Fed up has manifested itself in the streets of Latin America with the force of an earthquake.
From Buenos Aires to Bogotá, from Managua to Mexico City: tens of thousands of people have broken their fears, in many cases their indifference, to shout a basta that has opened cracks in a continent marked by violence, which is hell for women, where dictatorial regimes still survive and misery eats away thousands while their governments move like a huge indifferent elephant.
It is those tectonic movements of a jaded society into which
Rabia
(Anagrama, 2022) plunges, a book of eight chronicles that are an x-ray of a territory that in recent years has faced profound political changes.
"We are united by fear," warns Eliezer Budasoff, one of the book's editors, during the presentation organized as part of the Guadalajara International Book Festival.
Budasoff emphasizes the chronicle on Mexico, signed by the journalist Elena Reina, a country plunged into terrifying violence and where women bear the brunt: ten of them are murdered every day, crimes with 90% impunity.
“Bianca Edith Barrón was fourteen years old the day she was found dead in the ditch of a road on the way out of Ecatepec.
Her body was picked up the night after her murder and taken to the morgue.
But the bureaucratic schizophrenia of her death, due to daily events, caused her corpse to rot for 339 days in a common grave while the family papered the city with her face, ”writes Reina.
A sample of the horror suffered by women and the anguish of family members emotionally destroyed by official negligence.
It is not surprising that there are thousands of Mexican women, mothers, sisters, cousins, daughters, friends, who have taken to the streets full of rage, ready to destroy everything, to make the authorities respond to this violent tsunami.
Gabriela Warkentin talks with Javier Lafuente and Eliezer Budasoff during the presentation of the book 'Rabia'.
Hector Guerrero
In Argentina, women have also taken to the streets to put against the ropes a legislative system that in a large part was blind, deaf and mute in the face of one of its main demands: abortion.
The Argentinean green tide became one of the largest social movements on the continent, which soon spread to other countries with overwhelming force.
The triumph of the Argentines was applauded with enthusiasm and encouraged new transformations.
"In three years and a half, social tremors have occurred in Latin America, movements that are alive," says Javier Lafuente, also editor of
Rabia
.
“This book is an X-ray of a continent, it reflects a current moment in Latin America”, he adds.
A moment that includes the outburst of Nicaraguans, fed up with the excesses of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, which was reflected in a historical image: a gangly young man snapping at the commander, demanding his resignation.
That young man, Lesther Alemán, is now in prison and the journalist Wilfredo Miranda recounts in his text the courage of a “chavalo” – as they are called in Nicaragua – in a country on the brink of collapse.
Or of the young Peruvians who with their weariness managed to oust a president.
In both cases, State violence left many dead, more than 350 during Ortega's repression.
"Many young people have paid for their debut in politics with their lives," says Budasoff.
The editors of
Rabia
feared that changes would take place during the publication of the book that would quickly age the stories they were working on, but to their relief (or disappointment) they realized that those social outbursts created cracks that are still open.
“The repression in Nicaragua continues, it is brutal;
femicides do not stop;
Cuba continues without freedoms;
Chile turned its back on a constituent... We thought that everything was going to change, but in many cases things are worse.
Those cracks that people opened show stark societies”, warns Javier Lafuente.
The book, adds Budasoff, reflects local dramas that illuminate a larger reality, that of inequality, machismo, precarious education, "problems that are found everywhere within our societies."
The editor affirms that those movements that generated so much hope "have set in motion transformations whose end is open, it is unpredictable."
Book cover.
Rabia
brings together Elena Reina's chronicles on femicides in Mexico;
by Wilfredo Miranda on social protests against Ortega in Nicaragua.
The story of the Cuban Carlos Manuel Álvarez and the educated youth of Cuba who hold the Revolution accountable.
The social outbreak that overthrew a president in Peru, told by Joseph Zárate.
The impact of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, which demolished the idea of the "happy colony", a story signed by Ana Teresa Toro.
Or the violence that continues to drown Colombia, from the pen of Juan Cárdenas and the hopes that the great demonstrations in Argentina (
A fire that lights up at a precise moment
, is the title of the text by Estefanía Pozzo) and Chile, that
October that It has not finished
, as the title of Yasna Mussa's chronicle sums it up.
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