Prohibited literature of the Bukele regime of exception
Google translation:
Literature is the new enemy of the regime of exception. El Salvador sent an ultimatum to Filgua so that the work was withdrawn from the program under penalty of canceling its participation in the meeting.
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Roger Lindo
Literature is the new enemy of the exceptional regime of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. The weight of its censorship has fallen on the young Salvadoran writer Michelle Recinos. His book De ella Substancia de líver , a collection of stories, was going to be presented these days at the XX International Book Fair in Guatemala (Filgua). But the government of El Salvador issued an ultimatum to FILGUA for the work to be withdrawn from the program under penalty of canceling El Salvador's participation in the meeting. A pathetic case of collaboration between countries that have no interest in disagreeing.
You don't have to go far to know that what confronts President Bukele are not stylistic issues. Barbers on strike, one of the stories in the book –Mario Monteforte Toledo Award 2022–, describes a fictitious geography called San Carlos in which an “exception regime” has just been imposed. Any resemblance to actual events is not purely coincidental. The Monteforte Toledo jury stated that Barberos ' narrative approach is an "original and frontal approach to the threat of current oppressive regimes."
The protagonist of the story is an operator in an automotive workshop. Day by day he writes down the changes that the exception regime brings. A newspaper that goes from indifference to fear in 60 entries.
"I was late for the workshop, but everything was fine," he pointed out the day San Carlos woke up militarized. No problem, he agrees, the soldiers are doing their job: hunting down thugs, liquidating crime. That police apparatus does not go with him. “It was 1 o'clock. I had seen that several soldiers were entering the passage. I turned off the light and turned the key. Total, I owe nothing ”. It was the night the neighbor's son was arrested. That doesn't go with him. As the days go by, he adds to the list of those captured, who automatically become missing. The baker, the bus conductor, the bus driver, the co-workers, the barber, the gas delivery man end up thrown into the meat grinder. Wear the trendy haircut, In San Carlos, as in El Salvador today, appearance is key to identifying a criminal. The machinery, once it starts moving, does not stop: it feeds on people and is insatiable. Criminals, workers, ordinary citizens revolt in prisons. A human lump. Arrest warrants, judges, lawyers, habeas corpus, legal certainty have been abolished. 17,000 captured in 29 days, a “master move by the President of the Republic”, comments a television presenter. The new style prevails in San Carlos: shaved hair.
Michelle Recinos is, in addition to a fiction writer, a journalist in San Salvador. With incisive style, she processes what she sees. Fiction goes after reality, but it moves at great speed. Today, the real machinery of the regime of exception opens with a new phase: the proscribed literature.
*Róger Lindo is a writer and journalist, and was director of the Directorate of Publications and Printing between January 2012 and April 2013.
https://elfaro.net/es/202307/columnas/26926/literatura-proscrita-del-regimen-de-excepcion-de-bukele