Santiago Roncagliolo: “In Latin America and Europe there is less and less belief in democracy”
The writer Santiago Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) has been a direct witness that what is published in the newspapers affects people. When she was 2 years old, his family exiled to Mexico and, after returning to his country, He emigrated again to Spain to continue with a literary career catapulted in 2006 by his novel red april and agile and direct prose.
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He was in Morocco invited by the Embassy of Peru to present at the Cervantes Institute his latest book, The year the demon was borna story that mixes religion, superstition, intrigue and monsters from 17th century Peru and that, he confesses in an interview, will be adapted to the screen in Mexico.
–Themes such as identity, terror or politics are very present in your books. What motivates you to explore them?
–All my life there have been horrible political things happening around me. My family grew up in the 70s in the exilethen in the 80s in a country at warthen in the 90s in a dictatorshipthen in the emigration in Spain… I have always been very aware, because it has touched me directly, of how social events change your life, they are not something that happens in the newspaper. Then I have always been interested in my stories being intense and that you get into them as if they were a real world, and one of the most intense emotions we have is fear. I am interested in the moments in history when societies unleash their monsters., the door to hell opens and everything that a society hides begins to come out. In the case of my latest novel, set in the Viceroyalty in Peru, I was interested in the concept of witch, coined with a very patriarchal meaning.
–A concept that, according to what he says, still exists in some way. When will women stop being witches?
–Well, they are, there is a sign that is repeated in many feminist demonstrations of ‘we are the daughters of the witches who burned’. The levels of mobilization of recent years are greatly accelerating the history of that, but also are generating a reaction against. I think that a moral conservative today is much more conservative than ten years ago.
We have created the concept of monster to lock up everything we do not understand and punish it for being different.
–Witches were the monsters of the 17th century, what are they now?
–The monsters are the ones who are different. For much of Europe today, the monsters are foreigners, those of us who come from other places. In many places the monsters are those who are from some sexual minority. We have created the concept of monster to lock up everything we do not understand and punish it for being different.. My protagonists often feel out of place in the society they are in, because I have felt that way myself. I have been a foreigner for a good part of my life. I have always felt that what I write is a defense of different people.

–Having lived in Peru, Mexico and now in Spain, what do you think of the political situation in Latin America?
–Both in Latin America and Europe, people believe less and less in democracy and they are no longer hiding it. It is also a failure of democracy. In the case of Latin America, I think the pandemic revealed that many countries were growing economically because they were not spending on hospitals or schools. And that has created great distrust in democracy. But it is also happening in Europe, where There are voices that would prefer to go further back, to a Europe of separate countriesto more conservative moral ideas.
–And how does Peru see the political instability it suffers?
–Very difficult to solve, because you need a social organization that we do not have. You need political parties. What there is are formally political parties, but there are no institutions with stable ideologies. It also has to do with this current distrust, not only of the democratic system, but of all elites. There is a failure that we all share in not having been able to consolidate the democratic project that we wanted.
With information from EFE.
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