‘Rabia’, resisters and rebels of Latin America

First things first, the deaths. And it is not necessary to go to the extreme of the Monsters of Ecatepec, a couple of serial killers of women whose crimes are detailed in the Mexican chronicle of this collective book of great journalism. Others are less scandalous, but they were also cracks through which civic rage slipped.

The negligence that ended with that young Argentine who was denied cancer treatment because it would cause an abortion and, from one medical center to another, no one took responsibility for making a decision that could have saved her life and in the end the woman died mother and daughter died. The death of the Colombian hip hop singer Junior Jein, who was shot when he was going to present his latest single: the causes of the crime have not been clarified, but no one forgets that this black musician had supported the mobilizations that overflowed the country a few months before be killed.

Or those two young people, the victims in the Peruvian chronicle, who died in a demonstration when they were hit by projectiles fired by the police. Rage is a book that portrays Latin America and gives off the uncomfortable sting caused by tear gas.

The book tried to capture the fervor, without mythologizing it, but the chroniclers do commit themselves to challenging the regimes where they live, exercising their profession with the utmost demand: they give voice to protagonists and testimonies, they make a literary treatment of the genre and always choose particular experiences. to explain the popular dimension of protests that in many cases were interclass and intergenerational.

There is no equidistance. They are compromise pieces. “I see myself with Lesther in Miami because I also had to go into exile due to the regime’s persecution of journalism,” explains Wilfredo Miranda Aburto when speaking of Nicaraguan dissident Lesther Aleman. The most obvious case is that of the great Carlos Manuel Alvarez, he stars in his chronicle. He returned to Cuba to participate in the protests and, shortly after arriving and settling in with dissidents, he was arrested. The gesture was not harmless. “I realized that they were in a hurry. I think the fear was finite, a quota of national fear. The one we lost went on to power”.

The deaths, various forms of journalism and collective responses to injustice. Those responses, which went beyond partisanship, are the subject of the book. Rabid responses through which the people take to the streets to exercise their citizenship. From one end of the continent to the other, suddenly, an explosion, crack and overflow, “like the lava of a volcano that becomes active after decades.”

The pattern replicated. Demonstrations, repression, civic resistance and institutional violence. He spent in Puerto Rico until the fall of a governor after massive demonstrations, led by musicians who gave voice to weariness. “You made fun of us with other bastards / You made the whole country cringe / Manipulation, corruption, conspiracies / Ricky, quit and your mai forgive you / I don’t I don’t.” He happened in Cuba and they put it in verse. “The fear of the night no longer exists. / Make me a mushroom pizza for tomorrow. / I want to feel the taste of freedom.” After having felt too much pain, that yearning for freedom remains in the reader’s consciousness.