The thing about the fakes news (a matter that we already saw in this recent book by David Alandete) is a subject that actually comes from afar. Although previously, self-serving lies were created in a more concentrated way in political spheres moved by intelligence agencies and other services on either side of the Iron Curtain.
Well knows a Mario Vargas Llosa that makes this novel that hybrid between chronicle and intrahistory to ultimately enjoy the greatest juice of what happened.
We traveled to Guatemala in 1954. A country that lives its last days of that revolution that was established for a decade that, at least, brought democracy to that country.
But in the harshest years of the cold war, nothing could last long in a Central and South America on which the United States always fixed its conspiracy obsessions.
As the Yankees were capable of assuming the direct fault of Spain in the sinking of the battleship Maine that unleashed the war for Cuba between the two countries, it is easier to speculate about the truth about the conspiracies on which Vargas Llosa stages this story with a fascinating balance between real events, clarifying statements and action of fictional characters.
Ultimately, it was Carlos Castillo Armas who executed the coup. But it was undoubtedly the congratulations of the United States that blessed the action in order to eliminate temptations of communist control over the area.
Later each one would reap its fruits. The United States would get its profitable revenues while Castillo Armas quelled any kind of insurrection by readjusting the country's justice to measure. Although the truth is that he did not last so long in power because after three years he ended up being assassinated.
So Guatemala is a frenetic scene for everything new that Vargas Llosa wants to tell us from many angles and fragments of lives that make up the final mosaic. With characters always on the edge of survival, with the wishes of the people confused with ideologies, with accusations and constant confrontations.
A great novel about the hard days of the most troubled Guatemala thanks, above all, to the observance and control of the CIA over the country and, by extension, over the lives of so many Guatemalans.
You can now buy the novel Hard Times, the new book by Mario Vargas Llosa, here: