![]() ![]() ![]() Significantly, the friend added, “ Se jodió este país”-this country is fucked. ![]() 1 Though the question referred to the years of the Manuel Odría dictatorship in Peru (1950–1956), it was to resonate across Latin America for writers and readers anxious to pinpoint the moment when everything had gone wrong in their own frustrated nations.įor Gabriel García Márquez, according to his memoir Living to Tell the Tale (2002), there was no doubt about when Colombia had descended into hell, on which particular day “the history of the country split in half.” On April 9, 1948, the future Nobel laureate was placidly eating lunch at his boardinghouse in Bogotá when, a bit past noon, he was interrupted by a breathless friend with the news that Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the charismatic liberal politician and likely winner in the upcoming presidential elections, had just been killed. By using the verb joderse, Vargas Llosa is implying that something has been aborted or ruined in his country, with the passive voice se underscoring that the fuckup cannot be attributed to one person or incident but that everyone, including Zavalita-who has made a mess of his life-is responsible. “At what precise moment had Perú fucked itself up?” (“ En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?”) That is the question that Zavalita, the protagonist of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), asks himself at the beginning of the novel. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Bogotá, Colombia, 2009 ![]()
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