By Ana de Leon
Panama City (BLAZETRENDS).- Between nerves and prayers, Abraham Escobar, 27, dresses at the entrance to his cell in the brown tunic that other inmates made. He plays Jesús de Nazareno in a Panamanian jail, where some prisoners hope that this work will help his “mistakes” to be forgiven.
“I am not worthy, as Saint John the Baptist said. I am not worthy of representing the life of Jesus,” Escobar told BLAZETRENDS, who has been serving a sentence for theft for about three years at the Tinajitas Detention Center, located in the heart of the popular San Miguelito neighborhood, on the outskirts of the Panamanian capital.
Escobar is part of the cast of 29 inmates who dramatize, within the framework of Holy Week, the film version of the Passion of Christ directed by Mel Gibson in his homonymous film, where the last hours of Jesus Christ and his resurrection are recounted.
Dressed in precarious fabrics and cardboard sandals, the prisoners represented the religious play in the small prison courtyard, after weeks of study and acquiring basic notions of acting.
For the majority, according to what they told BLAZETRENDS, interpreting this biblical passage has served to “reflect” on their crimes and accept “forgiveness from love”, leaving behind the “mistakes of the past”.
“(The work) has taught that forgiveness exists and Jesus in the Passion of Christ teaches us that he was able to forgive out of love,” says Rafael Sáez, 36, who has been imprisoned for a year and a half for money laundering.
“Reconsider”, “unify” and leave their crimes in the past
Sáez, who acted as the introducer, explains that during rehearsals they repeated that they had to “learn to love, forgive and be more empathetic.”
“When we speak of the word of the Lord and that he tells us about the reasons why he came to die for us, we reflect on them and teach everyone who listens to us,” the director and screenwriter of the play explains to BLAZETRENDS. Jose Garcia, 52 years old.
García, imprisoned for three years for lewd acts (sexual abuse), details that “above all it is the participation as a team”, because they felt as if “they were living those moments”.
The work has served to “unify” the 293 prisoners in the jail, an infrequent and complicated event, according to what prison officials told BLAZETRENDS, since many of them participated by weaving the clothes or making the cardboard helmets and swords for the Roman “soldiers”.
“(The representation) has caused a very positive impact on the population because this month there has been a lot of peace and it feels (…) there is a healthy coexistence in the prison,” the director of the Tinajitas prison, Yesenia Núñez, told BLAZETRENDS. .
Thanks to this activity, which commutes the sentence of the participants, “the inmates put aside all that mistake they made in the past,” according to Núñez, who assures that they saw “the positive results in the prison in their conduct”.
The actors, who took their first steps on stage thanks to this play, did not make “any mistake” -according to García-, when interpreting the four acts in the prison courtyard, full of humidity and where the prisoners sleep in hammocks hanging from the ceiling.
Under the fierce applause of the few relatives and the officials of the Penitentiary System of Panama, the 29 interpreters prostrated themselves before a recently resurrected Jesus on an atypical Holy Wednesday -a day that commemorates the betrayal of Judas as a clandestine spy among the disciples- inside the prison.
“If tomorrow, God first, everyone leaves here, (hopefully) they always have that charisma (of Jesus),” says Roxana Burns, Sáez’s mother, as she clings to her son’s arm.
The entry Prisoners in Panama interpret the Passion of Christ in search of forgiveness was first published in BLAZETRENDS Noticias.