Excerpt: Castellanos Moya Interview

MJC: When I was preparing to review Senselessness, I went back to Antigone—the novel’s epigraph is from Antigone—and one of the things that stayed with me this time was Antigone’s railing against her cursed fate. Against Oedipus, who’s the origin of all her troubles. So where does the curse begin, I remember wondering, for the indigenous people of Guatemala? My answer could have taken the fuku route, of course, but at that point I had already read your novel El arma en el hombre, and because of the circular fate of its protagonist, I was thinking of more recent origins. In El arma en el hombre, a soldier nicknamed Robocop is trained by the Americans to fight the guerrillas. Then, after the war is over, Robocop is demobilized and thrown on the street. Given his training, he seems to have no choice but to continue the violence as a criminal. At the end of the novel, after he razes through El Salvador, the Americans capture him and offer him a job as a DEA agent. So perhaps in some of your novels, I remember thinking, the curse of violence begins with the American interventions in Central America and then continues unabated?

HCM: What is the origin of the “curse of violence” for Oedipus, who kills his father without knowing that he is his father, marries his mother without knowing that she is his mother and unleashes the tragedy of his sons? The Gods, of course. There’s nothing one can do against fate, Sophocles tried to tell us. And what is the origin of the “curse of violence” in Latin America? The answer to this question is material for a book. I have no doubts that the politics of domination and plundering of the United States toward Latin America has played an important role in the recycling of violence, but it is not the only element nor do I think it is the historical origin of it. In the specific case of Robocop, my character in the El arma en el hombre, you do see a closing of a cycle: the killing machine created by the United States to fight against communism can later be used as a killing machine against drug trafficking. Power lacks moral or principles. It only has interests.