In 2017, the case of Patricia Aguilar kept the Spanish population on edge. When she turned 18 she left her family behind in Elche and fled to Peru. After weeks of anguish without knowing anything about her, her parents discovered her whereabouts from her and that she had been seduced by the guru of a sect, Félix Steven Manrique, who had been manipulating her over the Internet for two years. From then on, the family made every effort to rescue her daughter, even when Patricia herself disowned them. A story that the documentary series 548 days: Captured by a sect has recovered at Disney.
Olmo Figueredo González-Quevedo and José Ortuño are the directors of this three-episode docuseries based on the book Hágase tu voluntad that the journalist Vanesa Lozano published about this case that began when Manrique convinced Patricia that she was one of the queens chosen to repopulate the world with him when the Apocalypse came and that he would end Patricia in Peru in the face of her family’s disbelief.
After finishing their previous work, El Estado contra Pablo Ibar, Figueredo and Ortuño wanted “the next story we told to be brighter and with a happy ending.” In 2018 they read that they had found Patricia in the Peruvian jungle and contacted her parents, Alberto and Rosa. After a while, they also did it with Patricia and told her that they were going to wait for her until she was ready to tell her story.
After going to a clinic specializing in sects in Malaga, she began therapy “and little by little she realized that she had been manipulated and entered into that contradiction in which on the one hand she did not want to speak to the media but on the other she needed tell her story so that it would serve her first as liberation and catharsis and then help others to prevent a case like hers from repeating itself”.
When he agreed to collaborate on this docuseries, “at first he set certain limits and red lines but there came a time when he asked us to turn on the camera to talk about this or the other,” recalls Ortuño. “We wanted to tell Patricia’s story as society and the Spanish press had perceived it,” he continues. For this reason, the first chapter narrates when she disappears at the age of 18, which is the moment in which she is in the news in Spain “and they begin to say atrocities and she is defined as a spoiled brat.”
In the second chapter we enter “the emotional part where we go back two years and where we discover the key to anyone who is captured in a sect in any corner of the world and the word is vulnerability.” In Patricia’s case, that moment of vulnerability was due to the death of a family member. “The family went into depression and darkness and the only thing that had turned on were some screens and the Internet at a time when her parents could not be aware of her and she sought and found help where she should not.”
And the third chapter deals with cooperation between Spain and Peru and between the Aguilar family and the Valverde family, whose daughter Marjorie had also been captured. They also speak with Luis Alfonso Capcha and Cristian Huarcaya, the two policemen from Peru who were decisive in finding the two girls and arresting Steven Manrique.
The desire of both directors and of Patricia herself when telling her story is to alert parents and children of the dangers that exist on the internet and on social networks. “Let’s see if we are capable together, in addition, to promote this legislative change that is asking the Aguilar family to include coercive persuasion as a punishable offense in the Spanish Penal Code”, the directors conclude.
