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“Capadocia” Brings Lesbians in Prison to Latin America

When billboards for the HBO Latin America television series Capadocia began springing up all over Lima, Peru, last winter, I didn’t know what to expect. Quality dramas that are made and produced in Latin America are few and far between, especially in a market dominated by telenovelas. From what I could gather it was a women’s prison drama – which immediately suggests lesbian story lines – but I couldn’t work out how they were going to get a poor farm girl falling in love with the ruggedly handsome son of a feudal landlord into the story.

The TV spots for Capadocia were bleak and mysterious, with some of the characters making grim declarations like “Welcome to hell.” One character stuck out more than the others – a Latina butch with corn rows. A lesbian on Latin American TV? The only lesbian/bisexual characters or story lines I had seen were on imported American shows on cable TV. I didn’t expect more than a couple of lipstick lesbians and a brooding Mexican butch, but what I got – the series’ first season ended in May – was both better and worse.

In Latin America, gays and lesbians are pretty much invisible on TV, and when they are on the small screen they’re usually portrayed as a problem or a joke. It’s the gay man in emotional turmoil over his sexuality, the predatory lesbian chasing the straight girl, or the gay guy camping it up for laughs.

Some Latin American countries, obviously, are more liberal than others, Brazil being the notable exception. Over the years there have been a few gay and lesbian characters on the popular Brazilian soaps, and the furore over a gay male kiss on prime-time TV even made international news a few years ago.

In Peru, it’s a lot more conservative, and the evening news is the best place to see anything remotely gay or lesbian. Whether it’s a popular gay club being shut down for “noise pollution” or the Gay Pride parade, you can be sure the presenter will treat it with smirking condescension.

But Capadocia was coming from HBO, so at best I was hoping for a female Oz – but with fewer white supremacists and more lesbians – and at worst, a Mexican riff on the campier Bad Girls. And the first episode of Capadocia had everything you’d expect from a women’s prison drama: a gratuitous shower scene, dykealicious prison guards, a riot and, of course, lesbian prisoners.

Warning: Spoilers for the first season

It was clear from the show’s beginning that the female characters would be at the heart of the series. Teresa Lagos (Dolores Heredia), the prison’s human rights advocate, is trying to juggle her career and family and later becomes director of the Capadocia prison. Ana Morena, aka La Negra (Aida López), is the head prison guard with a finger in every pie.

Among the inmates, Lorena Guerra (Ana de la Reguera) killed her best friend after walking in on her husband having sex with her. Marta (Mariannela Cataño) and Selma (Miriam Balderas) are star-crossed lesbians who meet in prison after being convicted for minor drug offenses. Consuelo Ospino, aka La Colombiana (Cristina Umaña), will sleep with anyone she thinks has power and influence. Aurelia Sosa, aka La Bambi (Cecilia Suárez), is the new queen bee whose obsession with La Colombiana leads to her downfall.

The series begins in the squalid and antiquated Oriente Women’s Prison in Mexico City. A prison guard tentatively emerges into a corridor, silent but for the sound of her echoing footsteps, to find debris littering the floor and dead bodies strewn in front of her. She turns around and looks up to see a dead body hanging on the wall – it’s the result of a bloody rampage which sees the prison’s former queen bee, Regina, slain by La Bambi.

The riot has been orchestrated by a private company that wants to use the women from Oriente to provide a cheap labor force in their newly built private prison. With government legislators dragging their feet over the decision, the company takes matters into their own hands. Their fixer, Federico (Juan Manuel Bernal), bribes a prison guard to set everything in motion and destabilize the prison.

His contact inside Oriente is La Negra, a strutting marimacha in black fatigues who knows the prison and the prisoners inside out, cutting deals with them and making sure she gets a peso or two out of it. She is a part of everything, and nothing happens without her say so. She lights the fuse, and the prison deteriorates into an orgy of violence.

The following day, the head of government for the city calls a press conference and announces the opening of a new private prison in the city, Capadocia.

Capadocia will inevitably draw comparisons to Oz because it’s made by HBO and because of the amount of violence depicted. It also bears a resemblance to another HBO program, Six Feet Under – at least structurally. Each episode begins with the story of the next inmate who will be sent to Capadocia, and like Six Feet Under there are a number of fantasy sequences that intertwine with reality. But for me, Capadocia is like a gritty Bad Girls, without the sense of humor.

Although there is an ongoing joke about showing new prisoners to their “suite,” any other humor is unintentional. In one scene, meant to show how Lorena has changed into a prison hard case, she beats another prisoner with a sewing machine, which I found inadvertently hilarious. This happened quite often during Capadocia, because the series is so relentlessly depressing that it borders on the tragically comic.

In one story line, an indigenous maid who speaks no Spanish is framed for murder by her boss. In another episode, a male-to-female transsexual is caught stealing underwear and sent to the male prison, where she is repeatedly beaten and raped before being sent to Capadocia. The lesbians don’t fare well, either.

La Bambi, the swaggering marimacha and queen bee at Oriente, is transferred to Capadocia where she reclaims her position as top dog – which includes the affections, so to speak, of the beautiful and alluring La Colombiana. She was sold to a Colombian drug baron by her parents, and willingly uses her body to manipulate anyone – male or female – to get what she wants, from money and drugs to freedom.

La Bambi goes doe-eyed at the sight of her, and becomes insanely jealous if La Colombiana pays attention to anyone but her. When La Colombiana takes a shine to Lorena Guerra, it ends badly.

Lorena is a dutiful housewife and mother imprisoned for killing her best friend, and over the course of the series goes from wide-eyed innocent to hard-nosed lag. In one episode, her husband visits her in prison to tell her that he’s moving abroad and she’ll never see her children again. When La Bambi sees La Colombiana comforting the broken-hearted Lorena in her cell, she flies into a jealous rage and attacks Lorena. But Lorena manages to grab a picture of her children and proceeds to beat La Bambi to death with it. Lorena then becomes the new queen bee – and also gets La Colombiana.

As might be expected from an HBO series, lesbian love scenes are included, but the handful that are in Capadocia are either fairly tame or fairly ridiculous. In one fully clothed fumble, La Bambi shows all the finesse of a teenage boy with La Colombiana. The most passionate sex scene is between two straight women, one who will shag anyone who can get her special privileges (La Colombiana), and the other who is emotionally unstable and using drugs to get her through prison (Lorena).

 

In general, Capadocia’s portrayal of lesbians is not terribly positive. The series seems to adhere to that old stereotype that women go gay because of some emotional turmoil or a lack of men – the basis of many a women-in-prison film. The only notable exception is the relationship between Marta and Selma.

Marta is a drug addict who has all she wants at Oriente – drugs and her girlfriend, Selma, a kindred spirit who has also spent her life living on the streets. But Marta’s life falls apart when Selma is released from prison.

Things get worse when she is transferred to Capadocia and is unable to get drugs. She tries to kill herself by head-butting a mirror and then slashing her wrists with the broken glass. She becomes more upset when she is not allowed a conjugal visit with Selma because those rights are for heterosexual married couples, not lesbians. When another prisoner goads her, telling her that Selma is probably on the outside screwing someone else, Marta stabs her in the hand with a pair of scissors.

Later the prison psychiatrist asks her why she is so interested in Selma.

Marta: I’ve never had anything. In prison I met Selma. She is like me, always lived on the streets. She knows how to laugh, how to be happy all the time. One day she said she’d teach me how, and she kissed me, and for the first time – for the first time I knew everything would be OK. And you won’t let me see her!
In the next scene, Selma is back on the streets, drunk and dirty, kissing a man. However, this is one of few stories in Capadocia that has a happy ending. Selma ultimately tires of life on the streets and goes to visit Marta in prison, where she tells her she loves and misses her. Selma holds her face up to the partition, and Marta gently stokes the glass. After Selma’s visit, Marta enters into the prison rehabilitation program, and in the last episode is one of 20 prisoners to be released. As she comes out of the prison, Selma is there waiting for her.

But although Marta and Selma walk away hand in hand, they also may have taken with them the chance of a regular lesbian character in the future. If the series is picked up for a second season, we may have to make do with Lorena and La Colombiana playing pretend lesbians.

Nevertheless, Capadocia represents significant progress in Latin America.

A few years ago, when I was flicking through the cable channels in Colombia and came across the first season of The L Word on the Warner Channel, some of the sex scenes between Tina and Bette had been edited down, and curse words had been dubbed over. How things have changed. Season 4 of The L Word has just finished airing on the Warner Channel, unedited. MTV Latin America recently aired South of Nowhere every evening, and on Antenna 3 (a Spanish cable network), a lesbian story line on Los Hombres de Paco has aired.

Latin America is still a very conservative place, but we’re beginning to get some representation on the television. Despite its often negative depiction of lesbians, Capadocia is a quality prison drama, with fantastic performances from all the cast. The writing is excellent, and La Negra gets some particularly good lines. Some of the story lines, like the one involving the male-to-female transsexual, are things I’ve never seen on Latin American TV before. And despite the lesbians of convenience in Lorena and La Colombiana, Capadocia also did deliver one lesbian couple with a happy ending – a revolution in itself.

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