Celsa Ramírez Rodas is 73 years old and has a jungle patio with plants that heal the pain of her body and soul. But her forgetting threatens her healing and that of an entire people “subject to an imposed lack of memory,” the Paraguayan people. That counts Handsome andtitle of the documentary film that Paraguay will be presented at the 2024 Goya Awards and is also the name of a type of South American ficus, whose sap heals difficult wounds.
“I’m adopting rosemary because they say it helps memory,” says Celsa while grinding and mixing leaves and seeds in the trailer for the 72-minute film, director Sofía Paoli Thorne’s debut feature. “The little clothes that I kept before falling into prison, the belly was still small,” says the protagonist, showing the dress she was wearing when she was detained and tortured while pregnant with her first child.
Celsa was arrested 45 years ago during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, the military man who governed Paraguay between 1954 and 1989 with his Colorado Party. She was locked up in a concentration camp of the time for opponents of the regime, dissidents and anyone unlucky enough to be denounced by one of the many spies (pyragüehairy feet in Guaraní, the most used language in Paraguay and co-official along with Spanish) of the dictator Stroessner.
There he met his mother, in what is still the Emboscada prison, 40 kilometers from the capital, where in the shade of a leafy Guapo’y (ficus luschnathiana) he was able to share the sentence with his mother and his son born in prison.
Like her parents, José Nicolás Ramírez and María Lina Rodas, Celsa was a worker, artist and member of the Paraguayan Communist Party (PCP) and that is why they were viciously persecuted by the dictatorship’s police. She migrated to Buenos Aires and spent much of her childhood in Argentina.
They returned and her mother was imprisoned in 1968 and she was imprisoned in 1975. Her husband, Derlis Villagraleader of the youth of the Communist Party, they arrested and murdered him, although the State would not recognize him until much later, and his remains are still missing.
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“I don’t think I have any more photos with him. Because people don’t take photos in secret,” Celsa is heard saying when the trailer shows a black and white portrait of her husband Derlis. In 1978 the three managed to be released and migrate to Argentina and then to Brazil. When the dictatorship of the Colorado Party falls and Stroessner is expelled to Brazil, Celsa, along with her children, returns to live in Paraguay, where she resides to this day.
Since she regained her freedom, Celsa dedicated herself tirelessly to fighting for human rights in Paraguay and sharing her experiences during the dictatorship. He also played the harp with excellence and cultivated a wonderful garden.
Her story came to director Sofía Paoli Thorne from a newspaper report called “Lullabies in Stroessner’s Dungeons”; by Jorge González for the newspaper E’A, about children born in prison in Paraguay during the dictatorship.
“I went to school here from a very young age and there was never any information about Stroessner in the history books. Only that he was a president who did great works in the country, there was never any real information. The victims were never talked about, the missing were never talked about,” Paoli, born in Peru and raised in Paraguay, explains to EL PAÍS.
The country of water and plants
In Paraguay, yerba mate with hot or cold water (tereré) is always accompanied with some other herb, some “yuyo” such as mint, sage, boldo or rosemary. The tereré is drunk in a two or three liter thermos, filled with ice and water that is almost green due to the ground leaves and roots that float inside. If someone has a sore throat: they put lemon, turmeric and ginger, if it is a stomachache, they will recommend the bitter but effective: ka’a jaguarjaguar grass or carqueja.
The appreciation, knowledge and daily use of at least a dozen medicinal plants (pohã ñana in Guaraní) is a common characteristic of Paraguayans, inherited from the wisdom of indigenous Guaraní peoples and others from the Chaco such as the Ayoreo, the Qom or the Nivaclé who live in the countryside and cities of this country the size of France or Spain , but with 6.1 million inhabitants. And this documentary proves it.
Handsome and It shows how plants can be a cure for the pain that afflicts the body and also teaches how to “scare away past times of injustice and cruelty that constantly threaten to return,” as its creator summarizes.
The film premiered on October 26 in Paraguay, but its world premiere was earlier at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), where it received a Special Jury Mention, as well as at the Malaga Film Festival in Spain. where he won a silver biznaga for Best Documentary Direction, among other mentions and recognitions in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. She is also the candidate of the Paraguayan Film Academy for the Goya of Spain.
The film “is an urgent story of a suffering body that needs to heal,” says the director.
The story of Celsa and her family is one of the list of at least 459 people reported as forcibly disappeared by agents of the military regime, documented by the Truth and Justice Commission of Paraguay. During the 35 years of Stroessner’s mandate, some 20,000 people were arrested for their democratic and leftist political beliefs, almost all of them were tortured. There were rapes of girls and pregnant women in police stations, repeating the script of other dictatorships in the region such as Argentina and Chile.
At least 20,814 Paraguayans became political exiles and went to Argentina, Brazil, the United States or Spain. Some 128,000 people were direct and indirect victims in a country that then had one and a half million inhabitants. Furthermore, Paraguay was the epicenter of the Condor Plan, designed by the United States and the Latin American dictatorships of the 70s to assassinate those who fought against them and were hiding in other countries.
Some 50,000 people were murdered, 30,000 disappeared and some 400,000 imprisoned during the validity of the Condor Plan in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and Paraguay. And almost everything was recorded in the “Terror File”, the summary of documents that the Paraguayan police kept in Asunción on citizens detained in all the countries involved.
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