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Celebrations of the annual Carnival holiday in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo were marred last week by antisemitic content included in a performance of the Doña Bastarda musical theater (“murga”) group.
The script for the “Patria o Tumba” (“Homeland or Grave”) show, attended by many families with children, included an antisemitic phrase — “I’ll turn them into soap,” a clear reference to Jews and the Holocaust.
CAM Director of Hispanic Affairs Salamon posted on X, “As someone whose family was murdered by the Nazis, I am not speaking theoretically — I am speaking from memory and alarm.”
“This is not a one-off debate,” he added. “It is about how we have come to normalize boundaries that should never be crossed. That a murga scriptwriter would think of using references to the Nazi extermination as a creative resource is already concerning. These are not just words: they are invocations of real practices of the Holocaust, the darkness of humanity at its most extreme, something that should never again be used on any stage. That this is accepted, legitimized, and even awarded makes the problem even more serious. None of this arises out of nowhere.”
“In the last two years, antisemitism in Uruguay has grown in an worrying way on social media, a phenomenon that CAM has regularly documented and monitored. The cultural sphere is not separate from that climate: it reflects it and normalizes it. Artistic freedom does not entitle anyone to trivialize Nazism or make light of antisemitism. There are horrors that are not ‘re-signified.; They are remembered. They are respected. Normalizing horror is the first symptom of moral collapse.”
Como alguien cuya familia fue asesinada por los nazis, no hablo desde la teoría.
Hablo desde la memoria y la alarma.
Esto no es un debate puntual.
Es sobre cómo llegamos a naturalizar límites que nunca deberían correrse.
Que a un guionista de murga se le ocurra usar referencias… pic.twitter.com/C6x3esYzL5— CAM en Español (@CAMenEspanol) January 23, 2026
The CAM en Español team also produced an original Carnival-style murga song as a direct response to Doña Bastarda.
The song, created with AI tools, went viral online, drawing nearly 300,000 views across social media platforms and earning strong positive feedback from CAM partner organizations throughout Latin America.
Lyrics of the CAM en Español song:
They didn’t teach us hatred
in the school of the drum.
They taught us to sing out loud
and to argue with reason.
We never needed a cage
to defend the light,
because whoever locks up another
has already locked themselves inside, voiceless.
They say “soap” without knowing
the weight that word carries.
It’s not a metaphor or a joke,
it is ash that cannot speak.
There were ovens, there were numbers
tattooed into the skin,
and there was the silence of the world
that still hurts to witness.
Today I sing to you from the heart,
transparent and with honor.
What you do is not murga,
it is hatred, and it has no worth.
Because the fight against hatred
does not need to shout,
it needs history, context,
and humanity to speak.
If it bothers you that we say
“never again,” without exception,
look closely at what angers you:
is it memory, or is it reason?
This murga does not execute,
does not cancel, does not accuse,
it simply lights a lantern
where hatred creates horror.
And if singing bothers some,
let it bother with truth.
In Uruguay, diversity does not stay silent,
it comes out to sing.
Today I sing to you from the heart,
transparent and with honor.
What you do is not murga,
it is hatred, and it has no worth.
Today I sing to you from the heart,
transparent and with honor.
What you do is not murga,
it is hatred, and it has no worth.
