Narco-literature genre emerges from Latin America's culture of drug-fueled violence

Its success lies in it being fiction taken from real life stories, says Roberto Herrera, lecturer in literature at Guadalajara University, Mexico. Speaking at the Third Festival of Crime Fiction, this month, to Mexican Medios UDG, a Guadalajara media organisation. Narco-literature reflects the violence that people live out in their daily lives, he told them.

Mendoza, winner of the Premio Tusquets de Novela, 2007, agrees. Violence for Latin Americans, he told Spanish newspaper, El País, "Is not something exotic, but a daily reality." And violence these days often means drug trafficking. Nowhere is this clearer than in Colombia where the genre first took hold. Novels dealing both with the fights between different drug gangs and government officials set the precedent. And as violence linked to drug trafficking spread through Latin America narco-literature went with it.

"Overnight, all of the elements of an eccentric and harrowing thriller arrived on the table of the Latin American writers," says Mexican writer and scholar, Jorge Volpi. Latin American writers "hurried to incorporate drug dealers into their texts, first as a backdrop then as the centre of the action." The traffickers acquired an almost "mythic aura," he said, speaking last year to an audience at the University of Rochester, USA. Stories tell of poverty stricken adolescents struggling up through the ranks of drug gangs, of young hit men, as portrayed in Colombian writer, Fernando Vallejo's novel, La Virgin de los Sicarios, (Our Lady of the Assassins), of women more beautiful than any other and of the police; underpaid and almost always corrupt.

And corruption and drug trafficking go hand in hand as Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramírez, shows in, El cielo llora por mí, (The Heavens weep for me). A novel about a drug network spanning Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in which, corruption is everywhere and where nobody is innocent. When asked if the novel mirrors real life Ramírez said, "Complicity with drug cartels is everywhere," he told ListinDiario, a newspaper from the Dominican Republic, "among attorney generals, judges and magistrates."

Writer and director of the annual Mexican literary festival, La Semana Negra, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, thinks the same. "Corruption is an iceberg," he told El País, "Both journalism and social sciences have a hard job explaining what is happening underneath. Most of the time they only write about the part they can see. Crime fiction tells the whole story."

This style of fiction is a world away from the Latin American style of magical realism, with its tales of morality and fairy stories, seen in literature such as Gabriel García Márquez's, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The contemporary novel finds its influence in westerns and films such as The Godfather and Pulp Fiction. And writers draw on what is happening around them. Dictators have fallen out of favour, says Volpi, what interests them now is, "the enemies of the system, the criminal bands and drug dealers that are waging war against the state and their rivals."

Narco-literature, "teaches no lessons, passes no moral judgements and is barely an instrument of criticism," he continues. There are only, "gunmen confronted with existential emptiness, pathetic heroes and villains, who are difficult to distinguish from each other."

A sentiment echoed by Colombian writer Mario Mendoza author of Satanás (Satan), made into a film by Colombian director, Andrés Baiz. "There are no bad nor good guys, he told El País, "As a writer you make a mistake by writing in terms of heroes or villains. Everyone is a bad guy."

But for some members of the public it is not only the characters of narco-literature who are the bad guys, it's the writers. Drug traffickers have gone mainstream. No longer are they just constrained to Mexican ballads. They are now regular stars not only in books but also in films and soap operas. And with this new found popularity comes concern. Groups such as, No more Narco books in Colombia and No more Violence nor Narco Books on Facebook, talk about social responsibility and the danger of glorifying violence and drug traffickers. Writing on, No more Narco Books, Series and Films, one member said, "With all the damage that drug trafficking has done us, television now wants to glorify it. They want to damage us with more and more violence."

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