In 2017, the case of Patricia Aguilar kept Spanish society in suspense. When he turned 18 he left his family behind in Elche and escaped to Peru. After weeks of anguish without knowing anything, the parents discovered her whereabouts 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 there, the family put all their efforts into rescuing their daughter, even if Patricia herself denied it. A story that the documentary series 548 days: captured by a sect has recovered for the Disney platform.
Olmo Figueredo González-Quevedo and José Ortuño are the directors of this three-episode docuseries based on the book Hágase tu voluntad, by Vanesa Lozano. After finishing their previous work, El Estado contra Pablo Ibar, Figueredo and Ortuño wanted to tell “a brighter story with a happy ending”. In 2018 they read that they had found Patricia in the Peruvian jungle and contacted her parents. After some time, they also contacted Patricia and told her that they would wait until she was ready to tell her story.
After going to a clinic specializing in sects in Málaga, she began therapy “and little by little she realized that she had been manipulated and entered into that contradiction of not wanting to talk to the media, but of the other felt the need to relate her case as catharsis and so that it would not be repeated”. When he agreed to collaborate on this docuseries, “at the beginning he set certain limits and red lines, but there came a moment when he asked us to turn on the camera to talk about everything”, recalls Ortuño.
“We wanted to tell Patricia’s story as society and the Spanish press had perceived it,” he continues. That’s why in the first chapter it is narrated when she disappears at the age of 18, which is the moment when it is news in Spain and they start saying barbarities and she is defined as a spoiled child”.
In the second chapter we enter “the emotional part, in which we go back two years and discover the key for any person who is caught in a sect, and the word is vulnerability”. In Patricia’s case, that moment of vulnerability was due to the death of a family member.
And the third chapter addresses the cooperation between Spain and Peru and between the Aguilar family and the Valverde family, whose daughter, Marjorie, had also been captured. We also speak with Luis Alfonso Capcha and Cristian Huarcaya, the two police officers from Peru who were instrumental in finding the two girls.
The desire of the directors and Patricia herself is to alert parents and children of the dangers that exist on the internet and social networks. “Let’s see if we are all able, in addition, to propel the legislative change that the Aguilar family is asking for to include coercive persuasion as a punishable offense in the Spanish Penal Code”, conclude the directors.
