the ugliness after 25 years: scene analysis regarding warfare

There's a scene in the many-times-over spun-off and remade "Yo Soy Betty, La Fea," that Guinness-record-holding Colombian telenovela written by Fernando Gaitán which aired from 1999-2001, that seems so out of place it can make you wonder whether the entire 150-hour-long saga is more an allegory for something large-scale rather than an oftentimes-goofy melodrama about a nerdy unattractive secretary playing cat-and-mouse with her narcissist boss at the offices of a fashion house. 

The scene is found in what's originally the 168th episode, a twenty-two-minute run where now-streamable episodes have been edited together to be between 45 minutes to an hour. The episode aired on the 16th of June 2000, and the edited version you can watch is the 68th episode entitled "Entre Cuadros de Picasso." The character Catalina Ángel (played by Celmida Luzardo), a publicist and friend to many of the series' characters, is explaining a replica of a Picasso to a group of secondary characters who are all gathered at El Museo Nacional in Bogotá, which was once a prison modeled in the style of a panopticon. I'll get to that. Before Catalina begins her explanation of the replica, our titular character Beatriz Pinzón Solano (Ana María Orozco) has excused herself to one of her friends and coworkers to go clandestinely meet her employer and lover, CEO of the company Ecomoda, Armando Mendoza (Jorge Enrique Abello).

CATALINA
Vengan, les quiero mostrar este cuadro. Es tal vez el cuadro más famoso de Picasso. No es el original, obviamente. Es una reproducción en miniatura; el original es más grande que esta pared. Simboliza la violencia.

Come, I'd like to show you all this painting. It's probably Picasso's most well-known painting. It's not the original, obviously. It's a miniature reproduction; the original is larger than this wall. It symbolizes the essence of violence.

During the line beginning with "the original..." the camera cuts to the miniature of Picasso's 1937 "Guernica." And then, while Catalina says the line, "It symbolizes the essence of violence," the camera cuts to two women climbing the stairs to the museum. It's dark but perhaps not late: nighttime falls year-round in Bogotá at around 6 pm. The women are arm-in-arm and walking hurriedly, with determination, with trepidation, as well as with a nebulous righteous anger. It should be watched to be best understood. The women are two important characters in the series, the first actually being a deuteragonist: Marcela Valencia (Natalia Ramírez) and Patricia Fernández (Lorna Paz Cepeda). Marcela is a shareholder and vicepresident of sales at Ecomoda, one of its heirs as her deceased father had started the company (along with Armando's father, Roberto) as well as Armando's fiancée. Patricia is her long-time friend, currently working as executive secretary at Ecomoda though she's overpaid and underqualified. The women hurry toward the entrance to the museum as the line is said with tense music in the background. The audience at this point in the saga understands they're there on invitation from Catalina but also due to an intuition that Armando is indeed meeting a lover there, who neither Marcela nor Patricia know to be or even suspect is Beatriz. 

"La Violencia" is a code that would not have gone over the head of any Colombian. Explaining that as well as what it could mean for this television drama that portrays comparatively mild physical violence but an enormous amount of psychological violence and explicit economic warfare, is my task for this post.

Background: Oligarchs as Economists

Beatriz, called Betty, lives in a humble neighborhood in Bogotá, the only daughter of a controlling father Hermes Pinzón and an enabling mother Julia Solano. Betty and her best friend Nicolás Mora (Mario Duarte) are relatively young economists, having earned degrees with honors. Colombia, of all Latin America, has the most universities after Brazil and Mexico and two rank in the top 15 in Latin America. LatAm is growing, she's still young and volatile and confused in identity: the planet's biggest bully is directly north of us, cut us some slack, OK? Anyway, Betty and Nicolás are flukes: they're not so much "ugly" in appearance as much as "ugly in appearing poor," out of touch with superficiality, unconcerned with social decorum and unseemly in their old-fashioned ways. Awkward nerds, you can say. Nicolás even exhibits traits that, with the awareness now twenty-five-years later, might put him on the autism spectrum. Nonetheless, they are genius financers, and they are too self-conscious to have the ambition to aim for employment that would suit their credentials, aware of their unseemly looks and weird personalities in a culture built on collective uniformity.

Betty tries and succeeds to land a secretarial position at Ecomoda. Very Devil-Wears-Prada, but, sorry, "Betty" aired and was a worldwide phenomenon before that novel was even written. The saga of the telenovela begins with the retirement of Roberto Mendoza as CEO of Ecomoda with his only son Armando being named the new CEO to the chagrin of Daniel Valencia (Luis Mesa), Marcela's brother and fellow heir to the Ecomoda dynasty and obviously one of its shareholders. Armando is not a good economist. Nonetheless, Marcela, being in love with him, supported his being named CEO and not herself or Daniel, once again leaving Ecomoda's steering wheel in the hands of a Mendoza after the Valencia patriarchs' premature deaths. Betty becomes Armando's right hand and dreams of him like a scullery maid would a prince, while Armando uses her infatuation with him to manipulate her into covering up personal and, more importantly, professional mishaps. Armando offers Betty capital to begin a shell company called Terramoda which will rescue Ecomoda from the debt towards banks and creditors, as well as prompting her to doctor the numbers for Ecomoda's shareholders so that no one learn about Terramoda. Armando also insists Betty does what she thinks best with the capital to make it grow: Nicolás ends up astutely investing in good stock. Upon the suggestion of another shareholder, Mario Calderón (Ricardo Vélez), Armando seduces Betty and begins a romantic and sexual affair with her so as to ensure her unflinching loyalty.

How Betty isn't the wiser to Armando's and Mario's schemes speaks to how naive she is to the core corruption of the wealthy. Think about the theme of the film "Parasite." The shareholders and wealthier employees within Ecomoda, including and especially the house's lead designer Hugo Lombardi (Julián Arango) and Marcela due to Betty's obvious loyalty to Armando, are so explicitly cruel and demeaning to Betty for the unforgivable crime of being cringey-at-first-glance and overly nice and lightning-quick-smart that the series is often painful to watch. I'm influenced by someone who took the time out to call my cringey-at-first-glance and overly nice and lightning-quick-smart novella "almost painful" so having planned to write about "Betty" after having spent about three months watching it is a nice coincidence; still trying to figure out whether that account is an AI or an anti-woman autistic person, but, whatever. Enlightened beings must have compassion for people who put that much time and effort into ripping apart things they don't understand. I'm in Zen mode. Betty will go there too, I'm getting to that part. Anyway, while at Ecomoda, before and during the affair with Armando, Betty just takes the shame and abuse; she's used to it, and her intellect if not her social affability wins out over most other people's. Unfortunately, her resulting pain has to manifest somehow. It does in the form of dysmorphic break from reality into escapism where Betty lives in a kind of dream state. Standing apart from her own sexuality enables her to have the sappiest and most fantastical medieval-type chivalric fantasies. The kind featured in Mexican telenovelas. Magical realism, some say, began in Colombia; and, Mexico is always taking our best telenovelas, including "Betty" and Gaitán's other classic "Café con Aroma de Mujer" and remaking them. No offense, Mexico, I love you, but, please bring back Frida and Diego and the Golden Age of your cinema and we'll bring back Gabo, Botero and Gaitán. Let's make a truce about that and to no longer produce Karol Gs and Peso Plumas, good God. 

Anyway, Armando claiming he's fallen in love with Betty creates this sense of euphoria in the woman where she's willing to do anything for her man, while Armando's conscience does begin to rear its ugly head. Armando isn't used to women like Betty, physically or psychologically; she is the loyalist person due to him regarding her as worthy and intelligent and calling her beautiful even if he doesn't mean it at first. They say women become more beautiful the more they're loved. Armando does fall in love with Betty and does come to see her as someone fragile and broken and yet still strong and upright. Side note: that's the definition of the ideal Hispanic wife, by the way. Yeah. We're all fragile and broken, we're all Lloronas, but because we remain strong in our loyalty to our man and follow the social codes of remaining humble against any abuse, we exemplify redemption from being born with the curse of Eve to becoming more like the Virgin Mary. It's a concept made up by men thinking God is Father-God with a beard and a booming voice like in the Old Testament, calling Israel a "whore" for experimenting with the worship of other Near Eastern gods. Truth is that Jesus, perfectly God and perfectly human, is actually way more feminine than masculine and praises women more than men. But, I digress. 

Surprise! Betty finds out Armando's romance is a ruse through a mistake on Mario's part. She enacts the first out of two revenges: Betty tortures Armando into madness and alcoholism, dangles the wealth her and Nicolás have accrued from Terramoda in front of Ecomoda, and eventually exposes to the shareholders how Ecomoda is entirely indebted to Terramoda before leaving for good. Catalina offers Betty a chance to be her assistant during the Miss Colombia pageant being held in the lovely colonial Caribbean-shored Cartagena de Indias, and, there, Betty undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation and meets happy laid-back people in the tourism industry. Back in Bogotá, Armando and Mario have had to renounce Ecomoda. The former becomes suicidal out of guilt and shame and loss. Second revenge, Betty returns to the capital a beautiful girlboss agreeing to help Ecomoda by becoming its CEO and an enlightened oligarch by means of a Cinderella story-arc. 

Boo, Betty eventually marries Armando, having forgiven him. The finale clocked in at eleven-million views, extraordinary for its time. The series isn't about poor people having rights by merely existing; it's about poor people waking up to being industrious and elegant with Judeo-Christian values and respect for the rich. In my opinion, that's genuinely why it was so successful. It exemplifies neoliberalism in the 90s, and Colombia, unbeknownst to ignorant people, has a middle class unlike many of her Latin American neighbors. Rumors are that the ending was forced by the producers, as Gaitán had wanted Betty to return to Cartagena and work with a Prince-Charming-type Frenchman she meets there Michele Doinel (Patrick Delmas) while Armando would have committed suicide. But, that would have been too dark for the public, obviously, and its moral would have been that financial and personal success lie in ditching the old Catholic oligarchs for entrepreneurship in tourism and travel and gentrification of historical areas. 

A clear delineation exists within the series. There are those belonging to old-money, who are traditionally elegant and chic, educated in Catholic conservative universities, a.k.a. the shareholders of Ecomoda, as if they were noblemen in a feudal caste. There are those who are underpaid and overworked belonging to the lower middle class, not groomed to aim for a higher class, who are expected to be picked on and are therefore resentful if still funny and jovial. The group Catalina is speaking to about Picasso is the group of underpaid and lower-middle-class secretaries from Ecomoda who've been called "el cuartel de las feas" or "the ugly women of the barracks." I don't know if the "Squad" led by AOC (whose name resembles mine and ironically we're both from NY, but she's a Nuyorican not a Colombiana and that makes a difference), ever knew about this series. But, it's the same idea, though there's absolutely no comparison as the Squad are the most non-jovial people in Congress. I'll take MTG over them because MTG believes in her vote for the Iron Dome while AOC is a crying hypocritical coward who voted "present" and then parties at the Met Gala in a dress reading Tax The Rich. 

"El cuartel" plays a pivotal role in providing much-needed comic relief as well as always supporting and encouraging Betty to build her self-esteem. Patricia, on the other hand, is employed merely through the demands of Marcela so as to spy on Armando's womanizing, is a superficial gold-digger living as though she's upper-class without being able to afford it and subsequently finds herself the butt of everyone's jokes. Patricia's false claims that she's completed six out of ten semesters in a university called "San Marino" which doesn't exist in Colombia but obscurely in northeast Italy, exemplifies the extraordinary lying people from this culture will resort to so that others are obligated out of social code to accept regardless of whether they're aware of the lie.

The laborers in the warehouse of Ecomoda? Nobody cares, none of them ever say a line except to collectively cheer that Armando and Betty both run the company together. Way to go, producers. With that said, let's move to the history of this classism in Colombia and the nearly-eighty-year conflict and asymmetrical warfare begun with a period called "La Violencia," as well as the irony of where the Picasso exhibit was being held which was in a panopticon prison turned into the National Museum. Colombia is a place of extremes.

"La Violencia" and the Panopticon-turned-Museum

In 1948, in a funny coincidence with names, the candidate for presidency running as a leftist was assassinated, and his name was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Same surname as this series' writer. Gaitán's assassination instigated a collective madness which swept the country, beginning with killings and rioting in Bogotá which left thousands dead, with what's called "El Bogotazo" and spreading to different regions. Some of the world's most depraved and disturbing tortures and killings were recorded and analysts are still thinking about what happened to the proletariat, the farmers and laborers and leftist supporters, to so insanely attack conservatives and the Catholic Church and experience retaliation. Some say it was an op; Fidel Castro was there for the assassination. What was he doing there and then? Ten years of this mad terrorism has been named, appropriately, "La Violencia," taking the lives of about 200k Colombians. My grandparents fled this madness. It's in my DNA. Why do you think I write about the things I do? I'm offering it to God and to you so as to heal the wounds, because we are more than assassins and rapists and general savages; those who are were made that way and we need to heal and not be further beat down.

Let's do conspiracy. The National Museum of Colombia was a prison in the style of a panopticon, built in 1872, the largest in the country. In 1946, a new prison called La Picota was installed with the plan to move the prisoners out of the Panopticon so as to prepare to inaugurate the building as a museum on the same day Gaitán was murdered and the riots began in 1948. And, so, the museum opened a few months after Gaitán's assassination and we have to wonder about the politics of that museum and its original intent. Anyway, prisoners of La Picota are a mix of corrupt politicians, narcos, and members of leftist guerrilla groups such as FARC (which supposedly dismantled in 2016 in Havana of all places), M19 and ELN. Unlike the Panopticon, these prisoners aren't being tortured by means of having guards be able to look in on them at any given time and experience perpetual violation of privacy. 

The Museum can be said to be haunted. Its aim was and continues to be the telling of Colombia's history. One if not the most famous Colombian visual artists, featured on the Champs-Élysées and on Park Avenue in my hometown New York City, is Fernando Botero, who, peace to him, was known for reproducing famous religious and political paintings in a stacked and fat style for humor and critique. Personally, I admire his work depicting the Abu Ghraib tortures. Either way, the disturbing history of the building and its coincidental move toward becoming a museum congruent with "La Violencia" works almost too perfectly with the scene in "Betty" at the center of this post.

Obviously, the Museum was indeed hosting a Picasso collection during the filming of "Betty" and Gaitán (that name!) took advantage of the occasion to create several episodes taking place within the building and regarding the different artwork. Catalina speaks to the cuartel and to Hugo and others of Picasso's womanizing, which the characters joke resembles Armando's reputation. Darkly, she mentions that Picasso's last and most loyal woman ended up committing suicide, which might just be a reference to Betty's transformation where she allows her masochistic personality to die and she is reborn into a new personality of a woman of grace and dignity. Armando himself will soon become violent and suicidal like Picasso when Betty finds him out. So, Marcela and Patricia hurrying into this prison-museum to try and "catch" Armando with a mysterious lover while Catalina speaks of "La Violencia" is no coincidence, even if it's in reference to the essence of violence in Guernica. Marcela and Patricia and Armando are oligarchs, Armando and Marcela being heirs to a wealthy company which might as well be a small feudal kingdom, and they would be considered the enemies of the rioters during the Bogotazo. Or, perhaps, if we want to be conspiratorial, we can say the oligarchs themselves began the rioting and violence to blame it on the proletariat. The forty-second scene is loaded with mystery.

Before I move to Guernica, though, I'd like to point out my translation of "La Violencia" to "the essence of violence" rather than just literally "the violence." Spanish is a language rooted in Latin as well as Arabic and of course has elements of ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Like other Romance languages, nouns or subjects have either masculine or feminine connotations, or sometimes but rarely both. And so nouns have this "essence" that demands the article "el" (for masculine) or "la" (feminine). In English, it would sound strange to say "Ah, long live the love," where in French everyone says, "Ah, vive l'amour," and in Spanish, "¡Viva el amor!" Therefore, "La Violencia" seems better translated as "The Essence that Is Violence" as awkward as that would sound. It does demonstrate the nature of the language better.

Guernica and Genocide Against Leftists

At this point, I'd like to give the background of the painting. In 1937, eleven years before the Bogotazo, the Basque region of Spain was a stronghold for leftists opposing the Franco regime in Spain as well as fascism in general, and the Nazis decided to annihilate the city with two hours of bombing. Most of the city's men were away fighting. All infrastructure leading out of the town was the first to be destroyed and so no one could escape. German planes dropped bombs weighing 1k lbs and deployed about 3k two-pounder aluminum incendiary projectiles. Fighters mowed people down with machineguns from the planes. Nazis slaughtered about eight hundred civilians.

Look, my first piece is about a merciless serial killer and rapist. I've had to think about these things a lot. I think about Palestine every day, a lot. I think of Sudan. I think of Latin America where really dumb people from the US don't realize that innocent people are being threatened, tortured and killed against the right-wing narcos and are looking to escape across the border so they can live. I think of places that the mainstream media will not even tell us about. And, for creatives, we feel things strongly and our responsibility is to show you what impacts us while not doing it to harm you or shock you into feeling helpless. I carry this extreme violence and genocide of my race and my distant relatives within me; I believe in genetic memories. I don't like talking extensively about my personal life but it is obvious that extreme violence is important for me to address in art. I'm curious as to how people can become so numb to it. It is unbelievable, and so that wonder at how cold humanity can be is a contrast to the lifeblood of my art and about my countrymen and women suffering for eighty years.

So, Picasso was in Paris during this slaughter of Guernica and he put his heart and soul into this oil on canvas piece that is 11 ft. tall and 25 feet wide. Parisians didn't like it on first display. The artist paid for it to tour parts of Europe and then America, first on the west coast and then in NYC, then to Milan, Brazil, back to USA to Chicago and Philly and again to NYC where it stayed in MoMA for a while and served as an excellent reference piece to other pieces about Vietnam. Picasso refused to let it go to Spain until he considered Spain a safe and sane republic free of fascism. He passed away in '73 and two years later Franco died. MoMA didn't want to give up the painting, arguing that Picasso considered that as long as Spain continued honoring its monarchs it wasn't free. Finally, with enough money I suppose, they conceded and the painting went to Madrid's great Prado, but then it was moved to the Reina Sofía which is for twentieth century art. Basques have advocated that it be kept in their land. I'm personally with them. The UN has a tapestry of the painting in its headquarters in NYC. The Bush administration had it covered while it decided to go to war with Iraq. Ha.

This video I'll post here points out a lot of beautiful aspects of the painting that I couldn't really put better myself, with regards to symbols. So, I'll make the reference to the video. I particularly like the monochrome aspect of the chaos as it leads the senses to consider newspaper. Again, a kind of desensitizing. A way of learning about the horrors that are happening far away that you feel helpless against except to portray the lack of conscience.

Conclusion

And, so, there's a lot to "Yo Soy Betty La Fea" whether consciously written/directed or not. I don't care about its silly spin-offs and remakes because the original captured something unrepeatable and something that still carried darkness reflecting the ongoing civil unrest of Colombia: the background fear of crime, leftist guerrillas, paramilitaries, narcos, and also the more explicit neoliberalism and the oligarchs owning the media, the explicit superficiality, the beauty standards, the misogyny, the mental illness and spirituality, the consequence of lies. But, it's my family's country and I consider it my home. I'll fight for her 🇨🇴. And I honor her ability to make great art that is being occulted by Shakira, Karol G, J. Balvin, Maluma, and Kali Uchis; we can do better, because we already have.