Having read a considerable number of crime books by Anglo and Latin American writers, I believe that the plots of noir genre novels penned south of the Rio Bravo are much more political than the majority of American or British crime books.
History shows that all along the 19th and 20th centuries, most British and U.S. politicians carefully pondered the economic implications of political strategies and tactics. Frequently they were subservient to the barons of industry and commerce. Illicit connections between crime, business and politics existed everywhere, but the U.S. and the U.K. were politically stable societies.
For reasons that I have not had the time to explore in depth, British colonies in America assimilated the principles of the rule of law, kept separate the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, respected freedom of the press, and so forth. That only one of them has experienced a coup since independence (Grenada in 1979 and 1983) proves the point.
The contrast with territories colonized by the Spanish is stark. Generalizations are dangerous, but in most countries even the biggest national firms were marginalized from the political wheeling and dealing. Although U.S. investors used to complain to the State Department when they believed that certain local political platforms could jeopardize their properties and profits, oftentimes their meddling did not change the course of events (except for Nicaragua and Guatemala).
Since its independence 180 years ago, Bolivia has experienced nearly 200 coups and counter-coups. That is the worst case, but I can’t recall a single Latin American country that has not suffered under a dictatorship or a corrupt political regime. A superficial examination of the region’s history in the 20th century shows that dictatorships and/or corrupt governments afflicted Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean basin; Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama and Nicaragua in Central America; Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in South America. Mexico, geographically in North America, registered numerous corruption scandals in the 20th century.
Moving now to artistic creation, I believe that the influence of this state of affairs on Latin American culture has been huge. Our visual arts, our literature, music, plays, even dance, frequently reflect local politics. Crime fiction is no exception. Although the interested reader can find classic crime novels written by Latin American authors, in my opinion the best books, those with superb mastery of the Spanish language, better plots and stronger characters, are not whodunits. They deal with police corruption, murder, torture, embezzlement of funds and patronage, almost always as a result of murky political environments.
One excellent outcome of the Argentinean and Chilean military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, are the gut-wrenching novels on repression, torture and political murders by authors from these two countries. In most Brazilian and Mexican novels the criminals are corrupt politicians and police officers.
Until recently, the only exception to this was Cuban crime fiction. Since all publishing houses are state-owned, any novel that dealt with corrupt cops or government officials didn’t get published. I know this from personal experience. In the last eight or ten years, however, a few crime books that mildly criticize the police or portray party members as criminals have been published. But all wrongdoers are low-ranking the generals, ministers and Communist party bigwigs remain untouchable.
With few exceptions, in Latin American crime fiction hardly ever heroes send the culprits to jail or eradicate fountainheads of crime. Our detectives and private eyes are cynical characters that try to rescue victims from a set of circumstances they are unable to transform. Those who reach the conclusion that trying to fix the system from within is impossible, end up as dissidents that the establishment tries to put out of circulation.
The term hard-boiled was invented in and ascribed to American crime fiction. But in Latin America the genre has produced works that would make the novels of Hammett and Chandler look soft-boiled by comparison.
Publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. show little interest in Latin American crime fiction. Perhaps the cost of translation is a discouraging factor, or maybe American and British readers prefer plots and characters from their own social environment. This is unfortunate because Latin America is producing great crime literature and precious few Anglo Saxon readers are aware of this fact.
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