| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2009 
Controversy Over Film Adaptation Continues
 William Booth - Washington Post
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October 22, 2009
Mexico City - When the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez penned his most recent novel, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," the wily old master knew he was being provocative.
The book begins with this line by an unnamed narrator: "The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."
But there is art and there is life. And so just as an international cast and crew were about to begin filming a movie adaptation of the 2004 novella, the plug was pulled as the filmmakers and García Márquez were denounced as aiding and abetting perverts.
A human rights organization called the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean filed a criminal complaint with the Mexican attorney general last week, asserting that the filmmakers would be "responsible for acts that could be constituted as the crime of condoning child prostitution."
That is a serious assertion in Mexico, which faces challenges to control sex trafficking and child prostitution.
"We don't want them to put García Márquez in jail," coalition director Teresa Ulloa told the Associated Press. "What we want is for them not to film the movie."
The attorney general has not made a move against the film, but the government in the state of Puebla, where the filmmakers were preparing to shoot interior scenes this month, announced that it would no longer finance the film with $1.5 million in taxpayer money, a grant that represented about 25 percent of the film's budget.
The colombian writer has lived in Mexico City off and on for two decades.
The controversy has quickly escalated here, as artists and intellectuals and human rights advocates - who would usually be allies - trade fire in news columns.
"The question of the week is why García Márquez agreed to take to the screen 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores' at a time when the world is fighting against the growing commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents," wrote Lydia Cacho in a local newspaper.
"The novel has a limited audience, while the film would end up on television and find a mass audience," she added.
Cacho is not just a columnist but an internationally recognized crusader against the sexual abuse of women and children. She investigated a ring of pedophiles operating out of the coastal city of Cancún and then wrote a book about it, "The Demons of Eden: the Power Behind Child Pornography."
In the García Márquez novel, the protagonist is a randy old goat, a newspaper columnist as bitter as ancient almonds, without family or friends, who paid money for each of the 514 women he has slept with in his misspent existence.
Before the young virgin Delgadina is presented to him, the brothel owner drugs the nervous girl with salts of bromide and the herb valerian, which puts her into a deep sleep.
The narrator does not touch her that night but lies beside her, falling in love for the first time in his life. It is all very much in keeping with the themes of "Love in the Time of CholerA" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Love. Death. Aging. Memory. And young prostitutes.
Cacho is not having any of it. "In his novel 'Gabo' says the old man falls for Delgadina. This argument we heard from hundreds of pedophiles seeking virgin girls between 13 and 14 years for rape and all those who paid for the kidnapping, buying and selling of children," she said.
Guadalupe Loaeza, a public intellectual whose barbed wit is often aimed at the rich and powerful, came to the aid of García Márquez in the pages of the newspaper Reforma: "As I remember, while reading your book it never entered my mind that this was a defense of pedophilia," any more than Vladimir Nabokov's "LolitO was.
The producer and co-director of the film, Ricardo del RAOo, said in an interview, "When you stop a work before it is made, that is censorship."
He said his detractors have never spoken with the filmmakers and have not read the script, "which is an adaptation of the novel, and a film, which is a completely different thing."
Del Río said that the movie would star a 21-year-old actress, Ana de Armas, as Delgadina and that the age of the virgin would not be addressed in the film. "She's a young woman," he said, "not a child."
"This is not a movie about child prostitution but a movie about the central idea of the novel, which is that even on the last day of your life, you can change your life," he continued.
Del Río said he has spoken with García Márquez about the criticism and said the 82-year-old author "was not surprised. His novel is a polemic. It is an extreme. But he is also confused.
"García Márquez respects the activists, but he also defends his right, and our right, to be free to express our art," Del Río said.
García Márquez could not be reached for this article.
The making of the film has been postponed at least until spring as the producers seek additional funding, del Río said.
As for the controversy, Loaeza points out that sales of the book have soared in the past week.
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