"Capadocia" Brings Lesbians in Prison to Latin America

The series begins in the squalid and antiquated Oriente Women's Prison in Mexico City. A prison guard tentatively emerges into a corridor, silent but for the sound of her echoing footsteps, to find debris littering the floor and dead bodies strewn in front of her. She turns around and looks up to see a dead body hanging on the wall — it's the result of a bloody rampage which sees the prison's former queen bee, Regina, slain by La Bambi.

The riot has been orchestrated by a private company that wants to use the women from Oriente to provide a cheap labor force in their newly built private prison. With government legislators dragging their feet over the decision, the company takes matters into their own hands. Their fixer, Federico (Juan Manuel Bernal), bribes a prison guard to set everything in motion and destabilize the prison.

His contact inside Oriente is La Negra, a strutting marimacha in black fatigues who knows the prison and the prisoners inside out, cutting deals with them and making sure she gets a peso or two out of it. She is a part of everything, and nothing happens without her say so. She lights the fuse, and the prison deteriorates into an orgy of violence.

The following day, the head of government for the city calls a press conference and announces the opening of a new private prison in the city, Capadocia.

The cast of Capadocia

Capadocia will inevitably draw comparisons to Oz because it's made by HBO and because of the amount of violence depicted. It also bears a resemblance to another HBO program, Six Feet Under — at least structurally. Each episode begins with the story of the next inmate who will be sent to Capadocia, and like Six Feet Under there are a number of fantasy sequences that intertwine with reality. But for me, Capadocia is like a gritty Bad Girls, without the sense of humor.

Although there is an ongoing joke about showing new prisoners to their "suite," any other humor is unintentional. In one scene, meant to show how Lorena has changed into a prison hard case, she beats another prisoner with a sewing machine, which I found inadvertently hilarious. This happened quite often during Capadocia, because the series is so relentlessly depressing that it borders on the tragically comic.

In one story line, an indigenous maid who speaks no Spanish is framed for murder by her boss. In another episode, a male-to-female transsexual is caught stealing underwear and sent to the male prison, where she is repeatedly beaten and raped before being sent to Capadocia. The lesbians don't fare well, either.

La Bambi, the swaggering marimacha and queen bee at Oriente, is transferred to Capadocia where she reclaims her position as top dog — which includes the affections, so to speak, of the beautiful and alluring La Colombiana. She was sold to a Colombian drug baron by her parents, and willingly uses her body to manipulate anyone — male or female — to get what she wants, from money and drugs to freedom.

Cecila Suárez as La Bambi (left) and Cristina Umaña as La Colombiana

La Bambi goes doe-eyed at the sight of her, and becomes insanely jealous if La Colombiana pays attention to anyone but her. When La Colombiana takes a shine to Lorena Guerra, it ends badly.

Lorena is a dutiful housewife and mother imprisoned for killing her best friend, and over the course of the series goes from wide-eyed innocent to hard-nosed lag. In one episode, her husband visits her in prison to tell her that he's moving abroad and she'll never see her children again. When La Bambi sees La Colombiana comforting the broken-hearted Lorena in her cell, she flies into a jealous rage and attacks Lorena. But Lorena manages to grab a picture of her children and proceeds to beat La Bambi to death with it. Lorena then becomes the new queen bee — and also gets La Colombiana.

Ana de la Reguera as Lorena Guerra

As might be expected from an HBO series, lesbian love scenes are included, but the handful that are in Capadocia are either fairly tame or fairly ridiculous. In one fully clothed fumble, La Bambi shows all the finesse of a teenage boy with La Colombiana. The most passionate sex scene is between two straight women, one who will shag anyone who can get her special privileges (La Colombiana), and the other who is emotionally unstable and using drugs to get her through prison (Lorena).