Mexico City, Oct 9 (IANS/EFE): Television should bear witness to current events with fiction series being a "mirror of reality and not a hole in which to hide from it", said Mexican producer Epigmenio Ibarra.

He believes that in the Mexican market reality and small-screen productions have always been at two opposite and contradictory ends of existence.

"What happened is that Mexican television started off with its back to the country and on bended knee to power, so a story portraying the true aspects of power was obviously a mortal sin," Ibarra told EFE Friday.

However, "there is no serious TV channel in the world that does not stand up to power", because that is one of the essential themes of drama "and so it has been since the time of Shakespeare, as evidenced in such works as Hamlet and Richard III", he said.

Ibarra has at times been branded an "agitator" but thinks he is more properly described as an "independent."

His career as a producer began in 1995, when after working as a reporter covering international events like the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, television news broadcasting "shut the door" on him.

He remembers the exact transition period very clearly: "The war ended and we reporters wanted to be on news programmes, but there was no room for us, so we began doing a journalism programme that included small dramatizations of symbolic cases to do with security and justice."

That production and the high viewer ratings it achieved, Ibarra said, was what inspired him to enter the realm of fiction.

"I saw that series and telenovelas were instruments that could offer something useful for millions of Mexicans and not just entertain them" as occurred in countries like Venezuela and Brazil, where they were used "to promote social change", he said.