Narrative
Huelga y represión
Not translated into English
Víctor Montoya · 1979
Synopsis
In June 1976, the army occupies the mining centres, and the strike starts at the entrance to the Siglo XX mine. Marcelo, a secondary-school leader from the Bustillo province and the author's double, has to flee: he hides in the countryside, then in Llallagua, and finally in Oruro, where he is arrested with other mining leaders. At the Department of Political Order in Oruro, then at the one in La Paz, he is interrogated with the picana about militants, a printing press, weapons. The narrative names those who resist, and the housewives of the camps who organise the food collections.
Context
The author began these pages in prison, at the Panóptico de San Pedro and then at Viacha, on paper his guards had given him to write down the names of his comrades; his mother took the sheets out, folded and hidden, at each visit. He landed in Sweden on 22 January 1977, the manuscript in his suitcase, and carried it for two years without finding a Spanish-language publisher, until a self-publishing house in Stockholm printed it at his own expense in 1979, in five hundred copies. The book circulated in Bolivia only with its second edition, in 2019.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French translation. A testimony between narrative and fictionalised history, raw in its realism, which assumes the reader knows what the mining camps were under the military.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first book, which remained unknown in his country for forty years, and the first of a body of work in which the mine constantly recurs.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.