Encanto

 ¿Que si yo hubiera escrito Encanto? Mira, eso de meter toda Colombia en una casa me parece muy poquito. Colombia tiene todas las regiones y paisajes posibles: selva, playa, montaña, llanos, hasta desierto. ¿Y qué de nuestros ciclistas andinos, tan apreciados en Europa? Versión en español: https://terceraorbita.com/?s=encanto 

Had I been the Disney creator, here my movie would be: a little kid from the jungle riding his old bike to arrive in Cartagena to see take his little sister to see the ocean. They would have tried all foods, gone up hill, down hill, seen thundra, passed by Bogota, gone through the Magdalena river, until finding Cartagena. But a house? I would have rather rewatched some soap operas by Julio Jimenez which I loved when I was a little girl.

Colombia is not a big country, but it condenses all possible regions from the equatorial band: mountains (from snow to tundra to valley), coasts from two different oceans, jungle, plains, and dessert. The potential for the movie to have been an epic adventure through all these places was totally wasted towards a journey inside a house. However, I believe choosing a house for the adventure was the best choice for the allegory of violence.

Colombia has a tradition in the Tropical-Gothic as the Colombian film-maker Carlos Mayolo would put it. Many 90’s soap-operas were horror stories about the secrets of a big house. It’s like the first 80 pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which only deal with Jonathan Harker trying to escape Dracula’s house. Yet the people in Encanto’s house don’t want to escape because they’re too in love with themselves to notice that the house is gradually crumbling. Yes, and the house is Colombia.

The candle embodies the right-wing political ideologies promoted by the ex-president Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002-2010), whose party is still in power. Everybody said “Uribe gobierna en cuerpo ajeno” or “Uribe governs in another body”. Nowdays the puppet is called Iván Duque, a young politician elected because Uribe said so. And the next president will have to receive the blessing of Uribe to be able to come to office. By the way, “En cuerpo ajeno” was an old TV drama from the 90’s about an old guy who possessed the body of a young peasant to recover his wife. Yes, about the scary house too.

Who is Álvaro Uribe Vélez? He's a farmer and landowner of the Western Andean region bordering the Caribbean North Coast. His family has been investigated for helping the famous drug dealer Pablo Escobar, and also for having supported criminal organizations who stole land from peasants to give it big land owners. In addition to that, during his tenure the military were killing random civilians to make them count as guerrilla fighters defeated in combat. Nowadays at least one political activist from small towns and villages is killed by the same criminal organization.

His government had been subject to many investigations of political corruption. Just to add an example, he created a program to support small peasants and farmers, whose money was given to rich landowners of the Caribbean coast. The responsible for such shame was imprisoned in the United States then extradited to Colombia, but no one knows in which jail he's being held. However, Colombians still vote his puppet, and still will.

Colombians became blinded by this far-right ideology to the point of voting No to the peace treaty in 2016. They believed that the peace treaty would bring the raise in power of guerrillas and homosexuals to force us all into homosexuality. Uribista campaign builds on the identity of the Colombian as a hard worker, “not like the communists who want everything for free.” The ideal of “verraquera” as a superpower.

Being a hard worker is like a superpower that would bring us prosperity, as we believe when blinded by the Encanto. The candle embodies the false belief in an individual will that makes us beautiful. There’s one who is strong enough to pack two donkeys on her back, another whose beauty will bring the connections the family needs to improve economically (no wonder she has breast implants), the kid who takes pride in the biodiversity of Colombian lands, and the other who fakes faces and steals your money. He's so clever!!!

And there’s Mirabel, the party-pooper, the one who recalls: hey, our house is crumbling. The one who talks against Uribe in family meetings (like in the table scene), then gets shut down. The grandmother knows that what she says is true, but denies it in front of others. Pure gaslighting. however, grandma behaves like that because denying the traumatic event has allowed her to lead a normal life. She has a reason to be that abusive, but she’s sill abusive.

And then there’s uncle Bruno. One day in the past, he just disappeared. Yet no one is allowed to talk about Bruno. Plain as it sounds, he’s the disappeared people whose bodies have never been found. Some were disappeared by paramilitary groups who Uribe was investigated to support in the 90’s and 2000’s. His family has even been accused of leading mass murders against rural populations who were against his economic endeavors in the Western Andes and bordering jungles.

Bruno remains hidden trying to fix the cracks from the inside. The failed peace agreement proposed restorative justice to help find the disappeared people from guerrillas and paramilitaries alike. This was the opportunity to discuss people like Bruno, to talk about the cracks. However, these efforts proved inefficient after the people voted No against the treaty. And no one ever discuss this problem in family reunions because no one talks about Bruno, as the song says.

As in any traumatic event, no one talks about the disappearance of Bruno and the dead of the grandfather. The grandfather was killed in the 1950’s due to the partisan struggle between liberals and conservatives where many people were displaced from rural settings to the cities. Since I’m liberal, I believe grandpa was killed by conservatives to gain ownership of his lands. The same force led to the mysterious disappearance of Bruno. Yet Uribistas would say the candle is the communists who are destroying the country. I have news for you: the leftist parties have never reached presidency and are always a small minority in congress.

The only way out? To wait that the house destroys itself so we can rebuild everything. It’s important to destroy the magic to be able to see beneath the beauty. The house is built on the bodies of many uncle Brunos and a river of blood who is pushing to bring everything down. Death will find you in the face again and again until you go beyond the beauty of your lipstick or the happy dancing step. No patch on memory as Bruno puts on the cracks will prevent you from the reality you don’t want to see.