Revolution interrupted?

Parts of Latin America are in the grip of the politicisation of crime and criminalisation of politics. Prison gangs have acquired power and clout by providing crime intelligence in exchange for special privileges in the prison. In many countries given the drug situation, the police and security forces have been given extraordinary power. Often the government has very little political power over the police

- ASH NARAIN ROY

Latin America is a land of endless dreams and imaginations. It tends to believe if you have no imagination, you have no wings. Perhaps the region has a larger share of visionaries and builders, reformists and revolutionaries and samaritans and messiahs. For long, Latin America remained a strategically secondary region because of its geographic isolation, historic subordination to the US and distance from the Eurasian landmass.

It is Latin American writers and thought leaders who gave the region a global profile and visibility. As Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says, “don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.” To Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, “literature is fire” and writing great literature has been a political radical act.

But Latin America has also become a victim of romanticization and a degree of generalisation. After all, writers don’t merely reflect on reality, but add something to reality that is not there. Hamlet was not there if Shakespeare had not written him. Don Quixote won’t be there if Cervantes had not written him.

Marquez has been projected primarily for his “magical realism” though he himself says that he writes “mostly about the reality I know, about the reality of Latin America. Any interpretation of this reality in literature must be political.” Some of Latin American writers are capturing their own present than the region’s likely future. Latin America, thus, requires reading against the grain.

Another Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez talks of “disproportionate reality.” He says that Latin America is more tragic than magical. What is disproportionate in his novels is “the violence and cruelty of our history and our politics.”