Pedro and the Captain

Drama. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Adrianne Aron. A gripping dialogue between a torturer and his victim, PEDRO AND THE CAPTAIN takes place in an interrogation room, where lives are deconstructed by the violent hand of the terrorist state. Torture, the awesome force that mediates the action, never appears directly on the scene; likewise, the repressive state is never named. Benedetti captures the essence of this dehumanizing practice without assigning it precise location or time, which speaks to the universality of the abomination, whether in Uruguay’s La Libertad or the USA’s Abu Ghraib.