law.
Opponents argue that it is a cynical way of trying to censure Grupo Clarín, which could be forced to sell of much of its assets and to a lesser extent La Nación, both of whom have been critical of the Kirchner governments.
Supporters claim the law is a much needed overhaul of a current system that can trace its roots to the establishment of the semi-monopolistic Papel Prensa, a news print producer formed by Clarín and La Nación in 1976,overseen by junta leader Jorge Rafael Videla.
Up to 30,000 people are thought to have been abducted and killed by the military dictatorship and as many as 500 children taken from their parents.
Ed Stocker is a freelance writer, currently based in Buenos Aires
