by Adam Johnson
When Beto first made the transition from print to television, he was known for his deeply reported stories about the seedier aspects of urban life: street kids, punks, prostitutes. He was unlike anyone else on the air. Today, in Lima, you need only say “Beto,” and everyone knows whom you’re talking about. When asked what it was like being famous, Beto responded: “That’s like asking me what it’s like being fat. I don’t remember what it was like being skinny.”
The show’s first contestant was a young woman named Ruth Thalía Sayas Sánchez. She was nineteen years old, with shoulder-length brown hair and an easy smile. She and her siblings were born in the province of Huancavelica, hundreds of miles from Lima, but had been raised on the outskirts of the capital in a working-class area called Huachipa. Not long ago, this area was a provincial escape from Lima’s humid, miserable winters, but by the time the Sayas Sánchez family moved in, the neighborhood was in the midst of an unseemly transition, away from its agricultural past and toward its frenetic, urban future. And so both ways of life coexisted, sometimes uneasily: Young men tended to mototaxis; slightly older men grazed horses. Stray dogs lapped water from dirty puddles in the middle of rutted, unpaved roads, and large plots of farmland sat amid halfbuilt houses, rebar poking out of the concrete, piles of bricks lying in the street.
This was where Ruth Thalía grew up, though she would admit to Beto that she longed for something better. For his part, Beto was, at least initially, unimpressed with Ruth Thalía: “Average,” he said, when asked to describe his first contestant. “Pretty, but nothing special.” When the cameras began to roll, however, something changed. Ruth Thalía brightened, carrying herself with the confidence of a young striver, comfortable under the lights, even playful. “She liked being on television,” her sister, Eva, would say later.
According to the rules of the program, every contestant could bring three guests. Ruth Thalía was accompanied by her parents, Leoncio and Vilma. Leoncio seemed worried from the outset. “I’m afraid of what I might learn about my daughter,” he told Beto when he was introduced on camera. Vilma was more optimistic. She was a small woman, with a wide smile and glowing light-brown skin. Ruth Thalía’s parents had an Andean pop band, Vilma Sánchez y los Chupachichis del Peru, that often performed in the dustier sections of the capital. Vilma sang, and Leoncio played the harp. As far as Vilma knew—as far as her daughter had told her—Beto would be asking about her arrival in Lima; about how the family had survived those first years in the capital, selling watermelon and pineapple in the market; about those days when the girls still spoke only Quechua, one of Peru’s indigenous languages, and were bullied at school for it. These were satisfying memories for Vilma. They’d worked hard, through difficult circumstances, and though they would never have a lot of money, their two daughters were studying at a local university. It’s the typical, heroic story of Lima’s hundreds of thousands of migrants, no less admirable for being common. “I was happy to go,” Vilma said later. “I was going to say, ‘I’m from Huancavelica and proud of it, Mr. Beto!’”
Ruth Thalía’s third guest was a handsome, timid young man named Bryan Romero Leiva. He wore his brown hair short and combed forward slightly. He was twenty years old, drove a mototaxi, and had been raised on a steeply sloping dirt road near Ruth Thalía’s home. He had soccer posters adorning the walls of his old room just off the dirt-floor kitchen, and he kept a cat and a rabbit as pets, both black, as was his preference. He wasn’t a dour or unpleasant boy, though; in fact, Bryan’s mother, Mery, described her son as helpful and kind. And he hadn’t had it easy, that was for sure. He’d stuttered, Mery said, ever since an old boyfriend of hers had pushed him down the stairs when the child was only eight. For years, Bryan had accompanied her to the market at dawn, helping her sell breakfast plates to the workers. At the time of the taping, he was renting a room in the neighborhood, just a few minutes’ walk from his mother’s house.
“I don’t know why,” said Vilma, “but I hated that kid.”
On the show, in front of the cameras, Bryan was tense, his right leg shaking anxiously.
“You seem nervous,” Beto said. “What are you so nervous about?”
“That she may have cheated on me.”
Everyone laughed, including Ruth Thalía.
Beto paused. “Let’s not forget this is just a game,” he said.
The show’s opening questions were light: Have you ever skipped school without your mother’s knowledge? If you found 1,000 soles, would you return them? Ruth Thalía’s parents joked along with Beto, as their daughter copped to these minor moral failings. There was more, of course. David Novoa, who was a producer with the show at the time, later admitted he felt bad. He’d done the initial interview with Ruth Thalía, had helped Beto formulate the questions that would be part of the show. He’d visited the Sayas Sánchez family in Huachipa and knew their story well. The afternoon of the taping, he was in the control booth, whispering into Beto’s earpiece. “I knew it was going to be a surprise, and a shameful moment for them.”
Which made Ruth Thalía a perfect contestant for El Valor de la Verdad. It all happened in a matter of minutes, a kind of onslaught. Ruth Thalía revealed that she’d had a nose job, that she didn’t like her body, that she wished she were white, that she was only with her boyfriend until someone better came along, that she was ashamed of her parents’ manners, that she didn’t work at a call center, that she danced at a nightclub. The result was undeniably riveting: this young, reckless woman sharing secrets with an entire country.
Reality television was relatively new on Peruvian airwaves. Peru’s economic growth in recent years had led to growing advertisement dollars for local television stations and growing budgets for bigger and more ambitious productions. For the region, however, Peru was still catching up. Formats like Big Brother, which had exploded across Latin America, skipped Peru for years. Importing an international format like El Valor de la Verdad would have been unthinkable until quite recently, and audiences were understandably drawn to shows like these. While Ruth Thalía answered Beto’s questions, her parents and boyfriend sat onstage. Over the course of the hour, they crumbled. Vilma all but begged her daughter to stop. Bryan was too stunned to offer much resistance, never stringing together more than a couple of sentences. At one point, he admitted he loved Ruth Thalía. “I don’t want to hear more,” he said.
She went on anyway. Beto asked Ruth Thalía if she thought Bryan was handsome.
“Uh . . . yes,” she said, hedging a bit.
“And is he smart?”
She laughed. “More or less.”
“Does he have a good heart?”
For this response, at least, she didn’t vacillate: “Yes,” Ruth Thalía said, and the studio audience applauded.
Then came question number eighteen: Have you ever accepted money for sex?
Vilma bent over, as if in physical pain.
Ruth Thalía answered yes, and the show’s announcer, a disembodied, almost robotically precise woman’s voice, called out:
“The answer is . . . true.”
There was a long silence.
“Just twice,” Ruth Thalía explained. “We needed money. We were in a bad situation. It hasn’t happened since, and it won’t happen again.”
For this truthful admission, Ruth Thalía had won 15,000 soles, or about $5,300—almost ten months’ wages for someone living in Lima. Beto asked if she wanted to go on, in search of 50,000 soles. Before responding, Ruth Thalía said she was sorry for all this. “My mother, my father, my brother and sister are the most beautiful thing in the world to me. I love them with all my heart. Bryan, forgive me for making you go through this.”
Then she announced she was done. The audience cheered her decision.
“The truth is always illuminating,” Beto said to the cameras. “It will not do harm, even though it hurts.”
Ruth Thalía hugged Bryan. His face registered nothing. As the credits rolled, she got down on her knees before her
ashen-faced mother and begged for forgiveness.
The show was taped in June and aired a month later, on Saturday, July 12, 2012. That month of waiting wasn’t an easy one. Something had been shattered in the Sayas Sánchez family. Vilma was moody and confused; Leoncio was distant. They couldn’t understand why their daughter had done the show. When Vilma asked, Ruth Thalía was almost flippant.
“For the money,” she said.
She had fantasized about being famous, to be sure, and had even auditioned for soap operas and other game shows—but her more immediate goal was practical. She wanted to open a salon. She’d already saved the equivalent of $7,000, and the winnings from the show brought her closer to that dream. If she had to make a spectacle of herself, perhaps this was the price to be paid.
Once the show aired, that position became harder to justify. El Valor de la Verdad was an instant success, knocking one of Peru’s television icons, Gisela Valcarcel, from her number one spot. In fact, for the next eighteen weeks that it aired, El Valor de la Verdad would win the ratings battle against Gisela fifteen times. Ruth Thalía’s secrets were suddenly part of the national conversation. “It was a celebration,” said producer David Novoa. “We beat Gisela. That’s all that mattered. The ratings! They were drinking champagne up on the second floor”—the executive offices at the station, Frecuencia Latina. Ruth Thalía was the face of Beto’s new hit show. She was photographed with a Frecuencia Latina executive, grinning and holding one of those oversize checks, and splashed on the cover of newspapers across the capital.
Ruth Thalía’s notoriety, though, had come at a great cost. “This neighborhood we live in is a hellhole of gossip,” Leoncio said. It seemed everyone had seen Ruth Thalía on the show, and everyone had an opinion. Relatives the family hadn’t heard from in years were calling to say how ashamed they were. Ruth Thalía withdrew. “She didn’t even want to leave the house,” Eva said. Ruth Thalía confessed to her mother that she’d thought of suicide.
For Bryan, one could argue, it was even worse. He’d been exposed as a cuckold in front of millions, something unforgivable in Peru’s macho culture. One day, at the bridge in Huachipa, Bryan was taunted by a busload of high school students. He had to go hide in a nearby store. In the weeks after the airing, he showed up at the station a few times, demanding some kind of recompense for his public humiliation. He was accompanied by his uncle, Redy Leiva, who was studying law and did most of the talking.
One afternoon, just a few weeks after the show had aired, a television crew from Frecuencia Latina caught up with Bryan at the front door of his house. The host asked him how he felt.
“Ashamed. All the things I learned on that show,” Bryan said, eyes avoiding the camera. “How would you feel?”
“But they say that if you love someone, you can forgive them.”
“Depends what they did. The things she said that day, I can’t forgive.”
In other interviews, Bryan claimed that it had all been a setup. He and Ruth Thalía had broken up months before the taping. She’d approached him and asked him for a favor. Pretend to be my boyfriend on television, she’d said, and if I win, I’ll share the money with you. He’d agreed, with no idea what he was getting into. It had been an ambush. Weeks had passed, and he still hadn’t seen a cent. Then he went further: The producers of the show had known all along that he and Ruth Thalía weren’t together. Frecuencia Latina was complicit in the charade.
“After the show,” Eva said, “he started asking for money. First 500, then 1,000, then 2,000.” One day, someone broke into the Sayas Sánchez house and stole Ruth Thalía’s laptop. None of Eva’s things was taken. The family assumed that Bryan had stolen it, but he denied it, and in the end, there was no proof. Leoncio filed a police report, and that was that.
On September 11, 2012, eight weeks after El Valor de la Verdad debuted, Leoncio and Vilma went to bed watching a World Cup qualifying match between Peru and Argentina. When they woke up, Leoncio heard his wife say, “Thalía hasn’t come home.” Ruth Thalía had never done this before. Eva was out of town, but eventually, they were able to contact her. She called some of her sister’s friends and managed to reach a young man who’d seen Ruth Thalía the night before as she left the university. He said she’d gotten a call from Bryan. Vilma went straight to Bryan’s house for answers. She feared the worst. “I was crying, screaming,” she said. “Everyone in the street, the neighbors, they must have seen me. I was kneeling, as if he were a god. Bryan, give me back Thalía.”
But Bryan was unmoved. He said he hadn’t spoken to her in a while, and then he turned and went inside.
When faced with a situation like this one, people like the Sayas Sánchez family don’t have a lot of options. This is a fact of life in Peru, though not just there, of course. If you’re poor, if you come from a place like Huachipa, the authorities aren’t always on your side. The police can be slow to react, even negligent, and corruption weighs most heavily on those least able to withstand it. Leoncio filed a missing persons report on September 12, 2012, without much hope. Then he went to the one place where he felt he had a chance to be heard: to Frecuencia Latina, the station that had aired El Valor de la Verdad.
“Here in the city,” Leoncio said later, “the only way to get help is through the media. Where else can you go?”
The studios of Frecuencia Latina sit behind a high green wall in a residential neighborhood of the city called Jesús María, and look more like a military bunker than a television station. Still, on any given day, at any given hour, there are mobs of young fans out front, hoping to catch a peek of their idols or get picked to be in the audience at their favorite show. There’s another crowd, too, often older than the fans, people like Leoncio, who’ve come to the television station for help. Supplicants. They press their documents against the mirrored glass security window; they stammer their sad stories and ask to speak to a producer. They’ve suffered one of the many indignities that life in a city like Lima can deal to a person: They need work; they’ve been swindled; they have a sick child and no hope of access to health care. From a turret above the scene, a guard stands watch.
Leoncio was fortunate: He was able to speak to a producer from Beto’s morning news show, Abre los Ojos, who promised to get them on the air the next day, to publicize their plight.
When Leoncio got home, he found Vilma in anguish. He did what he could to calm her. They talked for a while, speculating where their daughter might be, trying not to fall into despair. Maybe she’d gone on a trip. Maybe someone had drugged her or was holding her for ransom. That night, Leoncio and Vilma didn’t sleep. Tomorrow, they hoped, after their daughter’s disappearance was made known, the search for her would begin in earnest.
The next morning at 5:00 a.m., the phone rang. It was the producer from Abre los Ojos. She was apologetic: Their appearance had been canceled. A problem with scheduling, she said, and promised to call again soon.
Three days passed, and no one from Frecuencia Latina had called. There was still no sign of Ruth Thalía, and the police hadn’t done much investigating. Vilma and Leoncio went out every morning, asking for help at all the television stations in Lima, with no results. During those first anxious days, while Ruth Thalía’s parents visited the local television stations, they never mentioned El Valor de la Verdad or Beto Ortiz. They were omitting the most crucial and valuable detail: that their daughter was famous. Or infamous. Instead, they told a simpler version of events. Our daughter hasn’t come home. We’re poor people, and we need help.
It’s a story, incidentally, that is heard every day at the door of every television station in Peru.
On the third day, at Channel 9, also called ATV, Vilma finally shared the key piece of information that would once more land her daughter on the front pages of newspapers all over the country. “I explained it to the man,” Vilma said, referring to the security guard at ATV. “I said, my daughter, she was the girl from El Valor de la Verdad. Right away he went to get the cameraman.”
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That night, three days after Ruth Thalía’s disappearance, the case was mentioned for the first time on national television. Vilma happened to be watching ATV while she waited to speak to a detective at police headquarters in downtown Lima. “I was sitting there, and on the television, I hear Ruth Thalía’s name, and I thought: Sweet Lord, for sure I’ll find my daughter now!”
There was only one problem: ATV didn’t introduce Ruth Thalía as “the girl from El Valor de la Verdad.” Instead, the host called her “the prostitute from El Valor de la Verdad.”
“They killed me in my heart,” Vilma said.
Now the story had changed. This was no longer about the disappearance of a young woman from a faraway neighborhood of the sprawling capital. Everyone wanted exclusive access to Ruth Thalía’s family, and Vilma, Leoncio, and Eva found themselves under siege. Every station in Lima sent producers and cameramen to the family home in Huachipa. They took long panning shots of the unpaved street, the train tracks, the mototaxis. They talked to neighbors and passersby and hounded Vilma and Leoncio wherever they went.
When stories like these happen in Lima, the competition between the various channels can be brutal. Every television news program—and there are dozens—peddles a steady diet of crime reporting. The morning news shows recount the overnight death toll from shootings, robberies gone awry, kidnappings, domestic disputes that escalate into violence. It’s not uncommon for the producers of a news show to buy their way into a wake, offering grieving families DVD players and stereos for exclusive shots of the tearful mother or the mourning husband. “There’s a tradition in Peruvian journalism, not a good one, in my opinion,” explained Maribel Toledo, a journalist with more than 15 years of experience working in television. “In order to secure exclusives, the reporters, the stations, the producers grab people and almost kidnap them.”