The writer Horacio Castellanos Moya with his latest novel, Moronga (2018) .PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
The Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, born by the hazards of life in Tegucigalpa 63 years ago, finishes his literature class at the University of Iowa and answers EL PAÍS by phone five days before the elections that will consolidate El Salvador's power to Nayib Bukele.
His reflections speak of a right and a left overrun by history, of the Spanish-American taste for authoritarianism and of Sunday's elections that will anoint Bukele as the new regional leader of a model lacking manuals and in need of interpretations.
The wave of enthusiasm that Bukele provokes in the Central American country, whom Castellanos Moya compares to a
millennial Banderas Tyrant,
are the usual answers to the usual problems, according to the author of books such as
Insanity
or
El asco
, which
Roque Dalton will
present in Spain on March 18
, a clandestine correspondence
(Random House).
Question
: Bukele is sold as something new but it has ingredients as old as the continent.
Answer
: He is a character who bursts in and means the end of an exhausted formula of alternation in power between Arena and the FMLN.
It is a bipartisanism that had already manifested itself since before the war between a left of communist origin and a right of fascist origin, but Bukele is a new phenomenon.
The president is so young that he never even lived through the war, they have no idea what it was and, in that sense, it is the end of a system that collapsed due to its own mistakes and robbery.
Bukele is something new.
But it is not new in the sense that it has happened before in other places in Latin America.
Chávez was the product of the exhaustion of social democracy and Christian democracy.
Mexico is the collapse of the PRI and the PAN.
Bukele expresses a situation of the time, but if we add the messianic elements of his personality, just as he has something new, he is also very old in historical terms.
P
.
Would the characters in some of your novels such as Moronga (ex-guerrillas emigrated to the United States) be very clueless in El Salvador today?
R
.
Absolutely lost, they would be totally overwhelmed, they would not know what it is about because it is a generational change.
I do not know if the traits of authoritarianism and return to the past can make these changes not for the better because it is to pass over History without taking into account the lessons it has left us.
Factors such as putting the Army back into political life or taking over the Assembly with the soldiers is entering into a dynamic of authoritarianism that will increase in these elections with their victory.
He will surely want to change the constitution to be re-elected because he is a very young man.
His figure has all those ingredients of Latin American political history that make a young man an old politician.
P.
Chávez came from town, but Bukele was a Yamaha representative, he uses hair gel, fashionable glasses and is from a good family… Nothing to do with the Central American stereotype.
R
.
That tells you what are the imaginary traumas of a people.
If he is so popular, it is that they are not looking for someone similar to them, but rather that he seems to come from the French Riviera.
Surely the previous president (Sánchez Cerén, of the FMLN) came from the town where he was a primary school teacher who expressed himself with difficulty, but now there is a hypnotization that will end up happening.
P
.
That's what they said about Chavismo and he has been in power for more than 20 years.
R
.
But with another economic base.
El Salvador cannot be governed independently of Washington's decisions.
That is a sad truth.
P
.
It seems that Central America is the perfect breeding ground for these types of leaders.
R
.
All the ingredients are given but this strategy is not new.
The war between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 was a diversionary maneuver to solve internal problems and after that came the civil war.
I do not see what is new in the approach.
I see a group of people who come to govern with a new social base and a different formation than the one that came from the civil war but finally, in the political and economic approaches, I do not see anything new.
Q.
Where does that Spanish-American taste for caudillismo come from?
A.
It is such an old and intricate tradition that I have no explanation.
Literature has portrayed him since
Tirano Banderas.
The truth is
what
There is an authoritarian component of historical origin rooted in culture and related to messianism, which I don't know if it has to do with Catholicism or what, but it is true that there is a taste for caudillos in Central America and for that authoritarian tendency that also it resurfaces in other countries.
P
.
Bukele called the Peace Accords a "farce".
They no longer mean anything to a generation.
Now is the war over?
R
.
He has not understood a century of the country's history.
The civil war began in 1932 with the communist insurrection and ended in 1991 with the Peace Accords.
There are 60 years of conflict and the next 30 years after the civil war consisted of unraveling the country's political polarization.
He is possible thanks to that and if it had not been like that he would never have come to power.
During these years we went from a politics defined by crime to a politics defined by politics and democratic coexistence.
It happened that those democratic protagonists were self-destructing in the exercise of power.
Now let's see if that self-destructive dynamic doesn't also destroy Bukele himself faster than the others.
P
.
That way of referring to peace, what personal feeling does it leave you?
R
.
It saddens me and I feel that we live in what Sergio Ramírez calls the bicycle wheel because in truth the essential problems are the same: violence, poverty, emigration ... El Salvador's source of funding remains the same, expelling people to send remittances from the United States.
In essence the problems are the same but someone young, well built and well grown appears and hypnotizes people with the skill of his speech.
And this also occurs in other countries.
P.
For years the reality of El Salvador revolved around violence.
This has dropped significantly, but now we look at the caravans and the migration ...
R.
It is that El Salvador lives from this.
At one time, the United States, during the George Bush period, threatened to close the Western Union offices due to the candidacy of Chafik Handal, and the reality is that we would collapse in less than three days.
P
.
At some point, Bukele himself has hinted at the possibility of exporting his political model to the rest of Central America
R
.
Yes, but to see how others receive it.
P
.
You were a journalist.
These are not good times for the press in El Salvador ...
R
.
It is happening in Latin American countries where authoritarian leaders have come to power, with a belligerent social base and a messianic spirit destined to save humanity.
They all have those three components in common.
P
.
Do you feel displaced by history?
R
.
In my case I have been removed from politics.
But what has happened with my generation is that when they were in full maturity, they are over.
Nobody doubts that Bukele has emerged from the popular vote and that Arena and the FMLN ate up the political capital of 30 years of bipartisanship that led to four former presidents being prosecuted for millionaire embezzlement.
It is undeniable that young people say that those old thieves should go now, although the solutions to that are already another matter (laughing).
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