Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Original Title: Pantaleón y las visitadoras
Written by: Mario Vargas Llosa
Central Theme: Moral hipocrisy, enhanced by the Army
Synopsis: An army captain is assigned to create a mobile red distruict to improve morale on jungle deployements.
First published: 1973
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Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Spanish name: Pantaleón y las visitadoras) is a short novel of Mario Vargas Llosa about an army captain send to the jungle with a mission: to form a professional team of “visitadoras” (that is, prostitutes) to alleviate the troops’ needs. Basically, a mobile Red Light District. Hilarity ensues, as the captain is both too efficient and way too principled for the thing to work as his superiors intended.

In other words, the same things he criticized in The Time of the Hero, this time Played for Laughs.

It has had two flm adaptations, in 1976 and 1999.

Tropes used in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service include: