Testimony: Lost in the Amazon

Source: https://elpais.com/internacional/2018/11/27/america/1543344243_444001.html

By: Arianna Sánchez

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao.

Olivia was born in a tiny town, hours away from Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon. To get there, you need to not only trek but also travel a portion of the way by boat. As Olivia told me, “there was absolutely nothing to do, I had to leave”. During our lunches together, she would tell me about her main dream growing up – she needed to get out of that town. Olivia would take any chance available to travel to Iquitos even to work for free, any excuse to leave her cramped town. Even though she grew up in a loving family, she felt suffocated. In a place where everyone knows everything about everyone. She could not grow. 

Shortly after turning 20, she went to Iquitos to look for jobs to become independent. She knew her town would not provide her with what she wanted. She needed a way out,urgently. She found the best way to get out was to find a job and the closest city was Iquitos. Walking with her head down and ready to give up, Olivia found a brand-new poster stuck to one of the light posts, “Looking for people to work in the jungle, near Iquitos. Will pay 1,000 soles.” Olivia knew what she had to do. Her golden ticket out of her native town. 

Olivia did not hesitate and called the advertised number quickly. A couple picked up. They asked her to meet them at the main plaza where they would discuss the job in more detail. What they told her seemed too good to be true. She would get 500 soles right then, and the rest when she finished the job. If she recruited more people, she would even get a commission. Best of all, the place of work was an hour away from the main plaza, and she would get free transport. Olivia rapidly thanked them, carefully placed those 500 soles in her purse, and ran back to get on a boat before it got dark. 

When she arrived at her town, she decided she would break the news to her cousin first. Her cousin was a young single mother with a teenage son. When Olivia told her about the pay, her cousin quickly came on board. Both Julia and Mateo asked to be recruited too; Julia could pay for house refurbishments, and Mateo could start to save up for his dream of attending university. It was their golden ticket too, and they took it. Olivia’s mother was not on board. She feared her daughter was making an abrupt decision rather than one well-thought. But Olivia would not take it. And so, a few weeks later, the three had packed their favourite belongings and crossed the river towards their big break. They arrived at Iquitos with a bright new glow and headed to the plaza to meet with their new bosses to-be. They greeted each other, and as time went by people started to join them. Suddenly, the man said it was time to go. They got into a huge van and headed into the Amazon. This was when things started to go sour. 

Olivia stared out of her window and into the jungle, ruminating about her next steps. Sure, being inside the jungle for months would not be a vacation, but it was a small sacrifice with a life-changing reward. She drifted off to sleep. She woke up confused and asked her cousin how long it had been since they started driving. Her cousin let out a carefully silent “it’s been like 3 hours”. Olivia pushed away her hunch and decided this would be her ticket out. In just a few months, whatever happened, they would be out and with 1,000 soles in hand. She sat upwards and looked out the window as they went deeper into the Amazon. The bus stopped and demanded everyone to get out quickly. Olivia grabbed her belongings and stepped out of the bus filled with excitement and yet a lingering negative feeling would not allow her to enjoy what she had been waiting for. Julia, Mateo and Olivia followed the bus driver for around half an hour, as they walked through what the bus could not. Finally, they arrived, the bus driver said. Olivia told me she can only describe that moment as bittersweet; she looked up and saw this beautiful plantation, vast enough to make her question if it even stopped somewhere. This ethereal view was heavily contrasted with what she called “incredibly scary men treating you like a piece of meat”, and an arsenal of weapons enough to carry an army. She realised where she was in a moment of both acceptance and deep regret. Mateo, a mere 17-year-old boy, grabbed his mum by the wrist and asked, “They are going to kill us, aren’t they?”

Olivia kept quiet. She knew her nephew could see right through her lies, and, if she did not lie, she could worsen the situation by further scaring him. She told me she still did not have a grasp of the entirety of the situation at that moment, but she knew the job was not the one advertised. Another man showed the new people to their quarters, separated between men and women, as were the jobs. Women were told to meet in the morning by the entrance of the plantation, whilst men were told to meet by the common area. Mateo grabbed his belongings and, trying to seem as confident as possible to build a reputation amongst the mostly older men, walked into his quarters without a goodbye from Julia and Olivia. The two cousins walked into their quarters, where they were assigned a bunkbed, next to a dozen others. 

Around two weeks later, Olivia felt a constant ache in her arms due to carrying coca leaves to the main area and back all day. Her daily routine was almost as if robotic. Men would usually gather around to drink at night, so Olivia and her cousin tended to eat in their room. They would barely see Mateo, who was in charge of processing coca paste, and was dragged every night to the men’s nightly drinking-binges. They were tired but could not let anyone see, deciding to let their bodies run on autopilot and get it over with. Until the third week. Olivia and Julia were having dinner with some of their workmates in their room when they heard shouting outside. They dismissed it as it was extremely common to see drunk men making a fuss and starting fights every night. However, they stopped eating when they heard a loud gunshot. Julia did not even think twice and sprinted out of the room in an attempt to find her son. Olivia stared at her not knowing what to do – she froze. Julia came running with Mateo on her hand, trying to explain something to Olivia but unable to talk. Mateo told his aunt someone had been shot. With time not on their side, they decided to do what most were doing in a frenzy – escape into the jungle. 

Olivia told me the eight days she spent in the Amazon were the worst days of her life. The lack of clean water and safe food compounded with the constant paranoia of the drug traffickers finding them made these days a nightmare come true. They were following a stream of water trying to find a town, walking all day with an excruciating level of heat making them extremely dehydrated. However, the fear of being caught kept pushing them forward. At night, all types of insects would make sleeping impossible, and, by the morning, the three would wake up with wounds due to infected insect bites. But they had to keep going. 

Around day five, Mateo came running back from his daily food search to tell them he had heard people talking close by. What seemed like a golden opportunity to be saved, turned sour really quickly. Julia recognised the voices – it was a group of the drug traffickers. They realised walking would probably not be enough to lose them. They were severely dehydrated, and the other group did not seem so. If they tried to escape through land, they would get caught. Running out of options, the three decided their safest bet was swimming away. So, reluctantly, the three stepped into the cold river hoping it would lead them to safety. Olivia remembers the excruciating pain she would feel when she stepped out of the river. Leeches would be all over their bodies and taking them off by force was not an option. The only way to get them offwas urinating on them. 

A few days after, they felt overwhelming feelings of happiness when they found a small town. They were alive. Walking around the town, they recognised one of their fellow co-workers sitting on a bench alone. Mateo went running towards him, as the two had worked together for months. He told them he had escaped too and arrived at the town a few days prior to them. When he arrived, he found out the person that had been shot back in the plantation had told everything to the police for some money and legal immunity in return, and the traffickers had found out. The police and army raided the site during the night, and everyone who had not escaped was arrested on the spot. Most of the people that escaped were not seen again.

A few months later, the three were back in their small town, grateful to be there for the first time in years. However, their happiness was short-lived. Someone had given the police Mateo’s name, potentially in an attempt to reduce their own prison time. Mateo was arrested under charges of drug trafficking at 17 years old. He was sent to the capital, Lima, to become imprisoned in “Maranguita”, the only prison for young boys in Peru at the time. This meant his family could not even visit him, and the thought of hiring a lawyer from a capital was simply irrational. They could not afford it. Mateo spent 20 years in prison, without saying a word about Julia and Olivia, despite constant intimidation tactics by the police. Mateo was released last year, at 37 years old. 

Olivia has been diagnosed with PTSD. When she finished telling me her story, I cleared my throat and told her I did not know what to say. I did not know whether to tell her I was incredibly sorry or whether I admired her. She looked up at me and started laughing, and I thought she could see in my face my desperate attempt to find something to tell her. I asked what she was laughing at, to which she just replied, “I never even got paid the other 500 soles”

Arianna is a Peruvian 3rd Year Politics Student at King’s College London with a passion for Latin American politics and political risk-management.

Literature: Alienation and Decentering in Borges’ “El Aleph

Source: https://www.bookdepository.com/es/Aleph-Other-Stories-Jorge-Luis-Borges/9780142437889

By: Nazreen Shivlani

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

Common, I hope, is the feeling of detachedness from daily chores that taints everything with grotesque oddness. While brushing my hair, I may stare at myself in the mirror and see that body as so strange, those arms as so alien. At a stranger time, I decided the touch of the soil under my feet to be a most captivating feeling. Each time the enchanted moments pass, I recall having been thinking about something greatly important, though I am unable to identify even the character of such great thoughts and so resume my day with an aftertaste of strangeness. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges talks about similar moments in some of his short stories. This text picks up on small sections from Borges’ “El Aleph” about experiencing things from outside of ourselves, resulting in a form of alienation and decentering.

“El Aleph” is the last short story in Borges’ book of the same title. Aleph is a Hebrew letter written “א”, used in set theory to denote “the size of infinite sets that can be well-ordered” – take this definition, retrieved from Wikipedia and by someone who knows little maths, lightly. The short story tells the tale of a man, Borges, who goes to visit Carlos Argentino Danieri, the cousin of his deceased love interest. Danieri, a snobby aspiring poet, is about to be kicked out of his house. While pleading with a nostalgic Borges for help, Danieri says he doesn’t want to lose his house because it has the Aleph, a point in space which contains every point in space. When a reluctant Borges goes to see this mysterious object, he ends up astounded as he is indeed able to see every point in the universe:

“Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo” (Borges, 8).

“Everything (the surface of the mirror, for instance) was an infinite number of things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the universe”.

This remarkable experience took place when the fictional Borges lay down, as instructed by his friend, in the darkness of Danieri’s basement while staring at the nineteenth step of the staircase. In the middle of an entrancing description of all of the Aleph’s sights, Danieri interrupts our protagonist, humouring the reader at the realization of our own annoyance at Borges’ friend:

“– ¡Qué observatorio formidable, che Borges! 

(...) En la brusca penumbra, acerté a levantarme y a balbucear: 

–Formidable. Sí, formidable. 

La indiferencia de mi voz me extrañó. Ansioso, Carlos Argentino insistía: 

–¿Lo viste todo bien, en colores?” (Borges, 9).

“‘What a formidable observatory, hey Borges!’

(...) In the abrupt gloom, I was able to get up and mumble, ‘Formidable. Yes, formidable.’ The indifference of my voice surprised me. Anxious, Carlos Argentino insisted, ‘You saw it all well, in colour?’”.

Borges, the author, takes us through the perfect journey. First, a fast-paced multiplicity of descriptions of the Aleph which makes us feel as though we are ourselves experiencing all the points of the universe at once. The fact that we are reading a description, which reminds us that we are not actually experiencing the Aleph, is now mixed with the feeling of experiencing it through the eyes of character-Borges, itself a further point of view encapsulated by this mythical Aleph. This self-awareness of the reader as distinct from the protagonist enables us to notice that the transcendence of character-Borges happens in part because he is able to see reality outside of himself. He finds himself so detached that the world he sees cannot even see him:

“Vi todos los espejosdel planeta y ninguno me reflejó” (Borges, 9) / “I saw all the mirrors of the world and none of them reflected me”.

The viewpoint from the Aleph “corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which (we are) simultaneously effecting” (Sartre, 255). We get a feeling that at this point, indeed, in his alienation, character-Borges transcends himself. Could it be that when the point of view shifts and the world becomes decentralized, we can realize some eternal truths? Could it be that when we are so alienated that we don’t recognize our bodies as our own and seem to be discovering some external vague truth, the self transcends?

Such a transcendence from the self is something we will never experience– not only because we cannot possibly see first-hand the parts of the world that we do not go to or because we will not experience feelings from the perspective of another person, but because we may never get to know if there is something out there and if it is as we see it. When we stare at nature and absent-mindedly believe to have found a truth about it, could we really have experienced it as it truly, pristinely is? And could the Aleph finally free character-Borges of the fixed point of view that so excruciatingly traps us? Author-Borges expertly escalates our claustrophobia when alluding to other limits of our experience such as language. Only when he is interrupted by Danieri is the protagonist forced to descend back inside of himself, dazedly stepping into his encapsulating point of view to utter a response. This interruption marks the end of Borges’ reverie, as he is called back to reality.

Next in this expedition, the author humours us with hindsight. If author-Borges tried, as I implied, to show that character-Borges (or more broadly perhaps, the subject) transcends himself by annulling the “I” as the starting point, it seems nothing remarkable after the description-induced hypnosis. Naturally, the subject should transcend their subjectivity in order to experience objectivity – which was framed in the present text as the absolute freedom of experiencing a pristine world. Re-reading the previous paragraph, we realize that what to me felt as epiphanies when reading, were quite obvious all along. Of course, there are points in Borges’ writing that draw us into the story and points where we get distracted and realize that we are distinct from character-Borges; surely, not pondering over how we can only see reality from our own point of view for the best part of our lives reflects that this is a plainly obvious fact and not that our minds have not reached the grand depths. Still, in the context of “El Aleph”, Borges’ writing is incredibly ingenious because it is able to take us through the loopiest of thoughts only to drag us back to our living rooms, making us feel like the snobby Danieri that so annoyed us.

Finally, we reach the last stage of Borges’ trip: forgetting. Because character-Borges is fully immersed at every step of his journey, unable to think himself at any step other than the present one, his life after the Aleph feels absolutely normal. This is much like our feelings as we accompany the protagonist in his journey, aided by the author’s magical realism which makes everything appear wholly natural. Natural, yes, but it appears absurd too, from the outside, that such a mind-blowing event should be followed by the same good old daily chores as always. At the end, character-Borges forgets the specificity of what he recalled when looking at the Aleph, remaining only with the memory of an indescribable intensity. This touches upon the possibility that reality is limited and that it is created in its totality by language and memories.

Borges’ “El Aleph” takes us through a journey similar to what we feel during those moments of detachedness from what surrounds us. We may personally relate to character-Borges when we enter those strange and somewhat happy feelings of alienation that come to us under peculiar circumstances, the short minutes when we feel that we experience things from outside of ourselves, as if some thoughts feel awkward when experienced from our own point of view and they would rather be outside of us. When our eyes, perplexed, must begin to understand every part of what they are seeing, getting us bewildered at the novelty of normal views because we truly see things as if for the first time, it seems to me that we may experience something like Borges’ Aleph.

Nazreen is a KCL student interested in development, philosophy, and literature, focused on Latin America.

Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part II): Macedonio Fernández and Roberto Arlt

By: Luisa Ripoll Alberola

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

Note: This is the final portion of a two-part piece on the pillars of Latin American Literature. To read the first part, please refer to: Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part I):  Felisberto Hernández y Horacio Quiroga

Where does Latin American literature come from? What gave birth to its voice? The modern Latin American literature is genuine and differs notably from the occidental tradition. This was first globally manifested with the Latin American Boom–the literary movement that united many young Latin American novelists in the 60s and spread their work around the globe. The Latin American Boom seems to be the beginning of the assertion of this new voice in the literary world. And thiscould be the reason why Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar – among others – are so popular. 

I wondered if these authors had been some kind of geniuses to create such a new and original form of written expression unexpectedly. What did they read? What was their inspiration? What features were picked up from other literary movements? One day, I found the answers to these questions hiding in a prologue in the words of Carlos Fuentes. His opinion shows these influences in four essential Latin American authors. According to Fuentes; Felisberto Hernández, Roberto Arlt, Horacio Quiroga and Macedonio Fernández are the four fundamental pillars to the renewal of the 20th century narrative. 

To satisfy my curiosity, I started reading one important book per each author –these were written around the 1920s. Hereafter, I will tackle my reading experience with these not-widely-known classics of the Latin American literature.

Macedonio Fernández

The other day I was asked which was the strangest book I have ever read; my answer was Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (The Museum of Eterna’s Novel) by MacedonioFernández (1874-1952). Macedonio Fernández is an Argentinian author–known for being quite eccentric. In all his life, he never stood foot outside of his beloved Buenos Aires. Fernández collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges in many magazines and had a good friendship with Borges’ father. 

The influence of Fernández in Borges is irrefutable. As it is pointed in the summary of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, “Two intuitions sufficed: the obsession for the work inside the work itself, and the dreamlike conception of reality.” A basic recurrence in all of Fernández’s work,also taken by Borges, is the idea that ‘the true nature of the literary condition of the writer is the reader itself.

Macedonio Fernández was an avant-garde writer. He took part in the Argentinian ultraist group  of writers, who continued dadaism and other avant-garde movements. Una novela que comienza (A Novel that Starts) is part of this experimentation. Ironically, this is precisely a novel that doesn’t start–it is an aggrupation of prologues about a story and some characters that will never be real in any novel. The vanguard naughtiness, that provocative spirit, stayed in later literature. The avant-garde is the total rupture of stablished rules. Authors of the next generation, such as Cortázar, made this ‘game’ their main source of inspiration. The game is focused precisely on this: the invention of new rules. The destructive vanguardist aspect was necessary to wake up the destructive impulse of the game. 

Museo de la Novela de la Eterna torn its readers in two. In my opinion, Fernández’s book was dull. But it is this same boredom that marvels me the most. At the same time, Fernández achieves to give us both dull repetition and intrigue. This book, however, is very important for its influence in Cortázar’s Rayuela: a short chapters structure with no lineal connection between them, fragmented so it looks like a collection of pieces of text. The main difference is that Cortázar was concise, he invented concrete brilliant characters and worlds. Fernández, on the other hand, is more abstract. Other similarities are the pretentiousness of Fernández, comparable to Morelli’s style in “De otros lados” chapters of Rayuela; the metaphysic awareness; the structural experimentation of concatenating footnotes and parenthesis inside parenthesis. 

‘It is nowadays common to recognise in the fragmentarism of Rayuela, the print and presence of Fernández; but it is this fragmenting that transforms in into the rhetorical instrument that best adapts to the inherited attitude inherited in historical avant-gardes, being Dadaists, surrealists… regarding the old desire that emerged in the romanticism of presenting the writer as a provocative agent of the collective drowsiness, a rebel without more cause than himself or the mysticism.’ 1

The legacy of Macedonio Fernández, I believe, is the importance of the reader. He gets this argument to the absurd: writing a novel with insubstantial characters, with a radically abstract discourse, so it is not eclipsed by the limelight of the reader in the act of reading. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna is a mirror of four hundred pages: it is as boring as staring to oneself in a mirror for four hours. He himself affirms it in the words of one of his characters: ‘what occupies me is the reader: you are my topic, your fading existence; the rest is an excuse to have at reach from my process.

In the new Latin American narrative, although not in such a drastic way, the relation between author and reader wins importance. It becomes more dynamic, a true exchange. The author will want to move the reader in new, undiscovered ways. Consequently, the interpretation of the reader in the facts of the novel starts to be more interestingin the reading experience. 

Roberto Arlt

My favourite of the four authors, Roberto Arlt was anArgentinian author, porteño (born in Buenos Aires) frombirth to death (1900-1942). According to Ricardo Piglia, Arlt inaugurated the modern Argentinian novel with his new style. Many fellow-native writers still recognise in Arlt his mastery and consider themselves followers of his school.

His novels Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) and the follow-up Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers), were in my opinion, like reading Quentin Tarantino. Although I would have loved to, I didn’t get to read the next book El amor brujo (The Wicked Love). Hence, I will share my feelings with the first two novels aforementioned. If I compare Arlt with Tarantino it is because of their similarities: the presence of the sleaze and the street, the importance of dialogues that touch on any imaginable topic, and the banalization of death–all covered in profound sarcasm, and an existential irony. Arlt drives the reader to a very entertaining universe, in which it reins the contrast in the personalities of the characters, the insanity and a sincere nonsense. 

I don’t need to read more of his novels to know that Arlt dominates literary styling, which is characterised by the orality expressed in the spirit of the Latin American conversation. He masters it with such a naturality, avoiding all the time literary rigidity, that he is told to ‘write badly’. In that moment, he coexisted in Argentinawith a current of literary academicism, whose memberscriticised Arlt sharply. Arlt even addresses this criticism: ‘…it is said about me that I write badly. It is possible.”2And it is more than possible, as he makes grammatical and orthographical mistakes constantly, however he proves that not all the literary enchantment is in an impeccable style.

....

To sum up,  these four authors are all very interesting. I would like to encourage all readers, literature enthusiasts or beginners, to start their own literary investigations. Ask questions and dig deeper about any topic that interests you, any genre that connects with that specific moment you are living, or any group of authors you want to know more about.

Latin American literature plays, in my opinion, in another league in the panorama of world literature. For me, the feeling it transmits is not comparable to any other written thing. If you start reading these authors I–or any other great Latin American authors–I welcome you to aNew World. 

Luisa is a Spanish 3rd Year Industrial Engineering student at the Technical University of Madrid. She is passionate about literature and philosophy.

Bibliography

1 Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente, “Prólogo” a Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, p. 65-66. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 1995.

2 Roberto Arlt, “Prólogo” a Los lanzallamas, ArchivosALLCA XX, Barcelona, 2000. 

Teen Pregnancy: A Worrying Trend in Latin America

Source: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-08-17/nicaraguas-teen-pregnancy-rate-soars

By: Katherina Lister

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

There is an ongoing pandemic taking place in Latin America. This is not the pandemic that may currently pop to the forefront of one’s mind, but rather one that has persisted for decades: teen pregnancy, a common occurrence throughout the region. It can be the norm to see teenagers with one, if not several, children. While a young mother with children may not be a cause for concern in isolation, the societal impact of heightened teen pregnancies raises several issues.

Today, many Latinx families are the result of teen pregnancies. Even if it isn’t the case for a family’s latest generation, they can often look back only one or two generations to find a teen pregnancy. Of course, times have changed, and the prevalence is not as high as it once was. A few generations ago, not only were teen pregnancies more common, but it was very much a part of the societal structure of Latin America. This societal structure has transformed as a result of globalization, yet there are still many young mothers bearing children. With Latin America having been dealt a heavy dose of colonialism and the many societal injustices that come with it, the impact that teen pregnancies have on social mobility has been laid bare.

Teen pregnancies are strongly linked to poverty, social exclusion, gender-based violence, and early marriages. These associations facilitate a vicious cycle, in which teenage girls already suffering from societal injustices have these issues compounded if they become pregnant. This can then lead to ramifications throughout a girl’s life as she is at an increased risk of dropping out of school, resulting in decreased employment and financial security. Moreover, children born from a teen pregnancy are at an increased risk of having one themselves. The problem is therefore intergenerational. 

By the Numbers

It is important to understand and quantify teen pregnancy. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the total fertility rate – the number of children per woman – has declined. However, adolescent fertility– in women aged 15 to 19 – colloquially “teen pregnancy”, is declining at a much slower rate. The adolescent fertility rate in LAC is estimated to be the second highest in the world with 60.7 births per 1,000 women, compared to the global average of 44 per 1,000. In addition, there has been a rising trend of pregnancies in females aged under 15 in LAC, the only region in the world where this increase is taking place.

The probability of having an adolescent pregnancy in the region is up to four times higher in girls who are illiterate, only have an elementary education, or are from rural areas. This rate is even higher in the indigenous population.

This trend has been an area of much investigation by the World Health Organisation, Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), among many others. Nonetheless, progress has been slow and unsteady throughout the decades.

There are identifiable factors that have contributed to this slow progress, namely: the healthcare system in Latin America, government policies regarding pregnancy, and access to contraception. These three areas not only contribute to the high rate of teen pregnancies but can also be used as vehicles for change in decreasing this trend.

Healthcare & Policy 

Healthcare in Latin America varies by country of course. Despite these differences, there are systemic similarities in access to healthcare regardless of the specific country. Monetarily, rising healthcare costs due to technological advances, chronic diseases, and an ageing population have led to problems raising public funds for health coverage. In addition, investment in healthcare is heavily politicised, therefore factors such as economic stability and political ideals provide an uncertain and volatile funding landscape. 

According to a study conducted by the London School of Economics, total health expenditure as a proportion of gross domestic product has increased in Latin American countries in the past 15 years. However, there is an inefficient delivery of care and a delayed uptake of healthcare reform. To exacerbate this, the provision of resources to rural areas, where the majority of teen pregnancies occur, also presents inequalities in access to medicine.

A policy affecting teen pregnancy rates that has garnered much attention in Latin America is abortion. Abortion is currently illegal in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. In countries where abortion is legal, specific requirements must be met in order to proceed. This can include a lengthy ordeal of doctor referrals and legal processes, further alienating at risk adolescent pregnant women. Thus, if a teenager becomes pregnant and wants to seek an abortion, she typically pursues illegal avenues to do so. The World Health Organisation estimates that over 4 million illegal abortions take place every year in Latin America and the Caribbean. Often these methods are unsafe and have contributed to the region’s high maternal mortality rate.

Maternal mortality is also increased by the many cases of sexual violence in Latin America. Instances of rape, sexually transmitted infections such as HIV, and domestic violence all contribute to the high number of maternal deaths. More recently, mortality has also been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, where government responses have led to the suspension of many maternal services.

Contraception 

According to PAHO, providing adequate contraceptive access to teens could avoid 2.1 million unplanned births, 3.2 million abortions, and 5,600 maternal deaths each year.Contraception can act as a source of empowerment for young girls to exert autonomy over their bodies and sexual decisions. Unfortunately, there are many barriers in accessing contraception in Latin America. Rural areas, social stigma, and a lack of sexual education are all factors preventing the widespread use of contraception.

A PAHO official, Sonja Caffe, stated that “reducing poverty and increasing access to education and development opportunities would undoubtedly be an important step on the path to reduce unplanned pregnancies in teenagers, but it wouldn’t be enough. It’s also necessary to give teenagers access to effective, high-quality information, and sexual and reproductive health services.” This highlights the importance of a multifactorial approach to preventing teen pregnancies of which sexual education, combined with contraceptive use, is critical.

Looking at the issue on a more individual level, teenage girls often do not want to become pregnant. Many are aware of the availability of contraceptives and have even been taught sexual education in school. Despite this, girls may still be reluctant to use contraception due to the associated social stigma and gossip. While some Latin American countries have set up sexual health clinics to access contraception, in smaller villages where girls can be seen in the waiting room of the clinics, gossip can carry on to families that their daughters are sexually active.

Looking Ahead

Moving forward, to decrease teen pregnancies in Latin America, it is crucial to improve access to healthcare. This would encompass increased expenditure to allow for a more universal coverage and for better access to healthcare in rural and poor income areas where teenage pregnancies are highest. In addition, government policies regarding sexual health, such as abortion laws and the impact of COVID-19 on maternal services, must be addressed to reduce maternal mortalities.

Provision of contraception and reducing the social stigma of its use are also vitally important. Additionally, widespread sexual education is necessary to reduce teen pregnancies. If these improvements are made, there will be fewer adolescent girls dropping out of school, lessening the gender gap in education and increasing social mobility. This would provide teenage girls with a platform to attain higher positions in employment and public life. While teen pregnancy is still rampant throughout Latin America, there have been several recent protests against sexual violence, abortion, and maternal mortality serving to galvanise support and recognition of the issue.

Katherina is a fourth-year Medical student at King’s College London. Half-Colombian, Half-American, she is passionate about access to medicine in Latin America and the Latinx community of the United States.

Bibliography

 Castro, A., 2020. Maternal and child mortality worsens in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The Lancet, [online] 396(10262). Available at: <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32142-5/fulltext> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Pan American Health Organization. 2014. Violence against women in Latin America and the 

Caribbean. [online] paho.org. Available at: <https://www.paho.org/hq/dmdocuments/2014/Violence1.24-WEB-25-febrero-2014.pdf> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

Pan American Health Organization. 2017. Accelerating progress toward the 

reduction of adolescent pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean. [online] iris.paho.org. Available at: <https://iris.paho.org/bitstream/handle/10665.2/34493/9789275119761-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

Kanavos, P., Parkin, G., Kamphuis, B. and Gill, J., 2019. Latin America Healthcare System 

Overview: A comparative analysis of fiscal space in healthcare. [online] lse.ac.uk. Available at: < https://www.lse.ac.uk/business-and-consultancy/consulting/assets/documents/latin-america-healthcare-system-overview-report-english.pdf> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

Salomón, J. and Alford, C., 2020. Latin American Activists Fight For Access To Safe 

Abortion In COVID-19 World. [online] Amnesty.org. Available at <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/09/activists-latin-america-access-safe-abortion-covid19/> [Accessed 10 December 2020].

Statista. 2020. Adolescent Birth Rate in Latin America By Country. [online] statista.com.

Available at: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/945546/latin-america-number-births-adolescent-women-country/> [Accessed 6 December 2020].

The World Bank. 2020. Adolescent Fertility Rate (Births Per 1,000 Women Ages 15-19). 

[online] data.worldbank.org. Available at: <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.ADO.TFRT> [Accessed 6 December 2020].

Four Pillars of New Latin American Narrative (part I): Felisberto Hernández y Horacio Quiroga

Sources: https://sujetos.uy/2012/01/05/felisberto-hernandez-en-el-canon-narrativo-uruguayo/ and http://librosquearden.com/biografia-horacio-quiroga/

By: Luisa Ripoll Alberola

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

 Where does Latin American literature come from? What gave birth to its voice? The modern Latin American literature is genuine and differs notably from the occidental tradition. This was first globally manifested with the Latin American Boom–the literary movement that united many young Latin American novelists in the 60s and spread their work around the globe. The Latin American Boom seems to be the beginning of the assertion of this new voice in the literary world. And thiscould be the reason why Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar – among others – are so popular. 

I wondered if these authors had been some kind of geniuses to create such a new and original form of written expression unexpectedly. What did they read? What was their inspiration? What features were picked up from other literary movements? One day, I found the answers to these questions hiding in a prologue in the words of Carlos Fuentes. His opinion shows these influences in four essential Latin American authors. According to Fuentes; Felisberto Hernández, Roberto Arlt, Horacio Quiroga and Macedonio Fernández are the four fundamental pillars to the renewal of the 20th century narrative. 

‘Renewal that connects with the coexistence of imagination and critique, ambiguity, humour and parody, and the generating capacity of myths–whose encounter converts these aesthetic operators in disruption of the language and literary history. Also because of the establishment of a diversifyingmovement, critical and ambiguous, radically different from the perspective and aesthetic approaches of the old naturalist novel.’  1

To satisfy my curiosity, I started reading one important book per each author –these were written around the 1920s. Hereafter, I will tackle my reading experience with these not-widely-known classics of the Latin American literature. 

Felisberto Hernández

Inspired by my local bookseller, who did his doctoral thesis about him, Felisberto Hernández was the first author I approached. Uruguayan musician and writer (1902-1964), he spent all of his life in Montevideo. I read one of his more popular storybooks: Nadie encendía las lámparas (No One Lit the Lamps). His short stories are homely, calm and without overdone, dramatic effects. The characters seem to be sleeply taken by a great dream.

The style of the renewed Latin American narrative is vivid, visual, colourful and sincere. These attributes are usually related with childhood because when we were young, we received the gift of life purely and happily. As we explored the world for the first time, everything had a new colour, a new taste. Life was marked by these feelings and by the illusion of discovery. The writer, in his adultness, can get close to these memories by a combined act of remembering and imagining. Latin American writers often use this literary resource and make their readers feel alike. The genres that get closer to this innocent and childlike view of life are poetry and specially the tale. Hernández mostly explored this genre, publishing nine storybooks.

From my point of view, his definitive contribution is the intimal link between his literature and his music. Hernández himself was a pianist and a composer. The lifestyle and music in the American continent dictate a rhythm that only him was able to transcribe. It is said that his book Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling (By the Time of Clemente Colling) achieves the ‘painting of piano lessons’. This relation between sound and written word is more profound than just alluding to famous singers, as it happens in other more modern books like Rayuela(Hopscotch) with jazz.

Horacio Quiroga

I followed by reading Historia de un amor turbio (A Murky Love Story), a short novel by Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937). Quiroga is Uruguayan, but he lived most of his life in Misiones, Argentina, close to nature. He died in Buenos Aires, but his legacy lived on in the works of BioyCasares, who he influenced. In Quiroga’s work I already recognised that sincere, shoddy way of expression, that had only been used by children until then. Just as Hernández, he devoted himself to tales such as Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales), Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Stories of Love, Madness and Death), among others. 

Quiroga was a cinema passionate, just like Jorge Luis Borges. He was one of the first silent films critic of his generation, and he wrote articles in different magazines (Caras y caretas, El Hogar, La Nación…)2. Films had a great influence in the visual richness of his stories and inhis notorious experimentation with time –he makes use of ellipsis of time, just as cinema does. 

One characteristic that caught my attention is that he introduces nature so decisively that it seems just like another character of the story. On many occasions, the forest, the jungle, or the river, accompany the leadcharacter in his successes and his death. In others, the main characters are animals, making notorious his influence by Kipling. Definitely, his work is deeply rooted and embedded with Latin American landscape and the tropical forest. 

But the main theme of many of his stories is love. He portrays tradition, courtship, social classes, and all the conventions surrounding love. They are stories of tangible realities. Edgar Allan Poe was another of his influences; in his stories one can take notice of his sharply descriptive style. Quiroga already has some brilliant moments in the use of metaphor and anticipation and retrospection. 

By the time I read Quiroga’s books, I had already connected deeply with my experiment. Inside me, there was plenty of energy to continue reading and reviewing Carlos Fuentes’ chosen authors. Soon you will be able to read the second part of my journey with them and share my impressions about Macedonio Fernández and Roberto Arlt.

Bibliography

1 Enriqueta Morillas, “Prólogo” a Nadie encendía las lámparas, p. 18. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 2010. (Thetranslation is mine)

2 Many of these articles are collected in Horacio Quiroga, Cine y literatura, editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 2007. 

Luisa is a Spanish 3rd Year Industrial Engineering student at the Technical University of Madrid. She is passionate about literature and philosophy.

Art Exhibition ‘​María Berrío: Flowered Songs and Broken Currents’​ at the Victoria Miró Gallery

Source: https://online.victoria-miro.com/mariaberrio-london2020/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/09/MBE53_Clouded-Infinity_2020-a.jpg

By: Irene Pérez Beltrán

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

María Berrío is a Colombian artist based in New York, who predominantly uses a magical realist style to explore the themes of cultural heritage and life cycles. Being constantly inspired by the natural world and the Japanese paper–which she usually uses as her preferred medium–her work focuses strongly on colour and texture experimentation. When asked about the title of her most recent collection, Berrío describes Broken Currents as ‘the disruption of our flow of life’, and Flowered Songs, as a symbol of ‘creativity and new forms of reinventing the world’. This motif of the cyclical nature between resilience after a catastrophe and hope for a brighter future is palpable throughout the exhibition. 

Most of the subjects of her pieces are women and children, who are inspired by those she met when visiting fishing villages in Colombia last year. What she found most striking about her visit was the condition of deprivation these women and children faced due to ecological degradation and political instability. Colombia’s landscape is heavily marked by coastal areas that have become increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The communities that live in villages along the coast are often from a low socio-economic background, and therefore their stability is largely threatened by changes in the environment. Despite these hardships, the cyclical link between nature, motherhood and the growth of the new generation, creates a sense of optimism that illuminates all of Berrío’s paintings. This is particularly evident in her piece Clouded Infinity, where we see a pregnant woman with an expression of contained concern in front of a window showing a vast sky. Here, Berrío reminisces her emotions when she was pregnant with her own son, and how the worries about her child’s future and wellbeing would cloud her vision. Amidst all the uncertainty, however, there is this sense of celebration of womanhood as a symbol of new life. 

Most of the symbolism in Berrío’s art pieces stem from Latin American traditions, in particular storytelling as a means of transferring wisdom from the older to the younger generation. She would usually employ a large canvas to have more narrative freedom–constantly adding and removing images directly on the painting as part of a continuousevolving, and dynamic creation. However, forced to paint some of her works from home during lockdown, Berrío had to experiment with painting at a smaller scale. Interestingly, this restraint turned out to be an opportunity to explore the subject of childhood from a more intimate perspective. In both The Combed Thunderclap and Under a Cold Sun, there is a sense of proximity that transmits to the audience the endurance that these children have had to go through. Through their expressions, there appears to be a dichotomy between their innocence and a sense of maturity that has resulted from their experiences in Colombia’s coastal regions. 

Overall the exhibition Flowered Songs and Broken Currents is a beautiful and thought-provoking collection of artworks. Berrío’s exhibition not only provides an insight into her creative process and her intimate relationship to Colombian culture, but also gives a glimpse of hope that inevitably resonates with the audience during these uncertain times. 

Note: All the artworks in the exhibition have been photographed and are showcased online in the gallery Victoria Miro’s website. 

Irene Pérez Beltrán is a 2nd Year International Relations student at King’s College London with a passion for Latin American Literature and sustainable development.

Buen Vivir: an Andean indigenous challenge to modern development

Source: https://www.lostiempos.com/oh/actualidad/20191202/wiphala-simbolo-ancestral-fraude-historico

By: Nazreen Shivlani

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

Latin American politics today is generally centred around how to reach economic development. We hear about inflation, corruption, and economic growth over and over again. From either side of the political spectrum, the dominant voices debate each other over how to increase production to presumably yield a higher standard of living (with dissenting views over the importance of how these benefits are distributed across society). But these disputes conceal a greater, unchallenged assumption about human fulfilment being best realised within the structures of modern society. More practically, political discourse hides questions about society’s ends: what is development and why do we so stubbornly strive towards it? Buen Vivir is an Andean indigenous cosmology which offers unwavering dissent within the mainstream conversation.

Buen Vivir questions social goals from an integrated philosophical point of view and aligns theory with practice. The term is a rough translation of Sumak Kawsay in Quechua, or Suma Qamaña in Aymara, and translates to ‘good living’ in English. Originating from some communities in the Andes’ altiplanos, Buen Vivir’s different manifestations can be found across much of Latin America’s native cultures.

This worldview interprets well-being as the equilibrium between humans and nature. Contrary to an anthropocentric view, which, like the western one, imagines a dualism between society and environment, Buen Vivir believes both are interconnected. In its core lies the idea of living in harmony with nature and with other people in order to live a fulfilling life. The objective of society is thus to foster spiritual growth and a connection with the community and nature; it puts society in the service of people without assuming any previous modern structures like state bureaucracy or markets for consumption. In today’s context, Buen Vivir advocates for decommodifying nature and social relations by disembedding them from the structures of modern society.

Perhaps the most popularized aspect of Buen Vivir is its view of nature. Respect to the earth and harmonious coexistence are based on common sense and the belief that people and nature are part of a greater whole. Buen Vivir clearly challenges today’s post-Darwinian era, where we act as if we were so distinct from other animals and nature, and forget that we created all the modern structures that we now take for granted. The practice values nature independently of its utility to humans, opposing the view that nature is a “factor of production”. For example, we would protect a river not because it has extractable fresh water, but because, like a person, it has a life of its own. By decommodifying nature, we transcend its relegation to a means without denying its importance as one. Simultaneously, defending nature because of its intrinsic worth no longer depends on its defence as a productive life-support system for humans. This directly conflicts with the current system of production, as the latter relies on the exploitation of natural resources and must only necessarily consider sustainability when natural depletion threatens the economic system (be it due to scarcity or public pressure).

If nature is no longer a resource to be tamed and we are instead a part of it, consumption becomes about sufficiency instead of exploitation and accumulation for their own sakes. Thus, Buen Vivir allows for needs to be satisfied sustainably, undermining the ideals the market is based upon, such as the exponential growth of output and consumerism. What’s more, it recognizes material and marketable needs as part of a larger set of needs. Fulfilment and community, for example, don’tneed to be commodified and sold because human relations are prioritised over the market system that now hands them out. This defies the sanctity of markets, encouraging a vida plena (simple and full life) through collective life and conscience. It is easy to see how Buen Vivir might deem us unable to continue with the current scheme of consumption and production.

What about development? Buen Vivir negates the notion of linear evolution in which a country passes from underdeveloped to a superior, modernized state. Instead, through its notion of wellbeing, it proposes that society is under permanent construction and changes the parameters that we aspire to. Granted, living harmoniously with the community and environment requires raising the living standards of many Latin Americans – Buen Vivir does not oppose this. However, it recalibrates our way of thinking because it places raising living standards and other material outcomes strictly in the service of ‘good living’. Thus, it also changes the acceptable means of achieving them: growth cannot come at the cost of environmental destruction nor should it encourage mass economic inequality, as this would harm nature and the community. Buen Vivir thus conflicts not only with capitalist expansion but also with the European welfare state, green capitalism, and other movements which don’t demand the fundamental revaluation of capital.

Most significantly, Buen Vivir cannot be substantially rearranged to fit within the modern system. For example, we cannot dissociate its environmental principles and adapt them to the capitalist society while keeping everything else the same. This is because the philosophy is built so that each principle needs the other – it is holistic. Buen Vivir is also incompatible with the contemporary state because it violates the human rights of indigenous communities. For example, when the state supports the building of infrastructure or grants companies ownership of ancestral land, it denies indigenous people their right to Buen Vivir. The contradiction is more explicit in the lack of representation and self-determination of indigenous groups, and even more so in events of state violence in many contemporary Latin American states. Buen Vivir humanizes the question of indigenous rights, showing it as the basic necessity for the survival of fellow people, and so delivers it from the abstraction of courtrooms. Simultaneously, the clashes show its possible incompatibility with the status quo.

Chilean rappers Portavoz and Subverso put all this much more eloquently in their song ‘Lo que no voy a decir’, which talks about the Mapuche in Chile. The Mapuche’s ancestral wisdom (kimün in Mapudungun) is akin to Buen Vivir (KümeMongen), which the lyricists explain in the following lines:

“El Estado de Chile me reprime, me sigue la pista

Y está a la vista ya que su propia naturaleza es racista

Yo no soy terrorista

Me tienen odio solo porque yo me opongo a vivir de un modo capitalista

Porque no creo que los ríos son nuestros “recursos”

Sino que seres vivos que deben seguir su curso

Porque no saco de la tierra sin pedir

Y siempre trato de retribuirle todo lo que uso

Por eso es que yo asusto al empresariado

Porque mi Dios no es el dinero y no obedezco a su mercado

Me ofenden cuando dejo descansar la tierra

No ven que en este gesto muestro respeto y no flojera (...)

Lo mismo pasa con el trato entre personas

La comunidad se apoya y to’a la zona es una sola voz

Lo que le afecta a uno, afecta a los demás del lof [tipo de comunidad Mapuche]

Por eso los defiendo aunque los pacos digan “mátenlos” (…) 

Y esto es parte de un kimün profundo

Donde ayudar a los demás es siempre lo más natural del mundo”

Full song and video from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lm00GF5Faw&ab_channel=SubVersoRap 

Translated to English:

The Chilean State represses me, it follows me around

And it can be seen that its very nature is racist

I am not a terrorist

They only hate me because I oppose living in a capitalist way

Because I don’t think that the rivers are our “resources”

But living beings which should continue their course

Because I don’t take from the land without asking

And I always try to give it back everything that I use

That’s why I scare the businesspeople

Because my God isn’t money and I don’t obey its market

They offend me when I let the earth rest

Don’t they see that this gesture shows respect and not laziness? (…)

The same occurs in the relations between people

The community supports itself and the whole region is one single voice

What affects one, affects the others in the lof [type of Mapuche community]

Which is why I defend them even though the cops say “kill them” (…)

And this is part of a deep kimün

Where helping others is always the most natural thing in the world

As a whole, Buen Vivir is much simpler than all this theory. It is a lived practice whose beliefs about fulfilment through a connection with nature and society may seem intuitive if not for path dependency. In this context, the cosmology transcends the trends of Eurocentric thought which take modernity and capitalism as the only possible way. Buen Vivir makes us challenge modern society because of its impersonality; we can recognise that the seemingly impenetrable structures of modern society are self-imposed and then ask ourselves if we too want to maximise what they propose. The philosophy condemns the global injustices of the modern system as absurd because it allows for struggle where there need be none. For those of us who are privileged enough that our paths appear set our and the costs of reconsidering our purpose outside of modern ideals seems high, Buen Vivir also poses a personal challenge. But more importantly, it perpetuates ancient knowledge that the current model deems backwards in the few opportunities it is heard. In this context, we see Andean indigenous people who were previously the objects of development, as agents of Buen Vivir.

Nazreen is a KCL student interested in development, philosophy, and literature, focused on Latin America.

Bibliography

 Ancalao Gavilán, Diego. “EL PUEBLO MAPUCHE Y LA SOCIEDAD DEL BUEN VIVIR.” Mensaje . Padre Hurtado, October 4, 2019. https://www.mensaje.cl/edicion-impresa/mensaje-683/el-pueblo-mapuche-y-la-sociedad-del-buen-vivir/. 

Catrillanca, Marcelo. “El Buen Vivir Mapuche Demanda Desmilitarización, Verdad, Justicia y

Libredeterminación.” Mapuexpress , December 19, 2018. https://www.mapuexpress.org/2018/12/20/el-buen-vivir-mapuche-demanda-desmilitarizacion-verdad-justicia-y-libredeterminacion/. 

De La Cuadra, Fernando. “Buen Vivir: ¿Una Auténtica Alternativa Post-Capitalista?” Polis 14, no. 40 (March 2015): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-65682015000100001.

Gudynas, Eduardo. “Buen Vivir: Germinando Alternativas Al Desarrollo.” América Latina En Movimiento , no. 462 (February 2011): 1–20.

https://flacsoandes.edu.ec/web/imagesFTP/1317332248.RFLACSO_2011_Gudynas.pdf .

Gudynas, Eduardo. “Estado Compensador y Nuevos Extractivismos. Las Ambivalencias Del Progresismo Sudamericano.” Nueva Sociedad , no. 237 (2012), ISSN: 0251-3552. https://nuso.org/articulo/estado-compensador-y-nuevos-extractivismos-las-ambivalencias-del-progresismo-sudamericano/ .

León Irene. Sumak Kawsay / Buen Vivir y Cambios Civilizatorios. 2nd ed. Quito: FEDAEPS, 2010. http://www.dhls.hegoa.ehu.eus/uploads/resources/5501/resource_files/Ecu_Sumak_Kawsay_cambios_civilizatorios.pdf. 

Montalva, Felipe. “El Buen Vivir De La Cultura Mapuche.” Rebelión , June 18, 2015. https://rebelion.org/el-buen-vivir-de-la-cultura-mapuche/ .

Quijano, Aníbal. “‘Bien Vivir’: Entre El ‘Desarrollo’ y La Des/Colonialidad Del Poder.” Debate Ecuador 84 (September2011): 77–87. http://200.41.82.22/bitstream/10469/3529/1/RFLACSO-ED84-05-Quijano.pdf .

Rojas Pedemonte, Nicolás, and David Soto Gómez. “KümeMongen: El Buen Con-Vivir Mapuche Como Alternativa De Desarrollo Humano y Sustentable.” Academia.edu .Dissertation, Ponencia III Congreso social: Ecología humana para un desarrollo sostenible e integral, 2016. https://www.academia.edu/31776593/Ponencia_K%C3%BCme_Mongen_El_Buen_Con_Vivir_mapuche_como_alternativa_de_desarrollo_humano_y_sustentable_. 

Subverso y Portavoz. “Lo que no voy a decir.”

Las Travesuras de la Niña Mala by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Revolutionary Love Affair between Paris and London

Source: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2024634,00.html

By: Carla Suarez

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

The Author

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s greatest authors, was born in Arequipa, Peru on March 28th 1936, and grew up in neighboring Bolivia, in the city of Cochabamba, located in the warm and sunny lower valleys of the Andes. He spent over ten years in Bolivia before his family returned to Peru and relocated to the capital, Lima, and at the age of nineteen, he married his most influential muse, Julia Urquidi Illanes, a native of Cochabamba and who also happened to be ten years his senior. His controversial union with ‘la tía Julia’ caused some tensions within his family, and once he earned a scholarship to study in Paris in 1956, the couple moved to Europe. 

In Paris, Vargas Llosa worked as a scriptwriter for the French Radio and Television Network alongside his writing career. While in Paris, he published his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1962), followed by La casa verde (1966), and Conversación en La Catedral (1969). Vargas Llosa moved to London in the late 1960’s, teaching at King’s College London as a lecturer of Spanish American Literature, an experience that inspired him to write the novel Las travesuras de la niña mala (2006). 

After spending a couple of years in Swinging London, he returned to Paris, working as a translator at UNESCO alongside fellow Latin Boom author, the Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar. He published one of his most famous novels, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), a novel based on his controversial romance with Julia Urquidi. In the late 1980’s, Vargas Llosa, who was an admirer of the Cuban Revolution and Marxism in his youth, entered the political arena in Peru, advocating for liberalism. He ran for president in Peru’s 1990 general election but ultimately lost the presidential race. 

With a longstanding and prosperous career, Vargas Llosa has received numerous distinctions in Hispanic literature, such as the Premio Príncipe de Asturias and the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, as well as international recognitions such as the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Through his work, Vargas Llosa has truly shaped the quintessential ‘realismo mágico’ Latin America is known for, and established himself as one of the greatest writers of the Latin American Boom. 

The Novel

Las travesuras de la niña mala, published in 2006, follows Ricardo, a young man from the upper middle class of Lima, whose lifelong dream has always been to live in Paris, in his pursuit of love across Europe and Latin America.  In his childhood, he meets a girl at a country club named Lily, nicknamed ‘la chilenita’ due to her Chilean accent, for whom he feels a sudden ‘coup de foudre’, and falls deeply in love. 

Years later, in the early 1960s, Ricardo is in his early twenties and studying at La Sorbonne in Paris when he runs into ‘la chilenita’ of his childhood, now a beautiful woman. Lily and Ricardo meet again while attending a clandestine guerrilla meeting in the famous Quartier Latin. Latin American students in Paris at the time were fervent admirers of the Cuban Revolution, and used to gather in Parisian flats decorated with Che Guevara posters to discuss and share ideas on how they could import ‘la Revolución’ to their own countries. Ricardo and his friend Paul were militants of a guerrilla group that had connections in Cuba and sent scholarship recipients to study there. Lily, now known as ‘la Camarada Arlette’ ardently defends the revolutionary ideals Ricardo stands for, making him fall even more deeply in love with her. 

For a fleeting moment, their short-lived romance turns Ricardo’s lifelong dream into reality, but this comes to an end when ‘la camarada Arlette’ is sent off to Cuba, leaving Ricardo on the edge of a nervous breakdown. A jilted Ricardo wanders around Paris, reminiscing the days when he lived with the mysterious woman, as he walks through the streets, parks and restaurants he visited with her. Later on, as the spark of the revolution started to extinguish with the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, Ricardo has distanced himself from his revolutionary ideals and starts working at UNESCO as a translator. As he starts to frequent the diplomatic circles of Paris, he discovers that ‘la camarada Arlette’ is back, under a new identity: Madame Arnoux. They become lovers and they live a passionate affair that ends abruptly when, once again, she leaves him and disappears.

In search of a fresh start, Ricardo moves to London temporarily. He lives the effervescence of ‘Swinging London’ as an outsider to the hedonist hippie movement that was taking over the youth culture, with the rise of rock’n’roll, orchestrated by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and the proliferation of drug consumption. While in London, he runs into his former lover, a socialite who is now known as Mrs. Richardson. Ricardo’s feelings for her keep haunting him and he decides to give her an ultimatum to return to Paris. Mrs. Richardson runs off to the French capital with her ‘niño bueno’. Charmed under her spell, Ricardo is ecstatically in love with her. She finally lets her wall down and reveals her true self to him, only to disappear from his life again. 

This endless tango between the two characters is what makes this novel so fascinating and exciting to read. The runaway ‘niña mala’ is the source of Ricardo’s most passionate love, as well as the cause of his painful agony. Vargas Llosa brilliantly narrates the story from Ricardo’s point of view, making the reader sympathetic to his heartbreak. Furthermore, Vargas Llosa accomplishes a vivid portrait of Paris, London, Tokyo and Madrid across time based on his own personal experience. He vividly portrays the changing places and societies witnessed by a young South American man living his very own personal revolution away from his homeland. Las travesuras de la niña mala is an exquisite and captivating read of Latin American literature.

Carla is a Final-Year Student at King’s College London with a great interest in political economy, international relations and philosophy. Having spent most of her life moving between her homeland Bolivia, and her second homes, Chile, Colombia, Belgium and the United Kingdom, she developed a strong interest in Latin American cultural identity, political affairs and environmental issues and the portrayal of these topics in film and global media.

Caracas: Land of Legends, of Great Warriors and My Home

Photo taken by the author: A Blurred Sunset in Caracas

By: Andrés Vargas Arévalo

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao.

On October 3rd, 2019, I decided to take a leap of faith; I would turn a short voyage to Caracas into a one-way trip. I had been living in Mexico City for the previous fourteen months and, as my mother used to say each time we vacationed outside Venezuela: “I would return with double the eagerness that I had had when I left”.

Mexico City and Caracas have much in common: they are chaotic and perhaps unfriendly. I see them as chiral, as though they were mirror images, yet different, and sinister. Mexico City was handed to me in the same way I was handed Caracas: without a choice. Each city came with its own implications, pains, and gains. Yet the only thing I wanted whilst living in Mexico City was to be back home, in my brutalist, concrete jungle. Now that I am living in Caracas, I sometimes miss Mexico City and the good memories I have of it, but I have always had one - and only one - place which I call home.

My memories started to resurface as the plane began its landing at Simon Bolivar International Airport. It was the first time in years that I was landing at night given that my mother thought it would be better to return using daylight flights for security reasons. To my delight, it wasn't the case this time and I would now be able to see lights that I could only recall as fragments of my childhood days when I’d go back and forth between Caracas and La Guaira on weekends. As my uncle drove up to Caracas, I was greeted by the magnific Caracas-La Guaira highway, a testament to the former glory years of the 1950s. On each side of the highway, the lights of the barrios took me back to my childhood since I used to fall asleep to them.

I was hungry, I had had a long layover in Bogota before departing for Caracas and the flight had not accepted international cards to pay for meals. My uncle took me to a hot dog stand called ‘Joao’ in Las Mercedes, where I used to eat every week with my high school and college friends after a night of partying. It was a sad moment because I haven't seen many of those friends in years, and I knew that life takes turns and perhaps I won’t see them in what remains of my life. Caracas has given me everything and has taken a lot from me, but I still love her.

Just after getting home, I decided to surprise one of my best friends, Mort. As he entered my house, I jumped on him and started to laugh. He took me on a ride to one of the most sacred places for a Venezuelan patriot: the house where El Libertador was born, which is now bordered by cafes. There was a certain joy in the streets that night, with lights which were strange to me. You had to be crazy to go out after sunset to the center of Caracas due to the fear of getting mugged, but I didn'tfeel any fear whilst drinking a frappuccino almost at midnight.

We drove back to Las Mercedes to eat arepas and get a couple of drinks. Pilsner beer was something I’d missed while in Mexico City; negritas, as we call them, have a unique taste (In Venezuela the word ‘negro’ isn’t racist, it is actually used as a synonym for friend and as an affectionate nickname). I was surprised to learn that a nation in which it used to be illegal to have dollars, or any other foreign currency, now uses them as its main currency and that foreign credit cards could now also be used. Even using a credit card seemed surprising; previously it had been a nightmare to use one because the card terminals never worked.

Caracas wasn't the ghost town that I had left behind on July 27th, 2018. Somehow, she had come back to life. I still had friends left, my first alma mater was still standing and there were still opportunities left to grow up in the former land of opportunities; opportunities to rejoice, to mourn, to go out and to face the world.

Some may argue that I'm short-sighted, which as a matter of fact I am. There is still an unimaginable misery in Venezuela that shocks everyone, with news of the elderly and the young dying alone of starvation. The witches - as we call the policemen - roam in the shadows waiting for an unlucky soul to snatch. This is still the capital of the Animal Farm, ruled with an iron fist by our very own Napoleon. But it would be an insult to me, to my family, and to all hardworking Venezuelans lie to you saying that we are hopeless. We have stood up to tyranny many times before and we have always won; from Carabobo to Boyaca, from Junin to Ayacucho, and to our very own streets, we have fought and won. It's only a matter of time before we win again. 

Even in the darkness of the pandemic and of the economic ruin, we still wake up to work for a better life, just like the millions of wartime refugees of long ago who spent weeks walking towards ports to board ships, seeing no daylight until they had reached the ports of a land of grace called Venezuela.

I see you, Venezuela, each day as I go out to work; I see your fear dwarfed by your immense ambition for a better life and your courageous struggle for happiness. I see you, delivery guy, I see you, entrepreneur; old and young, I see you all. You are the true lights that stand up to the darkness, and the guiding star to a new dawn.

You are the heart of Caracas. Soon the carcasses of the buildings that lay dormant will rise, and we will become again the city of the eternal spring, the branch of the heavens, the home that so many have missed.

Andres Vargas Arevalo is a second-year student of Chemical Engineering at Universidad Metropolitana. Born and raised in Caracas who has lived in Canada, Mexico and Spain. A passionate entrepreneur and founder of @TuMetroCondon.

Latin American Community: Little Bird

Photo provided by the author

By: Camila Consolmagno

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

My story begins where it ends. All my life I’ve heard people say, ‘when one door closes, another opens,’ and all my life I saw this as nothing but a pretentious proverb attempting to justify the vexatious things that happen in life. In reality, sometimes things just occur irrationally. People seek comfort, sometimes in a proverb, in the same way as a hug; it will never actually solve the problem, but it will still be solacing. While growing up, however, I’ve realised that that saying isn’t as ostentatiously ignorant as I’d always believed. All endings are also beginnings; we just don’t know it at the time. And so, my story begins and ends with an airplane. 

...

It was an ordinary day in Guarapari, Brazil – adhesively hot. I wasn’t born here; my birth-city is a 15-hour car drive away. I was born in Londrina, my mother’s city, but my parents moved to Guarapari just a couple of months after having me. I don’t recall the time, but the sun was out, probably morning. I was in my mother’s flat – which was unusual for a Saturday, considering I spent the weekends at my dad’s. Unwashed dishes from the night before. No toys on the floor for a change. Four packed suitcases by the door. I was nine years old and my brother was four. 

Dad finally arrived, late and impatiently pressing his car horn. ‘Vamos!,’ he yelled still from inside the car but with his head poking out of the window. His girlfriend of a few months was sitting next to him in the passenger seat. My mother rushed down with my brother and I; then ran up and down again but this time with our suitcases. We’re waiting outside the flat. ‘Vamos!,’ Dad shouts again. My mother’s crying. My brother doesn’t understand what’s going on, and I’m mad at him for not knowing. ‘Say goodbye to mum’ I suggest, ‘because you might not ever see her again” – I’ve always been dramatic. He cries and hugs her, and I say a quick goodbye. We get in the car and just as the door closes my dad agilely speeds. I look back but in the flash all I see is a speck of what’s supposed to be my mother’s face. In what feels like less than a second, she vanishes, and I don’t get the chance to look at my mother’s face for one last time before I go. 

I didn’t see that face for another six years.

We arrive at the airport just in time. My dad and his girlfriend say their last goodbyes. I envy their hugs and their kisses and their tears as all of that was blindly swept away from me in the honk of a car. I still hate that noise. 

One airplane, eleven perpetual hours. I remember staring out at the clouds and imagining what it would be like to taste them. They looked like candy floss. Although I hated candy floss, the thought of eating a cloud was incredibly appealing. ‘It’d taste like ice,’ I thought, ‘after all it’s just water anyway.’I tried to look for shadows in the clouds, trying to see if I could find an angel. Eventually I just gave in to the screen in front of me and watched Finding Nemo repeatedly for the remaining nine hours. Growing up in a small town with fifty-two beaches I found comfort in the sea, even if it was pixilated.

...

We were moving to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, England. I hadn’t really quite processed that – and I wouldn’t for a while. What then used to be a magical town full of adventurous parks where my nine-year-old self could gambol for hours on end, is now a monotonous nightmare for the seventeen-year-old version of myself. ​

We lived with my grandparents for the first bit before we found a place of our own. Their house was a two-storey, three-bedroom, old English brick house. It would be spacious if my grandma had not adorned it with every decorative gift she had received within the past thirty years and bric-a-bracs she’d found in Sunday markets for the last ten. Mini replicas of famous paintings, like the Mona Lisa and Girl with a Pearl Earring hung above the living room’s electric fireplace that I’ve never seen been used. On the wall that followed the evanescing burgundy carpeted stairs that made ghost-like creaks whenever it made contact with any sort of weight, my grandparents blue-tacked framed photos of family members, dead and alive. My father was there, a profile picture of himwhen he was fourteen; that one was my personal favourite.Upstairs were two guest rooms, a bathroom, and my grandparents’ en-suite room. The first guest room was taken by my uncle, so we stayed in the second – the biggest, though not by much. My bed was a single mattress on the carpet floor, coercively squeezed between a wall, right below the only window in the room and next to the double bed where my dad slept. My brother slept on an air mattress adjacent to the double bed, so our mattresses formed an L around its left side. 

My dad’s girlfriend, Carol, joined us three months later and all four of us were crammed into that same room. Sometimes at night, Carol and I couldn’t sleep because of the notable different time zones that we still hadn’t got used to. So, whilst my brother and my dad slept soundly, she’d join me on my mattress and we’d get a pack of cards and quietly, yet competitively, play until we were both finally sleepy, this was often until 3am. Sometimes, we would also watch the current melodramatic Brazilian soap opera on the internet. Or, play the most emulous rounds of dominoes. Together, we always found something to fill our sleepless, empty nights with.

Although, I only seemed to love her when no one was watching. I was still pretty raw from leaving my mother behind and I thought there was a chance I could convince my dad to take us back to Brazil and return to our ordinary lives. But we are better off here, it just took me a while to realise that.

...

I’ve been moving all my life. In Brazil, I learnt never to get attached to a house as every year we moved and changed schools. Now, in England, having moved cities twice, gone to four different schools and lived in five different houses, I’ve learnt not to get attached to people. Albeit, at the same time I’ve grown used to moving, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Once my dad knew he didn’t have to have it all figured out to move forward, he hasn’t stayed still. I think that’s where I get my impulsiveness from, but some would call it courage. 

I leave Brazil, enter England. My mother leaves, Carol shelters me. One door closes, another opens. 

People often ask me which of the two countries I prefer, almost in a wrong or right form, but they’re incomparable. I can’t note the similarity or dissimilarity between the Latin heat and the British wintry, a feijoada versus a roast dinner, a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. They are countries underneath the same sky and above the same sea, but they are different universes apart. This year when I turn eighteen, I will have lived half of my life in each country. The magic of it all is not choosing which I love most but loving the most of out of both. In the end, I’m only one airplane away.

Camila Consolmagno is a final-year Bachelor of Laws student at SOAS, University of London. She is the first Brazilian President of the SOAS Latin American Society and an aspiring human rights lawyer

Latin American Community: A Very Latino London

Image Courtesy of Migreat Blog

By Maximilian Frederik van Oordt

​On the doorstep of a second lockdown in the Great British capital, now is a brilliant opportunity to glance at this city with a microscope and notice just how Latin Americans have influenced the city’s culture and gastronomy; with its effects on display now more than ever before.

​Even before the flags of the newly independent republics could be unfurled outside our embassies in London, the British metropolis had already hosted several leading independence figures including Simon Bolivar (1810), Bernardo O’Higgins (1795), Jose de San Martin (1824), and Francisco de Miranda (1802). They would lead a long line of Latin Americans choosing to visit London and, oftentimes, to make it their home.

​Nowadays, Latinx culture flows throughout the city, manifesting itself in what we hear, taste, and smell. No London nightclub is complete without a nod to Reggaeton at some point in the night. Some even dedicate themselves exclusively to the genre, with Time Out publishing a list of its favourite London Reggaeton discotheques in 2019 to reflect a soaring demand for the tunes. Match these musical exports to the wide array of salsa, bachata, and tango clubs all around the city and its safe to say our culture has been welcomed with open arms.

​Once the music is over and the dancing has stopped, a mealtime trip to the high street will inevitably greet you with Argentine and Uruguayan steakhouses, Mexican eateries, Chilean and Peruvian Pisco bars, and marketplaces dotted with Venezuelan arepa stalls. Despite each of these cuisines being so remarkably different from the other, every one of them has met with a delighted (and satisfied) audience. 

​These are displays of our region’s phenomenal cultural and gastronomical assets, presented in all their glory by those Latinos who have chosen to bring a taste of home to the English capital. Had Bolívar and San Martin visited today, I am sure they would have felt right at home.

Maximilian Frederik van Oordt is a second-year International Relations student at King’s College London. interested in politics, history and law, he enjoys focusing on Latin American affairs, with a particular emphasis on these three areas.