The trial against Nicholas Pachelo and two former Carmel Country Club watchmen for the murder of Maria Marta Garcia Belsunce. And for those who do not know the tragic history behind these names, there are two audiovisual productions to catch up: the documentary “carmel”, on Netflix, and the series “María Marta: The crime of country”, which has just been released by HBO. However, although the two productions delved into the same case, their views on criminal hypotheses are not exactly the same.
In the first reading of the documentary there were those who pointed to the production for having aligned with the prosecutor’s version Diego Molina Picowho accused the widower Carlos Carrascosa. To the series, on the other hand, for uncritically reproducing the version of the family, which is shown as a clan with such a level of clumsiness capable of eliminating any evidence without realizing it. However, none of the filmmakers takes up the gauntlet of these interpretations and, on the contrary, they insist that -with the differences that a documentary can have from a fiction- the only one in charge of saying who killed Maria Marta Garcia Belsunce is Justice.
Alexander Hartman, the director of “Carmel” acknowledged that a good part of the audience was left with the idea that his work was aimed at the family: “Unfortunately, most people saw a guilty Carrascosa. But I am sure that the perception of many people has to do with the preconceptions that they already had about him, ”says NOTICIAS. “Documentaries are nothing more than narratives. One must must be respectful of the truth, but you cannot tell everything. Our goal was to be impartial. We gave space to Carrascosa and Molina Pico. We mentioned Pachelo through witnesses, but he did not want to participate and, therefore, he has less space”, he adds in relation to the elements that were not incorporated, such as, for example, the inconsistencies of the prosecutor Molina Pico to speak of an alleged association between the Belsunce family and drug trafficking. “We had to condense a very complex story into four chapters,” he says.
The director of the series, Daniela Goggi, insists that all the lines of current research are present in their production and assures that the vision given about the family has to do with the same search that led them to make the fiction: “We were interested in telling the link and how Her death affected María Marta’s entire environment and that is where the place of fiction appears. It doesn’t matter if they prayed the Hail Mary or not. You know that María Marta was kept awake at home and fiction allows you to interpret. What you can’t do is say they didn’t find her in the bathroom when you’re working on a real thing. Linking is an interpretation”.
The truth is that both selected material and edited about a case that is still a mystery. With unpublished interviews with the real protagonists in the documentary and with incredible recreations in fiction, each production focused on different aspects. A job that put one of the most resonant murders in Argentine history on the media agenda.
