The Landowner’s Ghosts: Realism and Financialization in Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Ericka Beckman

Work in progress: Do no cite without permission of author

In 1994, the literary and cultural critic Jean Franco noted that Latin American culture had entered a “Black Period” of uncertain duration after 1989, in which many writers—long committed to crafting radical visions of the future—“are still mourning the end of utopia.” The end of utopia, writes Franco, hails most directly from the failure of revolutionary projects across the region, and trauma of counterrevolutionary military regimes, the result of which was

“a new era of modernization under the aegis of neoliberalism.” This context helps explains the turn in Latin American fiction to the work of mourning and restitution, as in studies by Idelber

Avelar and Alberto Moreiras; as well as the strongly dystopian character of much recent cultural production, as recently studied by Franco, Mary Louise Pratt and Ileana Rodríguez, among others.

The present essay studies how Latin American fiction has attempted to narrate the blockage of revolution itself, and—in the aftermath of anti-communist counter-insurgency and scorched earth campaigns—the consolidation of a particularly brutal era of capital accumulation. For the purpose of this volume on “the contemporary,” I am particularly interested in how two works of recent fiction—Arturo Fontaine’s Oír su voz (1992) and Horacio

Castellanos Moya’s La diabla en el espejo (2000)—attempt to narrate the neoliberal present by resurrecting old historical figures and casting them in new roles. While differing in form and

1 style, what these two novels from Chile and El Salvador, respectively, have in common is their attempt to narrate contemporary capitalist transition through members of an older oligarchic regime, a class that while temporarily defeated by revolution and reform, come to personify a new mode of financial accumulation in the current era.

Landowning oligarchs have been a mainstay of Latin American fiction since the 19th century, in foundational texts such as Jorge Isaacs’ María and Machado de Assis’ Memórias póstumas de Bras Cubas, to twentieth-century classics such as Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. In fact, a powerful argument might be made that at least until the mid-twentieth century Latin American literature is a literature of landowners and their ilk; and so it is not that surprising that their staying power—at least on an imaginary level—carries over into the present. What I am interested in primarily, however, is how landowners—in spite of their reputation as backward and feudal remnants, out of step with modern life—are imagined in recent fiction as encapsulating the very logic of contemporary neoliberalism. This is on one level counterintuitive: it is precisely because of the reactionary character of landowners in mid-20th century Latin America that national bourgeoisies and the Left agreed that they needed to be eliminated. And indeed, land reform programs begun in the 1960s, together with accelerating transitions to capitalist agriculture from the 1970s-present are widely recognized as contributing to the death of this the class across much of Latin America.1

And yet in the contemporary fiction I examine here, it is precisely these defeated old guard

1 On Peru, see Mayer. Chile, Bengoa, Riesco. El Salvador, Robinson. But there are of course significant divergences. Mexico—Revolutionary land reform programs early in the 20th century destroy hacienda and reroute accumulation through the PRI. Argentina—early capitalist mechanization and no land reform ever. Colombia, also no land reform, and most prolonged rural guerrilla conflict in the hemisphere.

2 elites who function as harbingers of a new financialized era in the postrevolutionary, neoliberal period. As argued below, this is possible because landowners highlight the restorative nature of neoliberalism as a class project in Latin America, but also because the main historical tendencies of the landowning class—predatory, rent-based, extractive—reemerge and become dominant in neoliberalism.

I am also fundamentally interested in the ways in which realist and proto-realist form might allow us to glimpse a larger totality of social relations under contemporary capitalism. To recall Fredric Jameson words in “Cognitive Mapping,” even “narratives of defeat” allow “the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit.” (352-3). In this sense, I am interested in what narratives of defeated revolutions can tell us about our own present.2

1. Landowners and Chilean financial realism

Arturo Fontaine’s novel Oír su voz (To Hear Her Voice, 1992) is an attempt to depict, in realist fashion, the financial world resulting from what was arguably the world’s first radical experiment with neoliberal economic restructuring. In the aftermath of the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende’s socialist Popular Unity government, the Pinochet dictatorship, guided by a group University of Chicago-trained Chilean economists (known as the “Chicago

Boys”), undertook radical measures to privatize state industries, attract foreign investment, and

2 In focusing on how Latin American literature conjures the ‘ghostly profile’ of postmodern global space, this essay owes much to Toscano and Kunkle’s updating of Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping in Cartographies of the Absolute. And in its commitment to Latin American literary invocations of totality, I align my project with that of Emilio Sauri and Eugenio Di Stefano in “Making it Visible: Latin Americanist Criticism, Literature and the Question of Exploitation Today.”

3 (re)open the national economy to international competition. These economic policies were implemented, as many have already discussed, in tandem with state terror (torture and forced disappearances) in an effort to extirpate, in the favored phrase of the military regime, the

‘Marxist cancer’ destroying the nation.

Much Chilean post-coup literature attempts to express, on the level of form, the effects of state terror and the foreclosure of revolutionary possibility; Diamela Eltit’s neo-avant-garde novel Lumpérica (1983) is a well-known example. And, as Alessandro Fornazzari has argued in his study of capitalist counterrevolution and culture in Chile, José Donoso’s Casa de campo

(1976) turns to allegory to express the impossibility of realist representation in a world dominated by the commodity form. In Fontaine’s novel (which is also studied by Fornazzari, and whose analysis I draw from below), something very different is afoot: state terror remains decidedly at the margins of this text, as when a minor character, the President of Chile’s Central

Bank, muses, at one point that history will judge the regime harshly for its human rights abuses.

CITE. Likewise, near the end of the novel, we hear the strains of the first major street protests against the Pinochet regime; this presence only serves as background noise, however, to the novel’s main focus: the deregulated, privatized and financialized business milieu of early 1980s

Chile.

The four-hundred-plus-page novel is saturated in realist detail about this milieu: characters engage in conversations about irrigation techniques for kiwi production, attempts to found a private television station, accounting practices to hide money, and battles with the

Central Bank over exchange rates. Such details, in turn, are anchored by two intersecting storylines: first, the rise and fall of Aliro Toro’s business group, run out of a bank that was

4 nationalized under the socialist Popular Unity Government and privatized under the Pinochet dictatorship; and second, the clandestine affair between Fernández Pelayo, a journalist for a glossy magazine, and Adelaida, an advertising copywriter. Each of these stories grind to a halt with the Chilean banking crisis of 1981: Toro, together with his economic adviser, the “Chicago

Boy” Mempo Taburinini, is jailed for financial fraud; and Pelayo loses Adelaida when she returns to her husband and children.

The focus of Oír su voz is hence simultaneously limited to a specific class milieu and, in contrast with much post-coup fiction, resolutely determined to create a vision of social totality via realist representation. Fontaine’s version of realism can be directly linked to the rise of neoliberalism, and especially finance-driven accumulation, in mid-1970s Chile. First, it is a vision of totality that limits itself to the victors of the capitalist counter-revolution, excluding the social sectors against which the coup was waged--radicalized workers, peasants, and students. On a deeper level, Fontaine’s realist project might be embedded in the ideological attempt to create new bases for approaching ‘reality’ itself in the post-coup, neoliberal landscape. As Fornazzari has already noted, Oír su voz might be approached as a literary realist version of the founding document of Chilean neoliberalism, known as El ladrillo (The Brick).

Named for its unwieldy size, the texts composing El ladrillo were penned by Chicago-trained economists on the verge of the 1973 coup, and became blueprint for the military regime’s first experiment with neoliberal reforms in the mid-1970s. Strikingly, this document declares itself committed a kind of economic realism. Even as the text assumes that upper- and middle-class opposition to socialism under the Popular Unity government was “natural,” it self-consciously retreats from ideology to present neoliberal market reforms as “the only realistic way to tackle

5 the human and social improvement we all want for our country” (19-20, emphasis added).3

“Realistic” economic policy, which in El ladrillo means the privatization public services, the opening of national markets to foreign competition, and the creation of a dynamic market in land, might thus be viewed as an antecedent to the variant of literary realism Fontaine employs to represent the social world created in the wake of such policies.

Fontaine, it should be noted, is equally known in Chile as a novelist and as a public intellectual, who served for nearly 30 years as the director of the center-right think tank Centro de Estudios Públicos. But it is not in his policy papers—in which he criticizes dictatorship in favor of liberal democracy, but largely embraces the free-market policies instated by the dictatorship—that he comes closest to representing capitalist transition in Chile.4 The realist novel, that is, still offers Fontaine special purchase on representing economic life.

More specifically, the realism Fontaine’s novel corresponds with the rise of finance as a dominant mode of accumulation in neoliberal Chile. As Leigh Claire La Berge has shown for the

United States, a new form of realism emerged in the 1980s as a key mode of representing the rise of finance. Works such as Thomas Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone’s

Wall Street, La Berge argues, “cement(ed) a new aesthetic mode that captured the way a new financial class was beginning to identify itself and its economic object,” in the process

3 “la única forma realista de afrontar el mejoramiento social y humano que todos ansiamos para nuestro país.” (19). Of course, this supposedly scientific and non-ideological turn in economic discourse is itself highly ideological. 4 As an example of this defense of free markets and critique of dictatoship, Fontaine muses in 1994 (in the context of Chile’s return to liberal democracy): “Para quienes apoyamos firmemente las reformas encaminadas al libre mercado, pero no a costa de un quiebre democrático, el problema consiste en cómo generar las condiciones políticas, económicas y culturales que favorezcan el liderazgo democrático” (417). This even as he openly recognizes that it would have been impossible to introduce free-market reforms in Chile without the 1973 coup.

6 reimagining “the economy” to mean finance itself, and lending a solidity to the financial world through realist technique. Arturo Fontaine has himself been called a “Chilean Thomas Wolfe” and his novel displays some startling similarities with what La Berge has identified as key characteristics of “capitalist realism”: the confluence of personal scandal and aggregate crisis

(the illicit affair and the financial fraud in the context the crisis of 1981-2); the salience of

‘financial masculinity” (the financier Aliro Toro, whose name after all, means “bull”); and the centrality of information to the plot (the knowledge of whether exchange rates will be raised).5

La Berge’s discussion of “capitalist realism” in the U.S. also generates meaningful particularities when transposed onto Chile, a semi-peripheral country whose neoliberal transition is rooted in the 1973 US-supported military coup against Salvador Allende.6 Along these lines, the salience of landowning elites in Fontaine’s story of capitalist transition in Chile deserves special attention. The novel’s two main characters –Aliro Toro and Pelayo

Fernández—around which the major narrative strands are constructed, are both members of the formerly powerful landed oligarchy. According to José Bengoa, the hacienda (or fundo as it is often referred to in Chile) and its social relations functioned as the country’s “basic unit of

5 On Fontaine as a Chilean Thomas Wolfe, see Rojo. 6 These contextual differences between center and semi-periphery need to inscribed in a global history of capital crisis and reorganization since the 1970s, meaning that the “ghostly profile” of world capitalist relations can be glimpsed in works from both Chile and the U.S. In Oír su voz, it is in constant debates on whether the Chilean peso should be pegged to the dollar (the military regimes’s early response) or float, in the ubiquity of the University of Chicago, in the imported prestige goods that flit through the novel. As might be expected, (semi)peripheral countries like Chile are less present in works such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street. It is perhaps interesting to recall that in the film Wall Street, right before Gordon Gekko’s famous “greed is good” speech, a board member accuses the corporate raider of treating their company as if it were “some piss-poor South American country.” This throwaway comment gestures to a longer history not represented in the film: the fundamental role played by Third World debt crises of the 1970s and 1980s (and ensuing structural adjustment and austerity programs) as major sources of windfall profits for Wall Street banking institutions. On this last point, see Harvey.

7 sociability” (Bengoa, page) until the 1960s. This oligarchy had been created by Spanish colonialism, but rose to new prominence at the end of the 19th century with the expansion of agro-export markets, especially wheat. In the 20th- century era of national development and industry, however, this class came to be reviled by the left and the national bourgeoisie alike for its political intransigience and economic backwardness. For the New Chile to emerge, both of these sectors agreed, the fundo and its social relations (patriarchialism, unfree labor) had to be destroyed; this was indeed carried out by land reform programs between 1965-1970, first by

Christian Democrat and then by Socialist governments.

Historians agree that land reform sounded the death knell of the landed oligarchy in

Chile. It is thus even more significant that in Oír su voz, it is only through recourse to this old guard and its history that Fontaine can plot the country’s neoliberal transition under Pinochet.

The story of financialization in the neoliberal era, that is, is the story of a reconfigured landed elite, and vice-versa. More than focus on the Central Bank bureaucrat Barraza, or the scion of the national-industrialist family Eskenazi, Fontaine is interested in the diverging paths of two former landowners: Pelayo Fernández, who personifies a lost attachment to landed wealth; and Aliro Toro, who personifies fictitious capital itself. These diverging paths, I argue, are themselves contemporary expressions of the Janus-faced character of the old guard, and hence its symbolic and material importance in the new: at turns static and dynamic; ‘feudal’ and bound to the global market; firmly rooted in a past mode of production and uniquely suited to financial (and not, for example, industrial) modes of accumulation. Moreover, this a class that is unwaveringly counterrevolutionary, which is ultimately why I think it remains important in

8 Fontaine’s narrativization of capitalist transition under a neoliberal and at the same time neofacist regime.

First we can examine Pelayo, a member of landowning family whose estate in the south of Chile expropriated under land reform during the Popular Unity government begun in 1970. A decade later, in the novel’s present, early 1980s, he has become a journalist, writing in the glossy magazine Mira (Look), precisely about the “New Chile.” But the loss of the landed estate is what defines Pelayo, even as he retains the social prestige of the previous era (cheekily driving a VW Beetle with a Rolls Royce grill). In a flashback scene set immediately after the

1973 coup, Pelayo brings Adelaida to his family’s estate in southern Chile.7

The estate had been expropriated by the Popular Unity government in 1970, and his grandmother had refused to accept the reserve accorded to the family. As a result, the seigniorial house has fallen in a state of decay and disrepair. Pelayo blames the decline on

“those people” [esa gente]—peasants—who absent an affective relationship with the land and any knowledge of how to work it, ruin the estate’s vineyards. Inside the decaying house, Pelayo builds a fire and attempts to consummate his relationship with Adelaida. But she, sensing perhaps the rot beyond the damp smell of raulí (a type of wood from Southern Chile) in the cozy room, withdraws, and leaves Pelayo to marry her estranged boyfriend. With this rejection,

Pelayo’s melancholy over the loss of the family estate assumes a distinct shape, and is transferred onto the figure of Adelaida, the unattainable woman he will pursue for the rest of the novel.

7There are definite autobiographical strains to this story: Fontaine hails from a landowning family in southern Chile.

9 Notably, with Pelayo, the novel expresses a landowner perspective of history: the traumatic moment is not, as we have come to expect of post-coup fiction, the 1973 coup, but rather land reform. Aside from predictable associations between woman and land as sites of male possession, Pelayo’s pursuit of Adelaida gestures toward the wider process of dematerialization and abstraction represented in the rest of the novel as characteristic of the world of banking. And while Pelayo doesn’t participate directly in the world of financial speculation, his inability to attain Adelaida conjures both the loss of land and the process of dematerialization characteristic of financialization. In this regard, we can note that the title of the novel, Oír su voz, comes from the phone conversation that takes place in the novel’s

‘present’ (1981), years after both Pelayo and Adelaida have married other people. In this conversation, he can only hear her voice; he cannot touch her. Pelayo is figured here and throughout the novel as male subject who experiences a sundering between sound and substance, in which possession can be experienced only as trace (memory, voices), but separated from the thing itself (woman and land).

Chile’s ‘great transformation’ under neoliberalism does not only signify loss for old regime, though.8 And Pelayo’s aristocratic melancholy is contrasted, in turn, with the mobility and dynamism of another son of a landowning family, Aliro Toro, who in the Pinochet era has come to dominate one of the country’s most powerful financial groups. Aliro, like Pelayo, hails from landowning class, but with a twist: his father had been an urban speculator, who after losing everything in a fraudulent tea speculation, relocated to his wife’s family’s rural estate.

From this plot detail, Fontaine shows awareness of the peculiar history of the landowning class

8 Javier Martínez and Alvaro Díaz use this term to describe Chile’s capitalist counterrevolution after 1973.

10 in modern Chile, which at different moments was limited by the estate system and, historically, defined by world market and, especially, the credit system.9 Indeed, precisely because of 19th century landowners’ rise to prominence as export producers (especially wheat), they become identified with rent-based wealth, speculation, and luxury consumption.10 This connection was suspended in the period of national ‘development’—when landowning sector did in fact stagnate with respect to national industry—but the connection is resurrected in the neoliberal era.

In Oír su voz, it is paradoxically, or perversely, through land reform and socialist revolution that the historical connection between landowning elites and fictitious capital can be reborn and flourish in unexpected ways. When, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the Unidad

Popular, politicized peasants begin to expropriate estates, Aliro Toro does not despair: instead, in the spirit of his speculator father, he “ideó su primer negocio” (loc 647) (conceived/devised his first business venture). He agrees to help landowners threatened with expropriation negotiate the retention of a reserve of land, and as payment, keeps a percentage of that land.

9 Zeitlin and Radcliffe maintain, for example, that 19th century landowners were never feudal: instead, they were engaged in “seigniorial commodity production in agriculture that emerged when a ‘world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market’ already existed and when industrial capital was already ascendant in England, which stood astride world commerce. (153). In this manner, even the backward elements of this model (forced labor, non- mechanization), were “not the relic(s) of a feudal past but the product of capitalist development.” (154, emphasis in original). 10 Thomas C. Wright shows that in 19th century, wheat export markets integrated Chile’s landed class into credit markets to such an extent that it become synonymous with non-productive gains of the financial world: a 1900 attack on the oligarchy he cites, for example, rails against “the squandering of the money received to cultivate the land…on sterile luxuries, on gambling, on stupid financial combinations” (32).

11 Contradictorily, then, it precisely the breakup of the old estates under land reform—a peasant demand backed by the socialist state—that allows Toro to begin to (re)accumulate land:

A los dos años, Aliro Toro era dueño de más de cinco mil hectáreas de rulo, de escaso valor, en verdad, pero que, sin embargo, constituyeron su capital semilla. Porque esas tierras, seguramente sobretasadas, constituyeron la hipoteca que adquirió la cadena de supermercados, su primera gran vaca lechera, su cash cow, como le explicarían después a él mismo expertos financieros como Mempo Taburinini, cuando el volume de sus negocios lo llevó a contratar técnicos como él. (loc. 658).

(After two years, Aliro Toro owned more than 5,000 hectares of barren land that reality wasn’t worth that much, but that nevertheless formed/constituted his seed capital. Because those lands, surely overtaxed (or overvalued?), constituted the mortgage that acquired the supermarket chain, his first cash cow, as Mempo Taburinini would explain to him later, after the high volume of his transactions had led him to hire financial experts.)

The quantity of land Toro acquires, 5,000 hectares, is astounding, especially if we consider that the Popular Unity reforms had tried to break up estates over 80 hectares. As social scientists have documented, land reform sets in motion a process by which land could be broken up under socialism and reconcentrated under neoliberalism to reach levels exceeding even that of the previous estate system, which had long been vilified for its inequity.11 So while some landowners—like Pelayo’s family—lose wealth and power, others—as exemplified by Toro—are able reconstitute landholdings, and use them as ‘seed capital’ once conditions are ripe, under the Pinochet dictatorship, for new investments. In the process of historical transformation, the estate system ceases to exist (to become a fully capitalist agriculture); with this, the social structure rooted in resident landowner and semi-bound peon (inquilino) is finally sundered.

11 Riesco, for example, writes: “En este sentido, la Reforma Agrarai como un todo, incluyendo su culminacion fascista, si se compara con la situacion existente en el campo en 1965, puede considerarse una verdadera revolucion capitalista, y , como tal, progresiva en relacion al antiguo regimen de inquilinaje y haciendas.” (70)

12 Whereas Pelayo experiences this transformation as loss, Aliro Toro (as his ultra-masculine surname not so subtly suggests) sees this as opportunity. The previously limited agricultural world allows a leap into “seed capital” and “cash cows”, language that reflects the landowner’s full leap into a type of capital accumulation driven by finance.12 This of course means that he is no longer a landowner in the previous sense. In addition to buying land, banks, supermarkets and bottling plants, he acquires heavily capitalized export-agriculture installations, which, importantly, he never visits:

Toro nunca visitaba los parronales ni tampoco las granjas marinas donde se desarrollaban sus cultivos de salmones y tollos de exporación. Prefería mantenerse a distancia y no dejarse embrollar por la corporeidad de esos procesos productivos que, en la mente del financista, son únicamente otro tipo de pagarés. Le gustaba que el objeto de su pasión tomara formas abstractas.” 535

(He never visited his grape arbors or the marine farms where he cultivated salmon and dogfish for export. He preferred to maintain a distance, and not let himself become embroiled in the corporeality of those productive processes, which, in the mind of the financier, are only another type of IOU. He liked the object of his passion to assume abstract forms.)

To see the land would be to become embroiled in the productive process; instead, he prefers to remain in the realm of the ideal and intangible. As Alessandro Fornazzari writes:

The notion of abstraction that begins to emerge here refers to an emptying of stable substances and their unifying identifications…; an immateriality of the commodity…; and the quality of endless transferability. From the cycle of revolutions—the agrarian reform being one of the most important—that led to the collapse of the old oligarchic order emerges a new capitalist regime that recodifies, under the banner of abstraction, older forms of commodities and commodity relations (50).

Fornazzari insightfully points to the way in which Aliro Toro emerges from the ashes of the old order to embrace fictitious capital in the neoliberal era. What I want to emphasize here is the

12 Aliro Toro’s own last name might point to this transition from agriculture to Wall-Street- driven finance (as in the English expression ‘bull market’)

13 fact that in order to tell the story of capitalist transition, Fontaine focuses so resolutely on the divergent paths of members of this old guard. The melancholic Pelayo Fernández loses land

(and a sense of importance), but retains a sizeable cultural capital he puts to work in an emerging creative economy. And Aliro Toro, paradoxically empowered by revolution, is able to awaken, at least on a symbolic level, the speculating soul of the nineteenth-century landowner, long associated with non-productive rent and fictitious capital, to make a leap into the future.

In this, Aliro Toro is a much more suitable figure for the rise of finance capitalism than, say, the son of the twentieth-century industrialist, associated with production and the protection of national markets. And even though it is true that it is precisely the son of one of those twentieth-century industrialists who weathers the banking crisis at the end of the novel,

Fontaine treats Toro as the catalyst for the financial boom. He is destructive, but he is also cast as daring, almost noble. He is, at bottom I think, a key figure in the restoration of class power, private property, and the setting loose of fictitious capital.

If, as noted earlier, the novel adopts a landowner perspective of history in marking socialist land reform as the traumatic moment for Pelayo, with Aliro Toro it plots financialization as a continuation of landowner history. In Fontaine’s novel, the story of financialization cannot be told without recourse to this class. Even though the novel ends with the ‘defeat’ of the former landowners (with Aliro in jail, and Pelayo as melancholic as ever), their protagonism gestures, perhaps, toward the fundamentally restorative class project of the dictatorship. In the novel’s backward- and forward-looking temporality, the novel points to the success of the capitalist counter-revolution against socialism as a foregone conclusion. Class conflict (the motor of history under the Unidad Popular) is absent from Oír su voz, whose realist

14 vision is limited to the intra-class jockeying for the spoils of (re)privatization and financialization in the neoliberal dictatorship.13 Fontaine’s novel gestures toward the particular suitability of the landowning class as representatives of this shift, marking simultaneously a return to non- productive forms of wealth (rents or fictitious capital), and the emergence of something new

(mechanized agro-industry, business groups). The landowner’s ghost, that is, animates contemporary capitalist structures in Oír su voz. It is perhaps in this sense that the novel’s title becomes meaningful, as the simultaneously melancholic and parasitic ghost of landowner history.

II. The Oligarchy in the Mirror: Anti-Communist Counter-Insurgency and Financialization in El Salvador

Like Fontaine’s Oír su voz, the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel La diabla en el espejo (2000) tells the story of capitalist transition by way of a landowning class transformed by revolution and counter-revolution, and reconfigured by finance-driven modes of accumulation. As in the case of Fontaine, the action of Castellanos Moya’s novel reaches its climax with a banking crisis, in this case a veiled reference to the crisis of 1996. But unlike

Fontaine’s ‘financial realism’, which as I argued naturalizes the class restoration of the Pinochet dictatorship, providing only a critique of the lingering moral conservatism of the new order, La diabla, denaturalizes this new world through registers of excess, hyperbole, and paranoia. At the core of this shift is a change in narrative perspective: while Oír su voz is narrated

13 Along these lines, the most potent site of novel’s critique is moral –not with respect to finance, though, but rather in relation to the Catholic prohibition of divorce, which is what ultimately prevents Pelayo from reuniting with Adelaida. (The conflict at the heart of the novel is, again, not rooted in class, but in what Fontaine views as a contradiction between an ‘open’ economy and ‘traditional’ moral values.

15 omnisciently, La diabla is narrated by a member of the oligarchy itself, a woman named Laura, a move, that as I’ll argue below, allows for a much more potent critique of class transition under neoliberalism.

The action of La diabla takes place in the mid-1990s, shortly after the signing of the peace accords that ended the decade long civil war between the Salvadoran state and Leftist guerillas. The premise is that Laura’s childhood friend, Olga Maria, has recently been killed in her home by a hit man in front of her two young daughters. Opening immediately after Olga

María’s murder, the novel takes the form of a long monologue, as Laura addresses an unnamed female interlocutor, addressed only as “niña” or “girl” (rendered as ‘dear’ in English translation) in an attempt to make sense of Olga Maria’s death. Each of the nine chapters is composed by a single, uninterrupted paragraph of Laura’s speech. Breathless, disorganized and seemingly unhierarchized, her musings employ a highly feminized register of breathlessness and volubility, shifting direction several times in the space of a few lines. As an example, here is Laura, in the first chapter, chatting at the wake as Olga María’s cadaver arrives:

“Eramos las mejores amigas, desde la Escuela Americana, te imaginás, hace veintitrés años. Ahí la traen ya, al fin. Vení, acompáñame, a ver cómo quedó. Mirá que arreglos florales más preciosos; éste es de la compañía de publicidad de Marito. Te lo dije, niña, era el mejor vestido, se ve tan preciosa, la han arreglado muy bien, hasta el hoyito en la sien casi no se le nota.” (14)

We were best friends, have been ever since we started at the American School— imagine that, twenty-three years ago. Finally, they’re bringing her out. Com on, come with me, let’s see how she looks. Look at those gorgeous flower arrangements: Marito’s advertising agency sent them over. I told you that’s her best dress—don’t you think she looks gorgeous, they did a good job on her, you can barely even see the hole in her head. (5)

16 In a clear parody of oligarchic femininity, Laura is so taken by the make-up artist’s success in covering the bullet hole in her best friend’s head that she seems to forget for a moment that she is dead. As if remembering, Laura drops the vacuous chatter for a moment to note, “Son unos hijos de puta, habría que matarlos a todos,” (Those sons of bitches, those cowards, they should all be killed) before immediately noting: “Mirá el peinado qué lindo le ha quedado…”

(Doesn’t her hair look great?) (14; 5).

The model of femininity parodied here and throughout the novel is simultaneously decorative and openly fascistic, a mixture that gives historical texture to a representation that might otherwise easily fall into casual sexism.14 For Laura is a gendered representative of a particular class formation: El Salvador’s notorious “14 families,” the name given to the handful of families that dominated the country’s economy and politics for much of the 20th century.

This oligarchy rose to prominence in the 19th century with coffee, and later other agro-exports

(such as sugarcane and cotton), presiding over one of the most unequal distributions of land in

Latin America. After a peasant- and communist-led insurgency in 1932, this class ran the state by military proxy for the next half century to defeat any attempt at reform, earning them the reputation as one of the most reactionary oligarchies in the region (no small feat!).15 During

14 Castellanos Moya’s representation of Laura reminds me of the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel’s parodies white, upper class and profoundly reactionary model of femininity that became an ideological pillar of the Pinochet regime, in figures like the Chilean Miss Universe Cecilia Bolocco and the actress-turned-politician Raquel Argandoña; see De perlas y citactrices. 15 The first major event that constitutes the historical character of this class formation is La Matanza of 1932, in which the Salvadoran army massacred between 10 and 40 thousand peasants, indigenous people and communists to quell rebellion in the countryside. After this, the oligarchy opposed all manner of reform for 50 years, which is widely recognized as the primary cause of the civil war in the 1980s. This oligarchy was so reactionary that even the Salvadoran military broke away to enact land reform in 1979 (a last-ditch effort to contain the civil war), to ire of its former patrons. Even the U.S.—heavily invested in containing the

17 the civil war between socialists and the military, El Salvador’s infamous ultra-right death squads emerged out of their ranks. Hence the offhand manner in which Laura says that ‘they should all be killed,’ should therefore not be taken lightly, especially when couched in seemingly innocent chatter about her dead best friend’s dress and hairdo.

The effectiveness of La diabla’s representation of post-war El Salvador depends upon its adoption of the perspective of a female member of the 14 families, an oligarchy that, as we’ll see shortly, has largely abandoned coffee production in the post war period to become retail magnates, advertising executives and financiers. If the omniscient realist voice employed by

Fontaine in Oír su voz served to naturalize the bases of “reality” in neoliberal Chile, the adoption of Laura’s skewed first-person perspective denaturalizes and destabilizes that reality.

Here I am inspired by Roberto Schwarz’s reading of the great 19th-century Brazilian author

Machado de Assis, who was able to move past the impasses of the period’s realism by adopting the perspective of the slaveowning elite, a shift that allowed “a complete, intimate exposure of the very viewpoint it ostensibly adopted” (Schwarz 47). Castellanos Moya’s adoption of an upper-class perspective works in a similar fashion, allowing full and intimate access into the seemingly limitless social depredations of post-war El Salvador.16

communist threat—opposed the oligarchs as backward, and shifted support to factions of the military and Christian Democrats. See Velásquez. 16 Schwarz maintains that Machado de Assis dismantled realism while remaining a realist, an observation that holds true for Castellanos Moya’s attempt to create a vision of social totality in post-war El Salvador. Along these lines, Weisner calls Castellanos Moya’s project—which comprises some X novels—‘almost Balzaquian’ in his use of recurring characters and settings. Indeed, novels, read together, create social map of postwar El Salvador. Different forms simultaneously point to the radical fragmentation and decentering of this society, and its ultimate intelligibility by way of a longer historical durée. In his twelve novels to date, we can point to novels like El Asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997), the disaffected first- person narrative of an exiled intellectual who has returned to El Salvador after several years;

18 The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño once stated that Horacio Castellanos Moya is “the only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that

Latin America was for a long time.”17 And Laura’s voice is indeed steeped in this Cold War history, and cannot escape it. At first glance, the novel situates us in the hyper-present of a triumphant neoliberalism, full of references to the shiny new malls, boutiques, restaurants and advertising agencies that characterize the “New” (post-war and neoliberal) El Salvador. Take, for example, Laura’s appraisal of a new mall. “Han dejado bien lindo ese centro commercial.

Lo que no me gusta es ese caserón colonial que quedó en medio; lo huieran botato: un chipuste horrible, rodeado de tiendas lindas y modernas.” (63) (They did a good job on that mall, except for that big old colonial mansion they left right in the middle; they should have torn it down; such a crummy old dump surrounded by all those pretty, modern stores (52). And yet it is precisely Laura who—in the midst of this ‘pretty and modern’ present can’t stop talking about the bloody Cold War past, and its reverberations in the present. Even as she frequents a

Baile con serpientes (1996), a fantastic tale about an unemployed sociologist who rides around the capital in a Chevrolet full of talking snakes, killing everyone in their wake; and Tirana memoria, a more traditionally realist novel set during the fall of the dictator Hernández Martínez in 1944. 17 It should be noted here that Bolaño himself turns to oligarchic perspective to unlock this history of anti-communist counterinsurgency and counterrevolution in Nocturno de Chile (2000). The novel takes the form of a single-paragraph, delirious deathbed internal monologue of the Opus Dei priest and literary critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a character in turn modeled on José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, better known by his pseudonym Ignacio Valente. Like his historical inspiration, Urrutia Lacroix hails from Chile’s landowning oligarchy; after the 1973 coup, he becomes a tutor in Marxism to Pinochet (who wants to understand how his enemies think). Bolaño’s novel thus conjoins the landowning oligarchy, the Church, literary institutions and the military to tell the story of the Pinochet counterrevolution. It is worth noting that Nocturno de Chile bears striking formal similarities with La diabla: the oligarchic monologue transmits a skewed, partial and delirious vision of transition that nonetheless gives glimpse of larger historical processes. In both novels, this limited perspective allows the brutal history of counterrevolution to be experienced in a delusional mode.

19 French bistro because ‘una se siente como si no estuviera en San Salvador” (81), (you don’t feel like you’re in San Salvador, 73) for example, she can’t avoid mentioning that its owner is Mirna

Leiva, from a coffee family, who during the war fell in with the communists and was tortured and raped by security forces. This act that makes Laura shudder with disgust before noting that

“Papa says they don’t arrest anybody for no reason, Mirna must have been involved in something” (79). Through such acts of forgetting and remembering, or erasure and resurrection of the Cold War past, the disorderly fragments that constitute Laura’s monologue thus provide access to a larger story of historical transition in El Salvador.

The form taken by this story is a first person monologue, a form that immediately calls to mind—if only to debase it—the most famous literary genre to emerge from Central America in the 1980s: testimonio (Kokotovic). This genre is credited as the first to give voice to poor, rural, subjects, often indigenous and female, whose stories had long been excluded from lettered discourse in Latin America. The most famous of these is of course, Rigoberta Menchú’s

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), which tells the story of the

Guatemalan army’s genocide against indigenous people (carried out in the name of counter- insurgency) from the perspective of one of its survivors, a Maya-Kiché woman. In El Salvador,

Manlio Argueta’s testimonial novel like Un día en la vida (1980), is the first-person narrative of a rural woman whose husband is arrested and killed by the military for organizing against the landowner he worked for. In the post-war period, Horacio Castellanos Moya perverts this genre by telling a first-person story from the perspective of victors and perpetrators. In La

Diabla, it is the vacuously oligarchic woman who goes about life in an El Salvador of malls, bistros and SUVs. In a subsequent novel, El arma en el hombre (The Weapon in the Man, 2001),

20 the first-person story of Olga Maria’s killer, nicknamed “Robocop”, the anti-testimony is narrated former member of the Salvadoran army’s special counter-insurgency forces, turned into a private hit man in the postwar period. On a very basic level, this perversion of testimonio posits the death of this genre as concomitant with the death of national-popular and revolutionary struggles in Central America—a horizon of world-historical revolutionary potential in the 1980s—as the region brokered a ‘peace’ fully predicated upon its absorption into global capitalism.18

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ‘anti-testimonial’ mode thus expresses, in a grotesque fashion, a class victory, and the successful blockage of the revolutionary possibility from which testiminio emerged. The two sectors most responsible for this blockage—the oligarchy and the

U.S.-supported military—are each given their own novel. This victory, in turn, opens onto the employment of a second genre employed in La diabla en el espejo: detective fiction. This is a genre that, as several critics have already examined, has flourished in post-Cold War, neoliberal societies. As Fredric Jameson was perhaps the first to note, for the US context, detective fiction represents an ideological and epistemological decentering in capitalism (Raymond Chandler’s

LA), a decentering that reaches new heights in a context like post-war San Salvador.19 We know that the hit man Robocop (whose name conjures the contribution of the United States military to the civil war) is a former soldier; demobilized in the postwar present, however, as he has become a hit man for hire, in an instance of what Jean Franco has called “the privatization of atrocity” in contemporary Latin America. In La diabla, we do not know who has hired Robocop

18 Cf Robinson, Kissinger report of 1984 already lays this out clearly.

19 Recent interest in detective fiction in Latin America. See Close, Kokotovic, Chinchilla. (More here)

21 to kill Olga María, or why. The politically decentered and radically privatized social context generates, on a very basic level, the need for detection. Along the same lines, it is significant that La diabla, as detective novel focuses entirely on conflicts within the victorious class (and not, as in the previous era, on revolution), bringing to mind Benjamin’s observation that the original setting for detective fiction is the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior, linking the genre fundamentally with class criminality.20

To this degree, it is important that Laura’s monologue focuses on Olga María’s secret affairs with members of her closed social circle to provide clues to the murder. The characters considered include a Spanish emigrant, nicknamed “Julio Iglesias”, who works for Olga Maria’s husband’s advertising firm; a photographer, ‘medio comunista pero de buena familia,’ (who returns to El Salvador after the War, (34), Laura’s own ex-husband Alberto, the owner of an investment firm (more on this later); and El Yuca, the owner of mega-stores and rising politician. Through these stories we never learn who killed Laura—though more clues are provided in Castellanos Moya’s companion novel El arma en el hombre—but we do get a

20 For Benjamin, the nineteenth-century detective genre follows the ‘traces’ of private individuals in the bourgeois interior, noting that “(t)he criminals of the first detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private members of the bourgeoisie” (156). The element of class criminality associated with detective fiction resurfaces in La diabla as well as in other novels: for example, as mentioned earlier, Laura Restrepo’s Delirio , the mystery converges around an oligarchic family’s involvement in the drug trade in 1980s Colombia. Other novelslocate the murder mystery in a physically closed upper-class milieu (another variation on Benjamin’s interior): in Patricia Lara’s novel Hilo de sangre azul (2009), the suicide-murder mystery unfolds in a luxury condominium; similarly, Claudia Piñeiro’s Las viudas de los jueves (2005), the murder takes place in a gated community outside Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crash. In Lara’s novel, the mystery is resolved through a Ponzi scheme; in Piñeiro’s, by way of a life insurance scheme concocted by executives ruined by the 2001 economic crisis. On these upper-class milieus as variations of trope of the ‘locked room’ in contemporary Latin American detective fiction, see Chinchilla.

22 picture of a transition, as outlined below, from a landed to a financial oligarchy; and, as a corollary, from an oligarchic unity of purpose against revolution in the cold war period to intra- class competition (figured as betrayal and murder) in the postwar neoliberal order.

The story of El Yuca is emblematic of the remaking of the Salvadoran oligarchy in the crucible of scorched earth counter-insurgency and economic liberalization. At Olga María’s wake, El Yuca arrives, and Laura reminisces about how he and her friend’s high school romance:

“hacían una pareja perfecta, los dos guapísimos…” (37) (They would have made the perfect couple, both so good-looking, 30). Today, he is a powerful politician, rumored to be named a candidate for the presidency soon. Dismissing rumors that el Yuca married the daughter of retail magnate to boost his political career, Laura says he had no choice but to get involved in politics:

“fue porque le quitaron todas las fincas de su familia, yo me acuerdo, niña, allá por el comienzo de la Guerra. El Yuca ya estaba a la par del mayor Le Chevalier, dando la cara contra los comunistas, nada le han regalado, al contrario, el hombre se ha fajado para llegar a donde está, por eso don Federico le ha echado el hombro” (38)

it was because they took all his family’s fincas, I remember it well, my dear, right at the beginning of the war, Yuca was up there with Major LeChevalier, taking a stand against the communists. He hasn’t had anything handed to him on a silver platter, on the contrary, that man has worked like a dog to get where he is, that’s why Don Federico lent him a hand (31).

Once again, as in Oír su voz, it is paradoxically agrarian reform—in El Salvador carried out by the military regime as a last-ditch hedge against socialist rebellion, to the ire of landowners—that allows the landed oligarchy to remake itself under a new model of accumulation. As in Chile, El Salvador’s short-lived land reform is credited with crushing what

23 remained of agrarian elites.21 But once again, fiction represents how land reform, rather than destroying the oligarchy, allows it to be reborn under neoliberal reform. First, during the war,

El Yuca joins LeChevalier (a thinly veiled allusion to Roberto D’Aubisson, the ultra-right founder of death squads and the political party ARENA) to fight against communism, then crosses over in peacetime to become a politician and retailer.

As in Oír su voz, in one moment land reform cripples the old oligarchic system, while in the next, a period counter-revolution followed by neoliberal restructuring allows the former landowner to reconstitute himself as a full-fledged capitalist. In the Salvadoran novel, the expropriated landowner becomes a death squad leader to do his part in the blocking of revolution; once the peace arrives, he cloaks himself in the legitimacy of electoral democracy, and takes full advantage of opportunities to accumulate in a privatized and deregulated market.

This performance is never quite fully legitimate, however: there are human rights groups after him (Laura’s strenuous disavowal of his crimes leaves no doubt as to their truth); and as we learn from Laura’s report on his affair with Olga Maria, he is a cocaine addict, and totally erratic in his behavior.

Through Yuca we can see that the former oligarchy is forced out of its historical role in agro-export production (coffee, cotton, sugar) by land reform; out of violent counterinsurgency, in the form of death squads and the like, followed by neoliberal reform, arise new opportunities. This time, however, these opportunities are not in the production of commodities, but in non-productive ventures like retail, advertising, insurance, real estate, and, most importantly, finance.

21 See Robinson.

24 The oligarchy in La Diabla has all but abandoned coffee, the commodity that had come to define this class historically. Significantly, Laura’s father is the only character in the novel that remains committed to coffee, a move Laura herself explains as sheer stubbornness.

Because anyone any sense knows that the era of coffee is over: “Owning coffee plantations isn’t what it used to be, there’s one setback after another these days, first the communists taking them over and not allowing the harvest, and now the drop in prices. That’s why Doña

Olga was right to get rid of them, it was for the best. My father should do the same, and I’ve told him so, but he’s pigheaded, very attached to his land. Hey, look who just arrived…”(23)

Between internal obstacles (communist peasants) and external ones (the fall of export crops since the 1970s), planting coffee just isn’t worth it anymore. In the novel, when Doña

Olga and other former landowners sell their coffee farms, they invest the profits in the financial sector: namely, an investment firm managed by Laura’s ex-husband Alberto (with whom, Laura discovers, Olga María also had an affair). This investment firm, named Finapro, serves as a referent for a major shift toward finance in the Salvadoran economy after the war: massive

U.S. military spending in the 1980s, coupled with the privatization of previously state-owned banks, provided ample opportunities for the oligarchy to abandon agriculture for good. As a result, the sociologist Velásquez Carrasco notes, the previous agro-export oligarchy became “a rigid oligopy contolled by a handful of financial enterprises”(page). Or, as newspaper articles have announced, the 14 families have been reconfigured into 8 business groups owned by the descendants of this class, and bearing their names: Solá, Hill, Llach, etc.22

22 On the 14 Families as 8 business groups: http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/internacional/56827.html. Also, FINAPRO in the novel is most likely based in the case of the collapse of the investment firm Finapre.

25 La diabla en el espejo incorporates this historical shift into its plot, but also into its formal organization, in two ways: first, through a vision of the new oligarchy as a Ponzi scheme; and second, through Laura’s own voice, which experiences as breakdown precisely at the moment of financial collapse. Finapro dramatizes a massive shift in accumulation patterns in postwar El Salvador, from production to circulation, and from an export-oriented capitalism to one that is driven by transnational finance, as Padilla and others have already pointed out. The social setting of La diabla is hence defined not only by ideological decentering, but also by a particularly financial form of instability. The climax of the novel comes as Laura learns of the collapse of the investment firm. She calls ex-husband Alberto to tell him she knows about his affair with her dead best friend; he tells her that he has bigger things to worry about--all of

Finapro’s money is gone. Laura, stunned, tells her friend: ‘it just can be that all that money’s been lost, money just doesn’t disappear from one day to the next”(138). To the murder mystery the novel adds another, that of money itself. Laura’s father, the last coffee planter in the novel’s milieu, notes that ‘he’d been expecting this, it was impossible for them to be paying twenty-two percent annually when the banks were paying ten, there had to be something shady going on” (140). Here, the reconfiguration of the oligarchy as financial class takes a specific form under contemporary capitalism: the Ponzi scheme. While Laura marvels that

”everyone” had money in FINAPRO—from Olga María’s mother, to military officials ‘who made millions during the war’, to the Archbishop—these are precisely the closed, incestuous relationships that permitted the investment firm to create fictitious capital in the first place.

26 Huge gains are possible, in fact 22% as long as everyone believes, but these gains evaporate when belief can no longer be maintained (as inevitably occurs in the context of a larger crisis).23

The oligarchy, unmoored from land, is best figured in La diabla as a group of investors in a Ponzi scheme. This attests to the incestuous character of the elite as they make a new leap into transnational finance. It also attests to the fact that this class, in selling off coffee farms, has largely abandoned production itself. A startling statistic illustrates this shift: according to

Velasquez Carrillo, in 1978, 81% of foreign earnings came from the agro-export sector. But in

2004, this had been reduced to a mere 5% of foreign earnings, while worker remittances had come to occupy 70%, thus becoming the new pillar of the Salvadoran economy (10).

Herein lies another secret of the oligarchic turn toward finance in the 1990s. In the post war period, windfall profits from the privatization of banks greased the wheels of an emerging financial complex, while—as a direct result of scorched earth counter-insurgency and austerity—masses of workers, many of them former peasants, were expelled into labor markets in the United States (the very country that financed the war). And while the source of the

23 Olga María’s murder and the financial fraud, in turn, open onto a larger criminal conspiracy in La diabla. For it is rumored that Toñito Rathis, the owner of Finapro, is in debt to the Cali cocaine cartel. The oligarchy’s connections to narco-trafficking are further explored in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s subsequent novel, El arma en el hombre, narrated from the perspective of Olga Maria’s killer, Robocop, in which Toñito and El Yuca reemerge as the leaders of two rival drug gangs. In these two novels, narco-trafficking emerges not only, as Carlos Monsiváis once remarked, as “the highest representation of criminality in neoliberalism,” but more specifically, the highest representation of class criminality. The penultimate section of El arma take place in poppy fields owned by El Yuca, aka “El Tío Pepe,” revealing the remaking of the landed oligarchy by way of narco-trafficking. (Also, if there is any productive base in the gutted Salvadoran economy, it is not in maquilas, as neoliberal reformers had hoped for, but in poppy production!)

27 money is not directly represented in the novel, migrant worker remittances are present in ghostly form in their conversion into fictitious capital.

And so the role of the reconstituted oligarchy represented in La diabla becomes even more perverse, if this were possible, wherein direct control over workers (the patriarchal agricultural economy) morphs into a transnational arrangement wherein the oligarchy skim profits from the labor that scorched earth and austerity expelled from the country. This deep and perverse history is itself present in Laura’s own voice, which as noted serves as a temporal bridge between the Cold War and the commodity ‘now’. The Cold War strains of Laura’s voice give way, in turn, to a voice that bridges a transition from an economy rooted in production to one rooted in circulation.24

This transition is rife with opportunities but also dangers, as present in the collapse of the investment firm. Laura (who might not be as vacuous as we are led to believe) comes to think that her friend’s murder and the financial fraud are related. “What if Olga Maria and

Alberto were still seeing each other and she found out what was happening with Finapro? …It was like I saw a blinding light. I felt this terrible dread, as if my discovery, that I’d solved the case, could cost me my life” (141). As if to confirm her possible insights, her father, to whom she relates her theory, simply tells her to keep her mouth shut. After the chapter in which she convinces herself that she has discovered the true cause of her friend’s death, Laura becomes increasingly paranoid and unhinged. In a chapter entitled “The Stampede,” Laura’s long- winded and meandering musings give way to short, staccato sentences enclosed by multiple

24 Other critics, such as Padilla, have already pointed to the transition from agriculture to circulation in La diabla’s plot; I want to emphasize that the transition extends into Laura’s voice, and hence the novel’s very form.

28 exclamation points, in which she becomes convinced that Olga Maria’s killer, Robocop, is outside her door. In the following and final chapter, “The Clinic,” we find out that Laura has been interned for a paranoid-schizoid episode, as we learn that the friend she has been addressing throughout the novel doesn’t exist.

This resolution frustrates the aim of the detective genre: we don’t find out who killed

Olga Maria—this seems impossible to know, given the opacity of social relations in the current era, an opacity that is linked at once to the previous era of brutality (death squads and counter- insurgency) El Salvador and to the mysteriousness of transnational finance in the contemporary era. Laura’s voice bridges these two moments, a work of suturing that can only be expressed as madness and paranoia. Not accidentally, this representation is rooted in a long history (in both

Europe and the Americas) that casts financial instability as particularly feminine in character; what saves the representation from casual sexism is the fact that this oligarchic model of femininity does provide unique insights into the history of this class, and into its chief contradictions. The decorativeness and vacuity of Laura’s femininity is historical, with practical and ideological functions: to cement social relations (they are the “14 families” after); to justify class privilege (often through a discourse of race); and to provide a veneer of beauty and respectability in the midst of unrelenting repression and inequality. But in contemporary El

Salvador—in the aftermath of Cold War massacres and in the midst of financial crises without end—this performance of decorative femininity itself comes under pressure and begins to crack. Unmoored from ‘family,’ from land, and from production itself, the oligarchy looks at itself in a shattered mirror, reflecting the image of Laura. This image, in turn, is one that emerges from on-going processes of social disintegration, with no end in sight. By restricting

29 the novel to the narrow focus of a self-cannibalizing oligarchy, Castellanos Moya allows us to see how the unending depredations visited upon El Salvador today—high murder rates, rampant poverty, massive forced migration—are themselves perpetrated by a specific class structure with a brutal history.

30