Alternative Zu Skagen

Pantoja and the Mirabal sisters

By: Felipe Argote

Lieutenant Pantaleon Pantoja, disciplined Peruvian army officer, has just been promoted to captain. As a first task in his new role is assigned to organize a service of prostitutes servicing the school and army troops located in the Amazon.

The army received too many complaints from people of Iquitos and surrounding communities. Soldiers located in this remote jungle province were constantly involved in violations against young people and other odds with morality. According to the high command this attitude was the product of too much sexual pressure because they can not relax their feelings for men. To fix it is called Lieutenant Pantaleon Pantoja, who will be responsible for organizing a prostitution service that meets the troops and solve this embarrassing problem.

As the Amazon is so wide that it is impossible to move troops to the place where prostitutes are located Pantaleon, Panta or Pantita as Pochita like to tell his wife, provides a visiting service, an itinerant group of prostitutes traveling from barracks to barracks: The SSGFRI (Service for Garrisons, Frontier and Allied) with a system mobilization of land, water and even air, carefully organized by Captain Pantoja, who engaged in the details personally verified the skills of each of engaging prostitutes.

His lieutenants are Curinchila Doña Leonora, aka Chuchupe, great experience for his leadership for many years, Fu Manchu, a center of prostitution in Bethlehem, her husband Juan Rivera, alias Shot, a highly respected midget prostitutes who is responsible for establishing order and Porfirio Wong, alias El Chino. SSGFRI the pompous appellation is simplified by the wisdom people who simply called him Pantiland.

Amid Pantaleon history is another story develops secondary. In these forgotten people in the middle of the jungle comes a Messiah, loved to the fanaticism for the locals: Brother Francis, who develops his fiery sermons on a cross. The brother Christian creates a current based on the crucifixion, to the point that believers start to hammer on the cross as an offering to birds, mice, butterflies, cats and dogs then finally to a child and an elderly woman, who after killing the declared martyrs: the child martyr, St. Agnes.

Pantoja and the Special is a journey to the center of the Peruvian Amazon jungle, where common sense is completely different from the rest of the world and where people survive on logic as opposed to the rest of humanity.

The author, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in literature was in 2010. Born in Arequipa, Peru in 1936, though it became a English citizen in 1993. Twice married 19 years to Julia Urquidi, his aunt and his cousin Patricia 28 Llosa had three children.

is one of my favorite authors, especially historical novels La Fiesta del Chivo and History Mayta.

Mario Vargas Llosa

had political experience in 1990, led the right-wing group FREDEMO Democratic Front, with which he ran for the presidency of the Republic of Peru. He was defeated in second round by the Japanese-Peruvian citizen currently detained Alberto Fujimori in a Peruvian prison.

Pantoja and the Special was made into a film directed by Francisco Lombardi Giovanna script Pollarolo and Enrique Moncloa.