A CRIME AGAINST THE LAMBS

directed by Susannah Tresilian

Performed at Contact Theatre, Manchester on the 15th March 2005
as part of Palaver Festival
(7-19th March 2005)

** performed as Work in Progress (script in hand) **

A successful right wing businessman and his left wing revolutionary daughter
are at the centre of this drama. When her revolutionary group are forced to
kidnap her own father as part of a coup the stakes are raised as high as they
can go. Written by leading Mexican playwright and revolutionary, Carlos Prieto,
based on his experiences.

With an introductory talk by Carlos' daughter, Ayari Prieto.

Jonathan Blake
Jim Bradshaw
Andrea Doran
Tom Guest
Lee Thorburn
Helen Spencer

WRITTEN IN 1974

Carlos Prieto was born in Mexico City on 6 August 1922. His father, his grandfathers and his great-grandfathers had been active in Mexican politics over a hundred years of revolutions and reforms and are to be found in history books. Jorge Prieto, his father, was Diputado (MP), Senator and Governor of the state of San Luis Potosi, as well as Mayor of Mexico City. Because his mother was French, Jorge could never be President, but in the early 20’s he engineered the election of his puppet, as befitted the mores of the times. Two years after Carlos was born in a palace in Mexico City, now a public park, Jorge was exiled and fled to Los Angeles with his growing family (he and Felisa, Carlos’ mother, were eventually to have eight children), where they remained for ten years. Carlos and his siblings were bilingual. Carlos lived in Mexico from 1934 to the end of his life, with the exception of a couple of years in England.

Jorge Prieto was an extreme right-wing politician, pro-Hitler and Franco during the war, and he founded the Anti-Communist League of Latin America. He was on friendly terms with Latin American dictators (Batista, Trujillo, Stroessner, Papa Doc, Somoza, etc.) and, curiously, with Chiang Kai Chek. His son Carlos, however, a polymath of remarkable energy and integrity, became a Communist and devoted his life to revolution in Mexico. His activism brought him into danger repeatedly. He earned his bread as a playwright, supplementing this meagre income with work for advertising agencies. His wife, Evelyn, a New York Jew, was a teacher. Carlos’ plays were staged on and off throughout his life to critical acclaim, but they were almost invariably closed down by the political censors – on two occasions (“A Medio Camino” and “El Jugo de la Tierra”*), the theatres lost their licences.

Carlos, having turned from Stalinism in disgust in the 50’s, gradually came to reject the Soviet Union as a possible mentor of Latin American revolutionary movements and he influenced many Mexican artists and intellectuals in pursuit of a Latin American direction within the Communist spectrum. In 1959 Carlos filmed the Cuban Revolution and became friends with many of its main protagonists, including Che Guevara and Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother. This revolution remained his model.

Mexico, like other countries in the region, suffers from dramatic extremes, with the vast majority of it’s citizens living in poverty, with no hope of justice at any level, in the iron grip of a handful of spectacularly wealthy, white-skinned families. After the bloody events of the student movement of 1968, it was clear to Carlos Prieto and to many other Mexican intellectuals that the party dictatorship would not relinquish - or indeed share - power by peaceful means and that the indignation of political activists was not enough to effect even moderate change.

In August of 1969, Carlos and Evelyn took part in the foundation of an armed underground revolutionary movement called the Frente de Liberación Nacional. Their plan was not like that of other contemporary armed movements: this group did not wish to be at the vanguard of the struggle, but at the rear, as military support for an expected political uprising. They were in no hurry; they believed that the time would be ripe in twenty years or so. And, finally, they were unlike other organisations in that they insisted on integrity in their actions from the beginning, i.e. no robberies, sabotage, assassinations, kidnapping, etc. They were able to grow gradually, funded by their members, and unlike their counterparts, the Frente survived, though with much loss of life over the years. In the event, they became the Zapatistas (in honour of the Zapatistas of 1910), rising up in January of 1994, 25 years after the group’s foundation. And they had indeed remained at the rear of a genuine political movement, providing an armed branch that ensured its military success, albeit in a limited amount of territory (Chiapas, in the Southwest).

In 1973, Carlos’ daughter Dení, who was 19 years old, joined the Frente full time. Four months later, in February of 1974, she was killed in action after two informers led the army to their safe house. This destroyed Carlos, who only wrote one more play: “Crimen Contra los Corderos”*. He took the title from a letter written by Georges Clemenceau, a French intellectual of great stature, to the Mexican President Benito Juárez in the late 1800’s. Mexico had been successfully invaded by the French, who imposed a Hapsburg emperor on its ailing republic. When Juárez defeated the French and was about to execute Maximilian Hapsburg he was inundated with pleas for mercy from world leaders. Clemenceau’s was the only voice that spoke for execution: “To have pity on the wolf”, wrote Clemenceau, “is to commit a crime against the lambs”.

Carlos Prieto suffered for the rest of his life for the loss of his brave daughter (and soon afterwards that of his beloved son-in-law), but remained active both within the Frente and with his pen. He spent his last years in Cuernavaca, near Mexico City, writing a regular column for “Exito”, the Spanish language supplement of the Chicago Tribune. His contribution to Mexican history, intellectual and political, was fuelled by honesty, courage and conviction in all his dealings, and he lived to see a partial fulfilment of the purpose of his life and that of his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law.

Some of the Plays by Carlos Prieto

“A Medio Camino”
“Atentado al Pudor”
“El Lepero”
“Ashes for Bread”
“Juego de Espejos”
“El Jugo de la Tierra”
“Un Crimen Contra los Corderos”