THEATRE VERSUS OPPRESSION
Registered Charity SC039092
Using applied theatre to bring about positive change and development

About Emilio Barreto

As one says that a wanderer does reach spring. So I set myself to work. With what a person receives from doing what I am doing, they can recover. I believe that my sacrifice has begun, and I believe that for the rest of my life I am going to continue doing just that. Already I am 60 years old, and what is left for me, every step I take each day is taking me nearer to my grave. What remains of me you have - this interview, the fact that you are now with me, talking, asking me things, this is the result of my work. Because how else are they going to know me? I don’t know that I deserve much more than that. I don’t know, that you will decide in your analysis, in your criticism, in your investigation you will say, you will judge. That is why I say that the fact is that you are here, giving your time to this interview, to this investigation . . . that is enough.
(Emilio Barreto, 2000) 

Emilio Barreto was born on 22^nd May 1940 in Paraguay. He came from a working class family, with a strong social conscience and involvement in social activity and workers’ rights. Emilio began studying acting and worked with various theatre groups learning design skills with masks that he later developed into an art form and studying puppetry and mime. At this time General Alfredo Stroessner was the dictator of the country after a successful coup in 1954 – he remained in power until he was overthrown in 1989. His studies were constantly interrupted by the political situation and he constantly found himself having to move or change his name to re-inscribe to study.

At the age of 25 he married Nimia Baez and just four months later both he and his wife were arrested by military police. After questioning and some months imprisonment Nimia was released. Neither was charged yet Emilio remained imprisoned for the next thirteen years, classified a prisoner of the state and therefore ‘a communist’. During those thirteen years Emilio was tortured on various occasions, imprisoned in a ‘calabozo’ (a cell  approximately four by two and a half metres, with no window, from which he was allowed out once a week and which he shared with up to 12 others at times including women, children, even babies) for a number of years and finally moved to a concentration camp outside of the capital.

No reason was ever officially given for his arrest and neither was one ever given to explain his release.

Throughout his imprisonment Emilio used his theatrical training to ‘remain sane’. With other prisoners he invented games, gave mini-shows, gave puppet shows using his thumbs and a torn t-shirt and he continued learning and developing his mask making skills. On his release Emilio returned to the theatre but in a very different way, influenced by some things he had heard of Boal he formulated a theatre of the oppressed which he continues now to use with deprived classes, street children, homeless, prisoners and in the countryside. He works, usually for nothing, believing that the most important thing is to educate and empower, to prevent the same atrocities from ever happening again.

He refuses to live in bitterness over what has happened to him explaining that were he to do so ‘he would remain in prison’ and ‘life is too precious and beautiful not to love it and cherish the freedom it brings’. His philosophy is that many of those involved in the atrocities that happened to him were merely doing their job and many from fear and ignorance. And while he is strongly aware of the responsibility others have and have never paid for, his belief is in constructing a future not being destroyed by the past.

In terms of the torture he suffered, it is numerous and graphic, brutally both physically and psychologically. To give just an example:

-     He was repeatedly submerged in the ‘pileta’ a bath of putrid water, human waste and vomit in which prisoners were submerged and beaten in their stomachs to force them to open their mouths and swallow

-     He was beaten by metal whips, whips with nails at the end, metal rods . . .

-     Fire hoses were turned on inches from his ears

-     An electric cattle prod was applied to all orifices of his body in turn and repeatedly

-     And the list goes on, perhaps one of the worst moments that he often recalls is that they drove him into the wilderness and made him dig his own grave and lie down in it. They then began to fill it and as he was suffocating, at the last possible moment, removed him. As I say the list goes on but it is not necessary.

As a result he has been blinded in one eye, he is deaf in one ear, his kneecaps are all but destroyed  and far more injuries were inflicted on him, too many to list . . . and he has needed various operations and still does but never has had them for financial reasons. Yet he works in a paid job minimal hours to feed his family and then spends every spare hour on outreach projects with theatre and community work. His wife, who visited him every day of his 13 year incarceration whether she was allowed to see him or not, works with him in many of these projects and supports all of his work.

Of all those I worked with in my research Emilio was the only one with no bitterness or hate; he simply loved life and cherished every day of his freedom. His greatest fear was to waste a moment he had been given and his excitement to live life infected everyone he came into contact with. From working with him and his wife I learned not only about life and theatre, but about strength, love and forgiveness.

In some of Emilio’s own words:

I use the theatre as a means of education. To me didactic theatre is useful to keep developing, not only theatre, aesthetics, but also the consciousness Theatre is like the creation of the human being, it is a culture – man is the creator of culture and he himself changes the products of culture. Therefore I do not see another purpose to the theatre other than to develop that, to develop the consciousness, to open the mind, to try to create new ways for human beings to relate to one another. If the theatre is not going to serve this purpose, then what is it good for?

(In prison) We began to tell stories, we played at who could lie the most, to see whose lies were the most imaginative. It was practically like writing, creating stories, creating fictional novels, and we began to create stories . . . I remember that once a Paraguayan peasant began to tell us stories that wouldn’t finish for seven or eight days. He told us his stories, because we had nothing else of which to speak. And otherwise we realized we would lose our wings, our sense of imagination

I turned prison into a university, for me prison was a university. I always tried to extract the positive part from it. Theatre, is not merely an entertainment, in a way, just like prison, it must elevate the person, develop universal values, solidarity, honesty, integrity, a love of work and respect.

We were heaps of people piled on top of each other, having to carry out our physiological necessities in milk jars . . . and yet still we made poetry – even though we were not allowed pencil or paper. Yet still we recited, we gave monologues, some dialogues, in that way we passed the days and the years.

. . . I would love to communicate with many people, to tell them many things, to make contact with a great many people and tell them in what way they could help. I have a dream . . . I have a dream  . . . My dream is to conquer Europe. What kind of conquest? To take a group from Paraguay, from Argentina, from Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia, to take a boat and go to Spain first and say ‘We came to bring you, to show you our culture’. To take them a theatre production about the Guaranies before they (the Spaniards) came. That the Brazilians bring their culture, the Chileans, the Argentineans, the Uruguayans, the Venezuelans, the Columbians, before we all die. All the effort that is made now to try to rediscover I believe is worth it. I know that it is a dream I will never realize, but it is my dream . . . 

When you’ve heard so many stories you have already lived the nightmare, you know what to expect and they lose the power to shock you. But you’ve died a million times over waiting for the moment that they would come and get you. The fear of what will happen is always greater than the thing itself . . . You know they will come for you one day; you live your life expecting it. Isn’t it strange how it still comes as such a surprise when it actually happens?

I would have been a great director, a great actor, the famous Emilio Barreto, who developed an acting technique, I would have been a star, I would have been like those great Argentinean actors . . . Now that doesn’t matter to me anymore. That is what I once thought, that was the criterion, but then I came to understand that the theatre should be an educational tool. That is why I use theatre as an educational tool – and for the development of the people.