Dolores Redondo, Javier Cercas, Petros Márkaris and Yasmina Khadra are some of the stars of BCNegra, the festival of police literature that these days brings together almost a hundred authors in Barcelona . The event reaches its 15th edition as a classic for fans of Maigret, Sherlock Holmes, Pepe Carvalho, Sam Spade and other hounds of a genre that enjoys robust health: you just have to see the avalanche of novelties that land these days in bookstores starring detectives, police, mossos, civil guards and inspectors more or less obscure and disappointed that, despite everything, they seek some justice. That if we talk about Spanish, European or American novels. The approach is different in Latin American literature if one looks, for example, at novels written by three authors invited to the festival directed by Carlos Zanón.

In Cometierra (Stealth), the first novel by Dolores Reyes , the protagonist is a sighted girl who, when eating land, is transported to those places where there are missing women. The news of his strange gift expands and the entrance of his house will soon be filled with bottles full of dirt, some with a photograph or a phone number attached. A crude image that reflects a real despair: impunity in the face of the many unsolved murders in Argentina, where the novel has become one of the revelations of the year.

"About one third of the cases of femicide in Argentina are carried out with weapons of the State , weapons of forces that should take care of us but are killing us," explains Reyes. «We see it now with the police in Chile, that's why impunity. When a state is femicidal, it is difficult for it to do something to investigate the fate of missing women. Then, the literature generates researchers who search from absolutely different places. Search engines that are willing to do everything to find the missing women, ”he adds.

In Mandíbula (Candaya) Mónica Ojeda writes about the students of an Opus Dei boarding school introduced in a sadomasochistic rite. "In mysticism, in magic, in religion, there is always a telluric desire to placate existential terror," explains the Ecuadorian writer, for whom law enforcement serves more "to maintain a status quo than to protect us. They are perverse forces. It is difficult to portray them as something else.

Something similar occurs in Our part of the night (Anagrama) by Mariana Enriquez , where the supernatural also appears: the protagonist is a medium that a satanic order uses for its rites in the mid-1970s, with the military dictatorship and the impunity enjoyed by the fund.

"Disappearances abruptly take away loved ones, we start the possibility of firing their bodies, writing them an epitaph, a tombstone," says Reyes. "This lack of farewell is fertile territory for literature, which can try to resume that communication in other ways."

For the author of Cometierra , «even before this epidemic of femicides that we are going through and before the dictatorships, the great tragedies of the American territories always involved huge killings, with mass graves of violent bodies, from the conquest of America to the present, and the earth opening to receive them ».

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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