ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
Title of Dissertation:  LIMINAL CRIMINALITY IN POST-CONFLICT 
CENTRAL AMERICAN CRIME FICTION  
 
    Kayla Jean Watson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 
 
 
Dissertation directed by:  Dr. Ana Patricia Rodríguez 
    Department of Spanish and Portuguese 
 
 
In his article, “Historia Negra, Novela Negra,” Nicaraguan author, critic, and 
recipient of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Sergio Ramírez reflects on the critical 
and political potential of the crime fiction genre in Latin America, and specifically, in 
Central America. He comments that, unlike any other literary tradition, detective fiction 
has become a mirror that reflects transnational corruption (np). Considering crime fiction 
as a mirror or mimetic vehicle, as Ramírez suggests, allows us to examine how societies 
are represented through literature and specific genres, to interrogate relations and 
paradigms of power, and to analyze the power of language itself. The crime fiction or 
novela negra genre critiques power dynamics through the dissolution and transgression of 
spatial, temporal, and psychological borders. Taking Ramírez’s quote as my point of 
departure, I argue that crime fiction is the vehicle to critically engage liminal criminality, 
 
which I define as the individual or institutional acts of violence that transgress judicial 
boundaries and procedures, in post-conflict Central American literature. My corpus 
consists of five transnational Central American novels – Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El 
arma en el hombre (2001), Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), Marcos McPeek 
Villatoro’s Minos (2003), Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012), and Jacinta Escudos’ El 
asesino melancólico (2015). In this dissertation, I analyze the novels’ protagonists’ 
liminal criminality, which refers to the ways in which they manipulate their positionality 
as criminals, crime fighters, and victims within current economic and political systems to 
reflect on and contest post-conflict paradigms of power. I examine individuals who are 
neither wholly victim nor criminal, but rather are individuals whose prior victimization 
manifests in displays of acts of violence and criminality in their search for justice. The 
liminally criminal acts include revenge, misuse of investigative tools and extra-judicial 
investigations, extortion, and suicide, among many others. The protagonists’ liminal 
criminality has the power to disrupt hegemonic processes and highlights how institutional 
and political wartime violence is recycled and disarticulates the possibility of achieving 
justice in truly post-conflict period.   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LIMINAL CRIMINALITY IN POST-CONFLICT CENTRAL AMERICAN CRIME 
FICTION 
 
 
 
by  
 
Kayla Jean Watson 
 
 
 
 
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of  
Doctor of Philosophy 
2018 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee:  
 
 Dr. Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Chair 
 Dr. Ralph Bauer 
 Dr. Laura Demaría  
 Dr. Ryan Long 
 Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright by 
 
Kayla Jean Watson 
 
2018 
 
 
ii 
For Carlos 
  
iii 
Acknowledgments 
 
 
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge my support system of family and friends. 
Mom and Dad, thank you for your continual support and encouragement throughout this 
long and difficult journey. Laura Quijano and Chris Lewis, thank you for your friendship, 
solidarity, and motivation, and especially, for joining me this summer in our online 
writing group.  
 
I would like to acknowledge my advisor Dr. Ana Patricia Rodríguez for her support and 
guidance. Thank you for your suggestions, criticism, and assistance in completing this 
project. I also want to acknowledge my dissertation committee, Dr. Ralph Bauer, Dr. 
Laura Demaría, Dr. Ryan Long, and Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh. Thank you for your time and 
participation on my committee and for the feedback that each of you have provided.  
 
During my time at the University of Maryland, I have had the pleasure of working with 
each of you in different capacities. Ralph, thank you for your leadership on the ARHU 
Dean’s Graduate Advisory Board and for providing professional development 
opportunities. Ryan, thank you for your guidance and leadership as both my professor 
and as Director of Graduate Studies. Your feedback and insight have been invaluable 
resources. Laura, thank you for providing opportunities and seminars to discuss 
theoretical texts. Vinodh, thank you for your mentorship, professional and academic 
advice, and for the opportunities to present alongside you at conferences. I have been 
truly humbled to work with and learn from each of you.  
 
  
iiii 
 
Table of Contents 
 
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii 
 
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iii 
 
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 
 
Chapter 1: Cyborg Soldiers and Liminal Criminality in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El 
arma en el hombre (2001) and Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998)…………...33 
 
Chapter 2: Legacies of Violence and Revenge in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier 
(1998)…………………………………………………………………………………….68 
 
Chapter 3: Broken Law, Law Breakers in Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012) and Marcos 
McPeek Villatoro’s Minos (2003)……………………………………………………….99 
 
Chapter 4: Playing the Victim: Liminal Subjectivity in Jacinta Escudo’s El asesino 
melancólico (2015)……………………………………………………………………..137 
 
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...162 
 
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………165 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 
 
Introduction 
 
 In his article, “Historia Negra, Novela Negra,” Nicaraguan author, critic, and 
recipient of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Sergio Ramírez reflects on the critical 
and political potential of the crime fiction genre in Latin America, and specifically, in 
Central America. He comments that, unlike any other literary tradition, the crime fiction 
genre may portray the societies in which we live and la novela negra in particular may 
serve as a mirror representing transnational corruption (np). Considering crime fiction as 
a “mirror,” as Ramírez suggests, allows us to critically examine the ways in which 
societies are reflected, to question relations and paradigms of power, and to analyze the 
power of language itself. In crime fiction, critiques of these power dynamics are 
manifested through the dissolution and transgression of spatial, temporal, and 
psychological borders. According to Lee Horsley “late twentieth-century crime fiction 
has increasingly shown its readers the physical opening of bodies, the psychological 
exposure of damaged minds, and the inscription of personal traumas on the bodies of the 
victims” (112). Taking this quote and series of meditations as my point of departure, I 
argue that crime fiction is a significant discursive vehicle to critically engage questions of 
criminality, or acts of violence and common crime, and liminality. At its core, liminality 
refers at its core to “moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to 
thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and 
imagination, construction and destruction” (Thomassen 1). The post-conflict period in 
Central America may be read as a period of liminality, of political transition, and 
subjective transformation. The period of conflict in Central America spans the decades of 
the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. 
2 
 
This dissertation proposes to illuminate the spaces in which liminal criminality, which I 
define as the individual or institutional acts of violence that transgress judicial boundaries 
and procedures, emerges as a response to the post-conflict conditions of rampant 
unemployment, state-sanctioned corruption, and economic inequalities, among others; or 
rather, it is precisely these conditions of possibility, defined by Frederic Jameson as a 
new way of thinking associated with a specific class or collective position (Valences 
217), that opens the dialogic and discursive space for contemporary crime fiction.  
Rationale and Methodology 
The objectives of this project are two-fold. First, drawing on recent scholarship, 
this project posits the crime fiction genre as a tool for analyzing the lived conditions of 
the post-conflict period through the production of criminal/liminal discursive spaces. 
Second, by decentering U.S.-based transnational readings, this project examines how 
neoliberal subjects reinsert themselves into society’s fabric in order to question mass-
criminalization of fragmented post-conflict subjectivities occupying a multiplicity of 
liminal spaces. The fragmented neoliberal subjects to be analyzed include the criminal 
detective, the post-conflict ex-soldier reincorporated into civilian life, the complicit 
victim, and a range of state-actors. The present research draws from close textual analysis 
of primary source material situated in historical context and framed by theories of 
neoliberalism, liminality, and violence. Following a broad historical overview of the 
armed conflicts in Central America and a discussion of the manifestations of violence in 
crime fiction, especially in the Central American context, I will define the neoliberal 
condition and liminality in the post-conflict period; identify and critique key generic 
elements including the role of the detective, the function of truth-seeking, and the 
3 
 
primary agents of crime vis-à-vis delineating the relationship between perpetrator and 
victim; and briefly outline the dissertation chapters.  
Central to the current project are the broader implications of aesthetic choices in 
contemporary Central American crime fiction published both in the isthmus and outside 
of it. My corpus of texts include Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre 
(2001), Hector Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos 
(2003), Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012), and Jacinta Escudos’ El asesino melancólico 
(2015). I have selected texts produced, for the most part, by Central American diasporic 
writers who not only contend with the legacy of past wars and civil conflicts, but also 
serve as a discursive “hinge” between North and South, as Arturo Arias suggests in 
Taking Their Word. These authors of Central American origin dialogue with one another, 
while remaining conscious of the United States’ presence in terms of language production 
and place of enunciation and publication, in addition to the economic and material aid 
provided during the period of armed conflict. Extending Arias’ metaphor of Central 
Americans as a corporal, imaginary, and discursive hinge, this dialogue emphasizes the 
temporal fluidity of violence and criminality transgressing borders. These components 
provide the extra-literary context which informs my analysis. This brings me to consider 
the following guiding questions for my dissertation: How does the corpus deviate from 
and transgress aesthetic and generic conventions to critically engage the transitional 
period following the decades of armed conflict? In what ways does the corpus question 
the ethics of transgressing both spatial and symbolic borders? How does liminal 
criminality disrupt the institutional, juridical, and neoliberal body politic?  
4 
 
My methodology draws on theories of liminality, first formulated by Arnold ven 
Gennep’s investigation on rites of passage and Victor Turner’s study of rituals, which 
provide a critical lens to examine the procedural nature of the criminal and historical 
investigative practices taking place within the texts. Victor Turner is most credited with 
the revival of van Gennep’s work on transition rites through his study of religious and 
cultural practices alongside the Ndembu tribe in Africa (Thomassen 75). Of particular 
interest to this study is Turner’s key contribution which elucidates the processual form of 
a ritual. The ritualistic and procedural components of investigative practices at stake in 
this dissertation include the fact-finding mission, gathering evidence, techniques of 
interrogation and the subsequent construction of a police report, the actors carrying out 
each of these steps, and the underlying motivation of each actor, among others. Taking 
van Gennep’s and Turner’s iterations as my point of departure, I will identify the key 
moments of the criminal investigations studied here which invert or manipulate the 
formulaic and processual nature. These moments of inversion or manipulation represent 
moments of liminality in the corpus of Central American crime fiction.  
This analysis also draws on Slavoj Žižek’s theories of subjective and systemic 
violence as a framework for understanding the nuanced relationship between individual 
criminal acts and patterns of violence ingrained in society’s fabric. Subjective violence, 
for its part, is defined as “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1), whereas 
systemic violence is classified as “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain 
relationships of domination and exploitation” (9). The subjective violence, or individual 
crimes and acts of violence, constitute the material conditions under investigation in the 
texts, which include murders carried out by individuals known to their victim, by state 
5 
 
actors, and by serial killers, drug trafficking, emotional and physical abuse in domestic 
relationships, and extortion. The patterns of systemic violence which permeate the 
Central American crime fiction texts being analyzed include criminalization of the 
racialized migrant body, discrimination based on ethnicity and sex, corruption of the 
judicial system, and the victimization of classes of individuals at the hands of forced 
conscription into the military, among others. Liminal criminality, therefore, refers to the 
ways in which the text’s protagonists manipulate their positionality within the current 
economic and political systems to address questions stemming from the period of armed-
conflict. Specifically, I refer to individuals who are neither wholly victim nor criminal, 
but rather to individuals whose prior victimization manifests in displays of acts of 
violence and criminality in their search for justice. I suggest that this structural 
manipulation is liminal precisely due to its power to disrupt hegemonic processes and 
shed light on the bodies occupying the interstices between subjective and systemic 
violence. These theoretical frameworks provide the critical toolbox to engage the Central 
American historical context and to elucidate the patterns of criminality which emerge as a 
direct response to the conditions of armed-conflict.  
Many historical and literary critics alike have noted how the conditions produced 
by the civil wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador have created discursive and 
performative spaces through which one can critically engage notions of subjective and 
systemic violence. In the collection Post-Conflict Literature, Stefanie Lehner emphasizes 
the potentiality that artistic interventions possess: “Artistic intervention, essentially, is a 
form of displacement – a disruption of one order of sensibility and the creation of a new 
dispensation. It is about the unveiling of power structures that create and maintain 
6 
 
regimes of understanding but also the reversal and undoing of those logics” (33). Read 
through Jameson’s theorization of the conditions of possibility alongside the displacing 
nature of artistic intervention, crime fiction provides a productive space to directly 
challenge systemic violence given the genre’s inherent relationship to processes of 
investigation, interrogation and justice. Recognizing war as a liminal experience, Maria 
Mälksoo also views the post-war experience as liminal; or rather, “the process of 
reconstruction can, in turn, be conceived of as a rite of reaggregation – the beginning of 
coming to terms with the experience of a major collapse of the existing order, healing 
wounds, and moving on” (236). It is no surprise then that victims of war time violence 
and perpetrators of war crimes enter the post-war period as liminal criminals. As such, 
post-conflict Central American crime fiction engages questions of criminality, 
victimization, and the transition to the post-conflict period. Even though this project does 
not directly engage texts from Belize, Honduras, or Panama, one could draw parallels 
given the shared socio-historical and political contexts.  
  In Understanding Central America, Booth et al. trace key historical, political, 
and revolutionary moments throughout the isthmus, indicating how waves of state terror, 
revolutionary insurrection, counterrevolution and foreign intervention engulfed the 
region, resulting in more than 300,000 deaths, countless refugees, and fractured 
economies and infrastructures (1). Displaced and victimized individuals and broken 
institutions pave the path to the post-conflict period. William I. Robinson notes that 
preceding the periods of internal armed conflict multiple struggles emerged across 
Central America between the two World Wars, from “the Sandino’s 1926-33 movement 
in Nicaragua, the failed 1932 uprising and subsequent matanza in El Salvador, to the 
7 
 
CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, marking the end of the reformist 
period in Guatemala” (67). As James Dunkerley points out, after 1987, “Central America 
was governed by regimes with quite similar goals […], a fact that encouraged renewed 
interest in economic integration as progress was made towards political peacemaking 
under the Esquipulas accords” (14). Specifically, outside of Nicaragua, El Salvador’s 
privatization and free market policies maintained the highest profile (16). The influence 
of financial and logistical aid from the United States is undeniable, considering the 
disbursement of $1.8 billion in military aid over a dozen years (26). Given similar, yet 
distinct contexts, it is important to examine each Central American country’s context 
separately to understand the rise of crime following the period of armed-conflict, which is 
essential to the current study.  
El Salvador witnessed a twelve-year war ending in 1992 which resulted in over 
80,000 lives lost and a significant displacement of its population from both internal 
migration and migration toward the United States (Dividing the Isthmus 76). The key 
actors in this conflict were, on the one hand, the revolutionary forces in the Farabundo 
Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which threatened state power, and, on the other 
hand, the National Revolutionary Alliance (ARENA), which was the ruling right-wing 
power (Robinson 87). The event which served as a catalyst to the war was the coup d’état 
on October 15, 1979 executed by a group of young officers to put an end to President 
Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero’s regime, which was notorious for its bloody repression 
of the masses and opposition groups (Martin-Baro and Cardenal 1). Additionally, at the 
outset of the civil war, death squads assassinated and kidnapped dissidents, priests, and 
activists, and attacked Church property. Between 1977 and 1982, Booth et al. point out 
8 
 
that eighteen Catholic religious personnel, including Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, 
were murdered (144). Over time, violence and economic aid became inextricable. During 
the following years, the Salvadoran army quadrupled its size and financial interests 
became more concentrated in the bourgeoisie; however, despite its growth, both financial 
and logistical aid from the United States shaped internal affairs (2). Specifically, between 
1981 and 1992, the year in which the Peace Accords were signed, the United States 
provided El Salvador $6 billion in military, economic and covert aid and another $1 
billion through International Financial Institutes (IFIs) (Robinson 89). The staggering 
amount of financial aid illustrates the imposing nature of the neoliberal project in Central 
America during this time.  
In Guatemala, the civil conflict, which spanned three decades, resulted in the 
execution of nearly 150,000 individuals, with an estimate of 45,000 desaparecidos 
(Andrews and McGuire 2). An additional 200,000 were sent into exile and over 440 
villages were irreparably destroyed in scorched-earth campaigns and indiscriminate terror 
(Robinson 105). Following President Jacobo Arbenz’s attempt to nationalize the United 
Fruit Company, a corporation based in the United States which controlled the majority of 
Guatemala’s agricultural land, the CIA-backed National Liberation Movement (MLN) 
invaded Guatemala in 1954 under Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (Booth et al. 174-5). 
Over three regime changes and repression of opposition parties, including the Democratic 
Socialist and Christian Democratic parties, among other, the death squads increased 
activity and political assassinations. From the 1960s onward, the U.S. embassy tracked 
political murders, the majority of which were committed by government forces and 
rightwing death squads – the rates rose from approximately 30 per month in 1971 to 75 
9 
 
per month in 1979, and then to nearly 303 per month by 1982 (180). During this time of 
atrocious human rights violations, the United States’ government continued to provide 
economic aid, totaling over $60 million from 1979-1981 (180). Robinson points out that 
from 1985 to 1990, Guatemala received aid from the United States in the sum of $847 
million, which was double all aid during the preceding forty years (110). Similar to El 
Salvador, the financial aid and protection of U.S.-based corporate interests fueled the 
terror and human rights violations during the decades of civil war in Guatemala. 
In contrast with the aforementioned countries, Nicaragua’s situation is distinct in 
its two-fold structure: the Sandinista Revolution against the Somoza family dictatorship 
and the U.S.-funded Contra War against the Sandinistas. When the United States failed to 
defeat Augusto C. Sandino’s resistance, the National Guard commandeered by Anastasio 
Somoza García orchestrated Sandino’s assassination in 1934 and then used the National 
Guard to seize power in 1936 (Booth et al. 99). Thereafter, the Somoza family 
dictatorship ruled Nicaragua until 1979 with the backing of the National Guard and the 
United States. Between August and October of 1978, uprisings led by the Sandinista 
National Liberation Front (FSLN) units spread across the country. On August 23, 1978, a 
Sandinista unit seized the National Palace taking over 2,000 hostages, who were used in 
negotiations for the release of 60 Sandinista political prisoners (103). During this first 
period, the conflict took 50,000 lives and accounted for approximately $1.5 billion in 
property losses, while marking the transition to a revolutionary government (104). 
Despite a fairly stable relationship between the revolutionary government and the United 
States, the incoming Reagan administration in 1981 provided the CIA $19.8 million to 
support the anti-Sandinista counterrevolutionaries known as the Contras (106). Growing 
10 
 
displacement, deterioration of living standards, and unfavorable positions toward the war, 
considering the deaths of 30,865 people by the end of 1989, provided the United States 
an opportunity in the 1990 elections. Specifically, the plan was to denounce electoral 
laws and procedures in the event of a Sandinista victory and promoted an opposition 
victory of the National Opposition Union’s (UNO) candidate Violeta Barrios de 
Chamorro, who won on February 25, 1990 (113). Following this period, however, 
Nicaragua entered a period of neoliberal violence, characterized by cycles of standoff, 
negotiation, and compromised alternated with peaceful and violent strikes and 
demonstrations (Robinson 76). 
The Costa Rican context, on the other hand, is distinct from the preceding 
situations. Of particular interest is how Costa Rica experienced the same global economic 
forces during the 1970s and 1980s while, at the same time, escaped much of the violence 
due to its lack of regime change (Booth et al. 75). Costa Rica and Honduras addressed 
mobilization relatively moderately, as visible in Costa Rica’s open, constitutional regime 
with comparably clean elections and access to officials (78). Costa Rica did, however, 
serve as the site of the southern command for the Sandinistas and as a buffer zone for the 
United States. Given the implementation of neoliberal reforms in Costa Rica prior to its 
neighbors, the social and political unrest stemmed from the developing market. Robinson 
delineates the evolution of Costa Rica’s insertion into the global market, which emerged 
following the 1948 civil war when landed oligarchy was replaced with industrial, 
commercial, and financial capitalists. The exhaustion of the dependent capitalist model in 
the late 1970s experienced a crisis in 1981, when the government failed to fully repay 
debts and suspended interest payments. This crisis paved the way for a restructuring 
11 
 
through the 1980s and 1990s and reinsertion into the global market (132). The breakdown 
of the Costa Rican market catapulted the country into political and social unrest, in which 
homicide rates and drug trafficking increased (Booth et al. 88).  
Following the signing of the peace accords in 1992 and 1996, in El Salvador and 
Guatemala, respectively, and the 1990 presidential elections in Nicaragua in which the 
Sandinistas were defeated, the Central American countries adopted new political and 
economic reforms, specifically aligning themselves with the neoliberal agenda. 
According to David Harvey, “neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political 
economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by 
liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional 
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” 
(2). In “Setting La diabla Free,” Yajaira M. Padilla has noted with regards to El Salvador, 
the reforms were not always successful: “El Salvador adopted a neoliberal model of 
modernization consisting of political democratization by way of open and competitive 
elections. Despite what seem to be positive changes […], recent studies suggest that the 
new neoliberal agenda has not only failed to ameliorate existing social and economic 
problems but has reproduced and, in many cases, exacerbated them” (133). With reform 
came new challenges, not only within the political and economic arena, but also within 
the social and ethical sectors of the Central American society.  
Ignacio Martin-Baro and Rodolfo Cardenal outline, in their introduction to Fifteen 
Years Later: Peace at Last, the obstacles facing this now post-war society: “The first 
concern in the economic area is reconstruction, which is treated generically and vaguely 
in the peace accords; the concept implies that the present government has the capacity to 
12 
 
impose its plan, but there is no guarantee that the plan will be the best for the nation” (8). 
While doubting the government’s underlying agenda, they also note that “there also 
exists the danger of reducing the construction of the new country to its material aspects, 
forgetting that it is necessary to solidly establish new ethical principles” (8). Without 
clearly defined ethical principles from the governing body, the peace accords operate as a 
discursive space where patterns of corruption and criminality are replicated in the era of 
reconstruction. Subsequently, the social anxieties of the post-conflict era are examined 
and critiqued through the materialization of corruption and criminality in discursive 
spaces. Therefore, the materialization of these principles and post-conflict ethics are best 
addressed through a study of literature, “which can frame and contextualize those 
‘neocolonial’ forms of subjugation that result from expanding capitalism and 
globalization” (Taking Their Word xii). After decades of exploitation, oppression, and 
discrimination, the discursive conditions of possibility which lead to the contestation of 
hegemonic discourse are manifested in literary production; or rather, as Arias points out 
in “Centroamericanidades,” “the words that tried to justify those acts in the name of the 
U.S.’s ‘manifest destiny’ became the discursive conditions that enabled a Central 
American literature to emerge as an imaginary contestation to the regulation of their 
peoples and economies by the U.S.” (13). Under these conditions, Central American 
literature not only acts as a representation of lived conditions but rather as a discursive 
space to actively assert one’s agency and critically engage hegemonic powers. “The 
denial of literary representation to Central American subjects,” he continues, “has 
historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of economic, legal, and political 
representation, as shown in the public media during the region’s civil wars of the 1980s” 
13 
 
(13). The symbolic potential of Central American literature provides one avenue to 
recover the autonomy that was lost during the period of armed conflicts. Recent literary 
criticism has addressed this lack of representation, while emphasizing the potentiality of 
crime fiction which was derived from the conditions of the armed conflicts.  
 To understand the ways in which contemporary detective and crime fiction has 
developed throughout Latin America, and specifically Central America, one must trace 
its development to its origins. Extensive research currently exists on the evolution of 
detective and crime fiction from Europe and the United States and its importation to Latin 
America. Even though crime fiction stretches back to the nineteenth century, academic 
discourse emerging in the 1970s sought to define a set of conventions and formulas that 
affirmed a culture’s dominant ideology: “this approach […] views detective fiction as a 
paradigm and an implement of the hegemonic processes of the Western nation-state, 
tantalizing readers with aberrant, irrational criminality while assuring them that society 
ultimately coheres through a shared commitment to reason and law” (Pearson and Singer 
1). The vehicle through which the text questioned hegemonic processes was the detective, 
defined by Michael Holquist as an “instrument of pure logic” (141). Not surprising then 
is that contemporary studies examine extra-literary issues, rather than solely on literary 
devices and generic conventions.  
 While the terms detective novel and crime fiction are frequently used 
synonymously, it is important to denote the key elements of each and trace the evolution 
of their generic conventions. According to Amelia Simpson, “detective fiction is 
generally understood to be a type of narrative constructed around the solving of a crime 
problem, in which a detective, or a figure who carries out the functions of a detective, is 
14 
 
assigned a primary role” (10). The current study focuses on protagonists who, while not 
classic detectives, fulfill the investigative and fact-finding missions traditionally 
conducted by the detective. These protagonists are comprised of ex-soldiers, family 
members of victims of the armed-conflicts, liminal detectives, and the victim-turned-
perpetrator. There are two frameworks which inform this study, that of classic detective 
fiction, the ‘whodunit’, and the hard-boiled detective novel, or novela negra. According 
to the canonical typology established by Tzvetan Todorov in the late 1970s, classic 
detective fiction consists of two stories: the story of the crime and of the investigation 
(44). In post-conflict Central American crime fiction, the protagonists conduct 
investigations of personal and historical crimes. The ways in which the investigation is 
presented allows the reader to attempt solving the puzzle, which “provides a reassuring 
view of society in the mechanistic crime-to-solution sequence” (Simpson 11).  
 In contrast to the investigative nature of the classic detective novel, “more 
typically align[ed] mystery conventions with anxieties over contamination, irrationality, 
and the threat posed to imperial modernity by unassimilated racial and cultural 
difference” (Pearson and Singer 4), the hard-boiled detective novel emerged in the United 
States in the 1920s. The hard-boiled novel, or novela negra, is defined in Demetrio 
Estébanez Calderón’s Diccionario de términos literarios as “a narrative subgenre (related 
to the detective novel), that appears in North America at the beginning of the 1920s and 
in which its authors attempt to reflect, from a critical consciousness, the world of 
gangsterism and organized criminality stemming from the violence and corruption of the 
capitalist society of the era” (Close 143-4). Crucial to the novela negra is the critical 
consciousness visibilized in the intersections between subjective and systemic violence; 
15 
 
or rather, an overt representation and subsequent questioning of the criminality inherent 
to the capitalist system which manifests itself through individual, physical violence. This 
critical consciousness speaks to the reasons why crime fiction is used synonymously with 
detective fiction, given that crime is the force which drives the narrative discourse and 
the detective’s investigation.  
 Responding then to contemporary political and historical changes, as critics like 
Alison Light and Susan Rowland remind us, “detective fiction is, after all, a form of 
crime fiction,” which attracts a large readership due to the desire “not by our need for the 
reassurance that comes with a restoration of order but by our suspicion that there is 
always ‘more to it’ than institutionalized accounts acknowledge” (Horsley 19-20). 
Speaking to the institutionalized accounts following transformative historic moments, 
which is the foundation to my study, Jameson underscores that, following World War II, 
there has been an increasingly fragmented societal structure, characterized by the 
breakdown of family units and cities, among other things (Raymond Chandler 6). 
Similarly, Juan Epple references the 1968 massacre in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 
Mexico, the first post-Franco crime narrative by Manuel Vásquez Montalván, and the 
1960s-hippie movement, accompanied by the civil rights movement, in the United States, 
among others, as key historical moments preceding narrative transformations (15). 
Inherent to these historic moments was the confluence of systemic and subjective 
violence, which is a “constituent part of the social fabric” (Close 149). The 
transformative potential of socio-political forces is evident throughout the evolution of 
the novela negra in Latin America.  
16 
 
In his introduction to Latin American Mystery Writers, Mempo Giardinelli 
emphasizes the relationship between the narratives produced in the United States and the 
creation of the hard-boiled novel in Latin America. Elaborating upon a definition 
provided by Javier Coma, Giardinelli notes that the hard-boiled novel “is a narrative, with 
origins in the United States during the 1920s and with a typical, primordial North 
American development, tied to a realist, sociopolitical focus on the contemporary topic of 
crime, slowly developed as an identifiable genre and practiced mainly by specialists” (xi). 
In relation to the economic state of the 1920s during which the North American novel 
developed, Giardinelli points out the variants of crime represented were byproducts of the 
conditions of hypercapitalism: unemployment, begging, urban crime, xenophobia, 
corruption, and unstoppable flow of migrants, among others (xiii). In these narratives, the 
reader encounters the criminal at a more personal level, often times viewing the 
investigation from the criminal’s point of view. The hard-boiled narrative that Giardinelli 
defines contrasts the conventions of the classic detective novel, which is centered around 
the investigative process. The key differences between the classic detective novel and the 
present corpus of hard-boiled narratives are the types of crimes investigated, the 
protagonist fulfilling the detective position, and the emphasis on representing extra-
literary psychological and social conditions resulting from the years of armed conflict.  
Referencing the periods of armed conflict in Central America, critics point out 
how crime fiction has evolved as a direct response and critique to the violence. Ralph E. 
Rodríguez asserts that the detective novel is better suited than other genres to identify the 
shifting socio-political terrain solely because of its emphasis on reason, order, justice, and 
alienation (6). According to Nicaraguan critic and writer, Sergio Ramírez, there are two 
17 
 
primary characteristics that Central American fiction manifest. First, “‘Así se observa, la 
figura del escritor comprometido en el estricto sentido de un escritor que opta por no ser 
ajeno a la realidad que le rodea. Por ello se encuentra, en muchos casos, un compromiso 
con una causa que es personal pero se relaciona con lo social’” (cited in Villalta 95). The 
dynamic relationship between collective and individual manifests itself in complementary 
ways throughout the present corpus. Second, Ramírez emphasizes that “‘el tiempo de 
post-guerra en Centroamérica y en particular en El Salvador que coincide, además con el 
fin de siglo, ha dado como resultado un recuento hacia atrás en la historia, un ir hacia el 
individuo’” (cited in Villalta 95). Ramírez emphasizes the possibility of an individual 
reasserting one’s agency in a post-war society that offers more obstacles than 
opportunities. Drawing attention to the interaction between individual, or the protagonist 
in the case of the works of fiction, and extra-literary elements, José Luis Escamilla points 
out that “la narrativa centroamericana de posguerra civil está determinada por una serie 
de elementos extraliterarios como el fin de Guerra, la firma de los acuerdos de paz, los 
procesos de democratización, la implementación del modelo económico neoliberal, el 
nuevo entorno internacional y la acumulación histórica, política y social” (23). Not only 
do the extra-literary elements inform the structure of the novel, but rather provides an 
evolutionary space for Central American literature.  
Returning to the discussion of the post-neoliberal or post-conflict criminality, Ana 
Patricia Rodríguez delineates how similar issues not only permeate post-conflict society 
but rather form the conditions of possibility which allows the novela negra to critically 
engage this tumultuous period. She notes the following characteristics present in both 
literary and extra-literary contexts: “la (des)construcción de identidades e imaginarios 
18 
 
sociales, la elaboración de historias oficiales y extraoficiales y la configuración simbólica 
y real de comunidades locales y globales, así como la imposición de políticas migratorias 
internacionales y el despliegue de la violencia y la criminalidad transnacional” (“Heridas 
abiertas” 425). Along similar lines, William H. Castro argues that post-testimonio novels 
possess the potentiality to reconstruct the solidarity trope, which is signified by its 
inextricable relationship to “radical democracy,” which “actively opposes the hegemonic 
instantiation of a now global ‘criminal capitalism’” (123). Transnational criminality 
amplifies the processes now inherent in a criminal investigation. For example, due to 
increased global communication and technological advances, the individual fulfilling the 
detective functions must rely on digital media and spaces to fully engage in the 
investigation.  
These new investigation and interrogatory tools distance the current corpus from 
the days in which the individual detective worked painstakingly to solve the puzzle. 
Generally speaking, “the detective novel, or better, the police procedural novel, is one 
genre of literature that rationalizes and systematizes specific aspects of conversation, 
including such aspects of identification and guilt, but also observation and objectivity” 
(Olsson 130). The crime novel unveils the violence that is simultaneously present and 
hidden in everyday conversation and literary dialogue: “Dialogue has always the 
potential of turning into a form of interrogation and surveillance. And it has always the 
potential of harming the other, of symbolically ‘killing’ the other in an act of 
desubjectification through the denial of the other’s integrity” (Olsson 130). Consequently, 
I propose that criminality surfaces not only in the crime fiction texts of the current corpus 
but also manifests itself in the desire for personal revenge and the protagonists’ personal 
19 
 
investigations that lie outside police jurisdiction. Situated specifically within the Central 
American context, Misha Kokotovic notes that detective fiction emerged in the aftermath 
of the Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s (15). 
Characterized by a noir sensibility of corruption, decay, and disillusionment whereby 
social order is the source of criminality rather than justice, Kokotovic proposes that these 
texts form part of a greater Latin American literary phenomenon which he refers to as 
neoliberal noir (15). He states that “since about 1990, most of the continent has 
experienced something of a boom in narratives that use elements of detective or crime 
fiction to criticize the effects of the neoliberal, free market capitalism imposed on Latin 
American societies over the past two decades” (15). He continues that “the strikingly 
senseless violence and criminality of all these postwar works of neoliberal noir represent 
a sharp turn away from the revolutionary utopianism of wartime literature, in which 
violence was employed in the service of social justice or, when exercised by the state, 
symbolized injustice” (26). Additionally, the current corpus of texts question whether the 
restoration of order is possible in a post-conflict society.  
The phenomenon of neoliberal noir serves as my point of departure into the 
detective novels produced by diasporic authors. According to literary critic and scholar 
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, “contemporary Central American diasporic writers like Horacio 
Castellanos Moya, Francisco Goldman, Hector Tóbar, and Marcos McPeek Villatoro, 
among others, often write in response to various forms of violence” (“Diasporic” 7). She 
argues that these authors “grapple with Central America as a site of unresolved historical 
crises that often extend into the lives of Central Americans outside of the isthmus” 
(“Diasporic” 7). Additionally, Ralph E. Rodríguez points out that “the emergence and 
20 
 
proliferation of the Chicana/o detective novel in the last two decades illuminates how 
Chicana/os grapple with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the 
nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico borders” (2). These symbolic spaces mirror the 
liminal spaces from which criminality emerges in the current corpus and are not 
exclusive to one set of cultural or political conditions; or rather, contemporary crime 
fiction is the vehicle best equipped at engaging these social, imaginary, and corporal 
conditions resulting from the periods of armed conflict and displacement due to its 
positionality as a liminal fiction.   
It is telling that when the quarterly literary journal McSweeney’s dedicated its 
forty-sixth volume to contemporary crime stories, the editors asked thirteen writers from 
ten different countries – many of whom write from the diaspora – to contribute a 
contemporary crime story set in their native country (Galera 20). According to Daniel 
Galera, the volume’s editor, “the choice of that broad and beat-up genre was intentional 
[in order to] see how each writer would adapt the themes and tropes of outlaw life to suit 
their own style and sensibility, and how they’d show up their surroundings through it” 
(20). While individual styles, characters and themes varied, it is important to note that 
“every author […] managed to use the architecture of the crime story to express their own 
mix of personal, political, and societal anxieties. The usual suspects have all materialized 
– murder and love, comedy and tragedy, hope and hopelessness – but so too has a 
glimpse of the complex world these writers live within today” (21). The fluidity of the 
genre speaks to the ways in which the authors engage the pre-established and accepted 
generic conventions, which can be read as the systemic violence which accompanies 
literary production. These narrative variations, therefore, illustrate the complexity of 
21 
 
confronting the systemic and subjective violence in which the post-conflict Central 
American society is engulfed, and symbolize the conditions of living against neoliberal 
forces.   
In his critical text, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey defines the 
neoliberal subject as one that emerges from the dissolution of ‘all forms of social 
solidarity […] in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and 
family values” (23). What this definition lacks, however, is the role that social solidarity 
plays for oppressed individuals or societies manifested through collective cultural and 
artistic exploration and reproduction. My comparative analysis will illustrate how 
neoliberal subjectivity is manifested in the Central American post-armed conflict texts. 
While the texts chosen recreate the collective history of various Central American 
countries and the United States from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the authors utilize and 
manipulate previously established and critically celebrated genres and aesthetics to 
problematize the “assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by the neoliberal 
market” (Harvey 7). Following a brief review of neoliberal cultural production and 
commodification in Latin America, I will discuss how the detective or crime novel adopts 
innovative techniques in order to complicate neoliberal ideals. Deviating from classic 
detective novels, the current corpus includes novelas negras which intensify the 
relationship between the reader and the criminal. In order to trace the individual’s 
personal and traumatic journey in the text, the writers, whose work I analyze, blur 
boundaries between institutional violence, victimization, and liminal criminality. 
Therefore, in this project I will argue that these discursive, spatial, and temporal 
transgressions indicate the beginning of the next marked generic transformation, as 
22 
 
previously witnessed following both World Wars, the civil war in Spain, the massacre of 
1968 in Mexico and the 1968 civil rights movement in the United States, and the Central 
American civil wars, among others.  
 In order to discuss the neoliberal project in Latin America, the United States must 
always remain in the forefront as a key player, with an emphasis on “its commercial and 
geopolitical interests [and] hegemonic design” (Haluani 322). Studying this twenty-year 
time span in Latin America uncovers the immediate consequences and social conditions 
of neoliberalism. Namely, in Latin America, “the 1980s were known as the ‘lost decade’ 
because of the financial burden caused by the rolling back of debt negotiations and the 
painful toll they took on the subsidy policies of almost all Latin American governments” 
(326). Stemming from the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, the growth and material 
aspirations of the urban populations placed tremendous pressure on the government to 
increase and improve public services, efficiency and management: “Themes like 
administrative efficiency and integrity, corruption, human rights, decentralization of 
national administration and strengthening of municipal authority, and better social 
welfare programs, among others, are the main and most pressing concerns of the vast 
majority of Latin America” (326-7). These public services are of dire importance 
following the internal conflicts and civil wars that occurred during the latter part of the 
twentieth century in order to regain control, offer assistance to the victimized 
communities and begin the arduous process of rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. In 
addition to these pressing concerns, the complexity of contemporary Latin American 
societies is characterized in the following ways:  
23 
 
the growing power of the middle class and its social movements as a limited 
alternative to the discredited political parties; the changing political role of the 
military in domestic politics; the influence of the private sector and the labor 
unions on economic policies; the reintroduction of the Catholic Church into 
domestic policies; the increasingly sophisticated nature of democratization; and 
the fact that the lower classes […] can exercise a certain degree of power on the 
outcome of voting. (327-8) 
While not all of these topics are explicitly depicted in the current corpus of Central 
American crime fiction, the authors provide opportunities for the reader to read between 
the lines and navigate the intersections that abound between these.  
Even though it appears that the neoliberal project has liberated the lower and 
middle classes from economic and political oppression, critics are quick to point out the 
paradoxical positions that these classes encounter within the neoliberal system. 
Considering the consequences produced by free-market capitalism, Kokotovic 
underscores the production of demodernization proposed by Mary Louise Pratt, who 
defines the term as the exclusion “[of] large sectors of the population – whose labor and 
meager capacity for consumption are not required in the new model of capital 
accumulation – and condemned them to an unprecedented regression in living standards” 
(26). This regression in living standards, however, offers little hope to those “left or cast 
outside the market system, [which include] a vast reservoir of apparently disposable 
people bereft of social protections and supportive social structures” (Harvey 185). For 
these individuals, Harvey points out that “there is little to be expected from 
neoliberalization except poverty, hunger, disease, and despair” (185). He continues by 
24 
 
mentioning that “their only hope is somehow to scramble aboard the market system either 
as petty commodity producers, as informal vendors, as petty predators to beg, steal, or 
violently secure some crumbs from the rich man’s table, or as participants in the vast 
illegal trade of trafficking in drugs, guns, women, or anything else illegal for which there 
is a demand” (185); or rather, they occupy liminal spaces of criminality.  
As I previously mentioned, and as other critics have stressed as well, the 
discussion of the neoliberal market needs to explore the potential that cultural production 
and commodification has to valorize the collective past. In her extensive study on the 
neoliberal crisis in Latin America, Francine Masiello notes that inherent to neoliberalism 
is the “apparent neutrality on social contradiction, erasing strands of memory that bound 
individuals to their past and suppressing discussion of ‘value,’ literature and art instead 
cultivate tension, revealing the conflicts between an unresolved past and present, between 
invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities […] that leave their trace on identitarian 
struggles today” (3).1 The tensions between past and present and invisibility and exposure 
permeate throughout the current corpus, emphasizing social liminality as a neoliberal 
byproduct, while highlighting the “shifting boundaries between truth and fiction, [and] 
between the experience of torture and the consequences of its representation” (Masiello 
5), which frequently characterize the period following an armed conflict. However, if 
literature and art provide the space to examine these tensions, one must question the 
relationship between commodification and memory.  
                                                          
1 It is important to note that Masiello bases the study of these tensions and the “in-
between” following the concepts of microspace (Deleuze, Foucault, Perlongher), the 
entre-lugar or in-between (Bhabha, Silviano Santiago), interstitiality and disjuncture 
(Achugar, Appadurai, Hopehayn) and ungovernable subjects (the subaltern studies 
groups of Asia or Latin Americanists) (12).  
25 
 
In The Untimely Present, Idelber Avelar delineates this conflictive cycle stating 
that “growing commodification negates memory because new commodities must always 
replace previous commodities, [sending] them to the dustbin of history” (2). He 
problematizes this process noting that “the erasure of the past as past is the cornerstone of 
all commodification, even when the past becomes yet another commodity for sale in the 
present” (2). In the present study, the commodified past assumes the form of literary and 
artistic production which has conformed to present market demands, as a result erasing 
previous literary and artistic conventions. Futhermore, Avelar stresses that the market 
operates in such a way that “the past must be relegated to obsolescence. The past is to be 
forgotten because the market demands that the new replace the old without leaving the 
remainder. The task of the oppositional intellectual would be to point out the residue left 
by every substitution, thereby showing that the past is never simply erased by the latest 
novelty” (2). Given the “war fatigue,” (Taking Their Word 22), the corpus of Central 
American crime fiction does not directly or explicitly engage the periods of armed 
conflict, but rather focus on the common and subjective criminality which results. This 
common and subjective criminality include murders, physical and emotional domestic 
abuse, corrupt investigations, and drug trafficking, among others.  
Following Avelar’s notion, these Central American crime fiction authors market 
their texts in such a way to speak to the past without speaking about the past. I argue that 
the post-armed conflict literature of this current study must also confront its new position 
in the global market, which is defined by fluid boundaries, rapid production, and cultural 
exchange. To resituate these texts within the ever-expanding market, one must identify 
the current literary trends in Latin America that pertain to “a new generation of readers 
26 
 
and writers [who are] eager to put the stereotypes of their cultures and literatures behind 
them” (Galera 20). As Daniel Galera remarks in the introduction to the McSweeney’s 
volume on Latin American crime fiction, “social, political, and economic change, plus 
our old friend the Internet, have helped foster the so-called ‘anxiety of influence’: when 
everything is available as a reference and pretty much everything has been made, 
unmade, and remade by canonical and contemporary authors […], what the hell should 
you do?” (20). For starters, literary critics must scrutinize the position of literature in the 
global market and its relationship to other desired commodities. In relation to the 
advancement of technology and a tremendous explosion of digital media and popular 
culture, in The Ends of Literature, Brett Levinson questions the privileged position 
literature once held. He notes that neoliberalism and global capitalism are viewed “as the 
new fields of domination, leading to the virtual elimination of public, therefore, political 
space. The death of literature, to the contrary, evidently signals the descent of high or 
bourgeois culture and the opening to new works, an emerging class of formerly 
suppressed creators or subjects, and authentically democratic pluralisms” (2). The 
formerly suppressed creators or subjects in this study refer to the diasporic writers of 
Latin America who address the political instability and violent past of their home 
countries while responding to the forces of the neoliberal market.  
Even though the new generation of artistic producers and consumers seek new 
alternatives and practices, Galera notes that the new social, political, and economic 
commodities are accompanied with wealth and poverty’s incessant tortured dance (19). 
On the other hand, in The Expediency of Culture, George Yúdice comments on the 
pluralizing power of globalization and its problematic effect on cultural production. Due 
27 
 
to expanding borders, migrations and conflicts over citizenship, Yúdice situates cultural 
capital along a timeline demarcated by conflict: “The turn to cultural capital is part of the 
history of recognition of shortcomings in investment for physical capital in the 1960s, 
human capital in the 1980s, and social capital in the 1990s. Each new notion of capital 
was devised as a way of ameliorating some of the failures of development according to 
the preceding framework” (14). However, as previously mentioned, cultural capital is 
evaluated based on its potential to provide “fiscal incentives, institutional marketing or 
publicity value, and the conversion of nonmarket activity to market activity” (15). In 
post-conflict Central American crime fiction, physical capital is visible as soldiers return 
to civilian life while lacking the capacity to seamlessly assimilate due to the lived 
conditions of the war. Human capital, for its part, is thus recognized in patterns of 
displacement and migration for both political and economic forces. Social capital is 
understood as the culmination of the deficiencies of human and physical capital produced 
from war-time conditions and evaluated in terms of overcoming post-conflict criminality 
and participating actively in the institutionalized market. Specifically, the collective loss 
or fragmentation of social bonds and networks illustrates the loss of social capital due to 
violence.  
In contrast to the aforementioned argument, others note current trends, themes 
and aesthetics that would constitute the foundation of a current literary movement. 
Situated within the discursive practice of violence and the struggle for representation, 
Yajaira M. Padilla suggests that “with their often stark and disparaging portrayals of 
neoliberal society, these contemporary texts suggest that free-market doctrine has created 
a rather than attenuated disparity and that the transition toward democracy is plagued by 
28 
 
the persistent discriminatory and oppressive practices of the past” (134). Among these 
peripheral figures present in post-conflict Central American crime fiction that represent 
those cast outside the market include “ex-soldiers turned drug traffickers or assassins for 
hire, ex-guerrillas turned ‘shady’ cops or bodyguards, emigrants disgusted with their 
fellow countrymen, and corrupt politicians” (134). These figures occupy liminal spaces 
while actively engaging in liminal criminality, which is evidenced throughout their 
respective investigative and interrogative procedures.  
 
Outline of Chapters 
Chapter 1: Cyborg Soldiers and Liminal Criminality in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El 
arma en el hombre (2001) and Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998) 
 Expanding upon the neoliberal noir generic conventions (Kokotovic), authors 
Horacio Castellanos Moya and Héctor Tobar problematize the victimization and post-war 
criminality of former soldiers. Castellanos Moya explores the demobilization of soldiers 
immediately following the signing of the Peace Accords in El Salvador and their 
recidivism into neoliberal delinquents in El arma en el hombre (2001). While the reader 
accompanies the protagonist’s transformation from highly decorated soldier to common 
criminal who steals cars and murders for necessity, hire, and pleasure, Castellanos Moya 
sheds light on the active institutional agents responsible for these crimes. Héctor Tobar 
brings to the fore how war time violence transgresses temporal and spatial borders in The 
Tattooed Soldier (1998). Following the armed conflict in Guatemala, ex-soldier 
Guillermo Longoria relocates to Los Angeles, California, where he is invisibilized 
alongside former political and military victims and faces one of his former victims. This 
29 
 
chapter examines the post-war transition for ex-soldiers whose victimization at the hands 
of the state and military has produced cyborg soldiers who perpetuate acts of criminality 
and violence in the post-conflict period. My analysis draws from Donna Haraway’s 
theorization of the cyborg, which she defines as a “hybrid of machine and organism” 
(2190). The cyborg becomes a metaphor for the “disassembled and reassembled, post-
modern collective and personal self of contemporary cultural theory suited to the West’s 
late capitalist social order” (2205). I will suggest that liminal subjectivity and criminality 
resulting from the conflict appeal to the contemporary individual as a means to protecting 
oneself in a society where institutional violence is hidden. These novels ultimately 
reconceptualize the crime narrative to expose the societal danger of pertaining to this 
post-conflict society through the victimized perpetrator’s perspective. 
Chapter 2: Legacies of Violence and Revenge in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier 
(1998) 
 Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier deviates from the established norm by 
portraying a polyphonic and multi-ethnic Latino community in Los Angeles, California, 
while simultaneously portraying both the victim and perpetrator’s points of view. 
Following the brutal murder of his wife, an intellectual actively protesting the 
government, and infant son, Antonio Bernal flees Guatemala in hopes of escaping his 
impending death, only to find himself unemployed, homeless and captivated by the 
possibility of revenge. Meanwhile, recognized for his well-maintained appearance 
resulting from his military training at the School of the Americas, Guillermo Longoria, a 
retired sergeant in the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army, also relocates to Los 
Angeles after the war, seeking refuge from his impoverished and war torn homeland. 
30 
 
Both fractured beings who have been victimized, albeit differently, by political and 
military violence their chance encounter catapults Antonio on his own personal 
investigation for revenge, while Guillermo struggles to readjust to civilian life, visible 
through displays of domestic violence. The tensions between past and present and 
invisibility and exposure permeate throughout The Tattooed Soldier, emphasizing social 
liminality as a neoliberal byproduct, while highlighting the “shifting boundaries between 
truth and fiction, [and] between the experience of torture and the consequences of its 
representation” (Masiello 5), which frequently characterize the period following an 
armed conflict. In this chapter, I analyze how revenge is the only legal recourse available 
to Antonio Bernal for the brutal murder of his family. Antonio’s liminal criminality 
results because he is entrapped within a system which protects state institutions and 
further marginalizes its victims and invisibilizes the state’s culpability.  
Chapter 3: Broken Law, Law Breakers in Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012) and Marcos 
McPeek Villatoro’s Minos (2003) 
 This chapter analyzes how detectives Romilia Chacón’s and Don Chepe’s liminal 
criminalities provide a vehicles for assessing justice in broken legal systems in Marcos 
McPeek Villatoro’s Minos (2003) and Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012), respectively. 
In McPeek Villatoro’s crime fiction series, the protagonist Romilia Chacón engages in 
multiple investigations that blur the boundaries between legality and illegality. The series 
opens as Chacón is tracking a Nashville serial killer, “the Whisperer,” and the murderer 
of her sister, Catalina, which is the basis for the series’ second installment, Minos. Within 
the homicide department, Chacón’s liminal criminality stems from the marginalization 
she experiences based on her gender, ethnicity and ability to speak Spanish, of which she 
31 
 
is highly aware. In Quirós’ Verano rojo, Don Chepe is tasked with investigating the 
murder of his friend La Argentina. In contrast to Chacón, Don Chepe conducts extra-
official investigations, assisting the police department in Costa Rica while, at the same 
time, placing himself in an in-between position. Don Chepe’s investigation differs from 
Chacón because he relies on evidence that his victim left for him. Being the only texts in 
the corpus to speak from within the judicial system, this chapter explores how Romilia 
Chacón and Don Chepe’s performativity as law protecting detectives reveals that the law-
making system is broken. Subsequently, this analysis will focus on their criminality 
which arises from blurring the lines of justice; or rather, emerges from their conditions as 
representatives of the systematically violent institution.  
Chapter 4: Playing the Victim: Liminal Subjectivity in Jacinta Escudo’s El asesino 
melancólico (2015)  
 In El asesino melancólico, Jacinta Escudos inverts the traditional judicial process 
by emphasizing the victim’s desire to escape the emotional and psychological distress 
produced by a failed relationship. The novel portrays Rolanda Hester’s psychological 
decay resulting from her husband’s betrayal and her subsequent journey to hire someone 
to take her life. After being trailed and emotionally manipulated by Hester, Blake Sorrow 
considers taking the money offered and fleeing, once the job is done. A moment of lapsed 
judgment and a brief struggle ends with Hester being shot and Sorrow being incarcerated, 
leaving the reader questioning if true justice had been served. The conflation of emotional 
and subjective violence in the novel represents the anguish and desperation characterizing 
the neoliberal subject in the post-conflict period. This chapter will examine Hester’s 
agency as both “victim” and “perpetrator,” and her desire to narrate her own death as 
32 
 
conditions not possible to the victims of the armed conflict. The absence of the 
investigative process will be shown to be characteristic of a truly and completely liminal 
crime narrative, while illustrating how the confluence of subjectivity and criminality 
underscores the neoliberal condition. This novel ultimately reconceptualizes the crime 
narrative to expose the societal danger of this post-conflict society and opens the 
discursive space to transgress formulaic constraints and transcend into a new critical 
mode.  
Conclusion 
 The dissertation will conclude with brief remarks on how the current corpus of 
post-conflict Central American crime fiction texts provide a discursive map for 
identifying how post-war violence transgresses spatial, temporal, and psychological 
borders. My analysis illustrates how conditions of victimization and criminalization are 
internalized and naturalized in post-conflict societies and reveals how societies are 
conditioned to violence. In a post-conflict society, therefore, liminal criminality is the 
most effective means for victims of subjective and state-sanctioned systemic violence to 
access justice. Ultimately, these texts illustrate how justice itself is corrupted and 
elucidate the relationship between liminal criminality and liminal justice.  
  
 
  
33 
 
Chapter 1: Cyborg Soldiers and Liminal Criminality in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El 
arma en el hombre (2001) and Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998) 
 
 The transition between periods of armed conflicts and post-conflicts presents 
many social, cultural, and economical challenges. In her introduction “A Farewell to 
Arms?” political scientist Sarah Zukerman Daly states that “almost half of all countries 
emerging from conflict relapse into war within five years of signing a peace agreement. 
Even where civil war does not resume, most post-conflict environments experience 
elevated levels of violence” (2). Identifying and problematizing the causal relationships 
between war and post-war violence is the subject of both criminological and literary 
studies and the subject of this dissertation focusing on the postwar literature of Central 
America. Within criminological studies, questions of the (il)legitimacy of violence 
abound. In Understanding Political Violence, Vincenzo Ruggiero states that “‘crimes in 
war’ and ‘war crimes’ are central areas of investigation, and while the former are 
exemplified by conventional predatory offences, interpersonal violence and illicit market 
operations, the latter tend to be included under the rubric of state crime” (185). The 
distinction between ‘crimes in war’ and ‘war crimes’ refers to the (il)legitimacy of each 
act; or rather, illegitimate ‘crimes in war’ refer to crimes perpetrated by an individual 
without authorization from the states and legitimate ‘war crimes’ refer to those authorized 
by state-sanctioned institutions. Furthermore, Ruggiero suggests that “once made 
legitimate […] violence may also come to be viewed as the only effective tool for the 
protection of one’s well-being, the achievement of one’s goals, or the solution of personal 
differences” (185). In Central America, U.S.-backed government and military forces 
34 
 
perpetrated legitimized war crimes and victims of the systemic, institutional, and military 
violence are considered the perpetrators of illegitimate crimes in war.  
In times of war, violence and criminality are not only legitimized, but are also 
considered the most viable means of survival. Specifically, victims of military violence 
actively contest oppressive forces through individual acts of violence and criminality 
while fighting for both their individual survival and the collective restoration of law and 
order. The questions guiding this analysis are the following: How are violence and 
criminality normalized during a period of armed conflicts? What happens to the 
criminalized following the period of armed conflict? How does legitimized violence and 
criminality become survival mechanisms? As Daly notes, post-conflict societies 
experience an elevated level of violence, which tends to suggest that legitimized 
criminality from the war is recycled and transformed in the post-conflict society, thereby 
making impossible the existence of a truly post-conflict society. A truly post-conflict 
society would be free of the remnants of legitimized war crimes, would prosecute the 
perpetrators of these war crimes, and would provide services and opportunities to victims 
of these war crimes. In Central America, these victims include former soldiers who were 
forcibly conscripted into the military, family members of victims of military and political 
violence, communities who suffered material and immaterial losses, and individuals who 
were forced to flee their homes, among many others. In his text Violence and Democracy, 
renowned political scientist John Keane refers to these post-conflict societies as today’s 
battle zones, or more specifically “uncivil wars” (114).  Contrasting the legitimized and 
authorized violence of an armed conflict or civil war, Keane states that the most striking 
characteristic of the uncivil war “is the way in which the protagonists of violence practice 
35 
 
asymmetric violence” (114). Asymmetric violence, for its part, refers to the destruction of 
people, property, the infrastructure, places of historical importance and nature (115).  
In addition to criminological studies, literary works also contend with questions of 
post-conflict criminality and violence. Referring to the transition to the post-conflict 
period in Central America, literary critic Misha Kokotovic comments on a similar 
transitional period in Central American literature. He states that “during the war years, 
narrative fiction tended to be overshadowed by testimonio and was often influenced by it, 
giving rise to the hybrid genre of the testimonial novel, exemplified by Manlio Argueta’s 
Un día en la vida (1980) and Cuscatlán, donde bate la mar del sur (1986), which 
chronicled the rise of armed struggle in El Salvador” (“After the Revolution” 22). In the 
postwar period, Kokotovic notes a return to narrative fiction that focuses on “individual 
desires, passions, and struggles for survival in violent, postwar societies with only a grim 
future” (23). According to Kokotovic, postwar texts highlight the relationship between 
the individual, the foundational figure of neoliberalism, and one’s lived conditions: “The 
freedom of the individual is severely constrained by the violence and decay of nations 
still ruled by corrupt elites, in which it is virtually impossible even to know what is going 
on, much less to freely act upon such knowledge” (24). For example, in Central America, 
forcible conscription into the U.S.-backed and funded military stripped individuals of 
their rights, their identity, and their victimhood as they were manipulated and used as 
weapons in the armed conflict. Consequently, cultural products and literature of the 
region responded to military oppression and systemic violence both by problematizing 
the relationship between the individual victim and institutional forces and by contesting 
the official historical discourse. In Central America, following the Nicaraguan, 
36 
 
Salvadoran, and Guatemalan civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s, crime fiction was the 
vehicle used “to criticize the effects of the neoliberal, free market capitalism imposed on 
Latin American societies” (Kokotovic, “Neoliberal noir” 15). Kokotovic refers to this 
literary phenomenon as neoliberal noir because texts produced during that era “share a 
noir sensibility characterized by a pervasive sense of corruption, decay, and 
disillusionment, in which the social order itself, and particularly the state, is the ultimate 
source of criminality, rather than of justice” (15). In this chapter, I analyze the 
embodiment and naturalization of violence in two post-war Central American novels, 
Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre (2001) and Héctor Tobar’s The 
Tattooed Soldier (1998), both written and published in the diaspora.  
First, in his 2001 novel El arma en el hombre, critically acclaimed Honduran-
Salvadoran author, scholar and professor at the University of Iowa, Horacio Castellanos 
Moya follows the protagonist, Robocop, as he returns to civilian life from his tenure as a 
decorated soldier in the elite Acahuapa Battalion in the Salvadoran armed forces. 
Forcefully conscripted into the military at the age of 20, Robocop equates the military to 
his schooling and family, stating that following the signing of the Salvadoran Peace 
Accords and his disarmament, he feels orphaned. With a meager three months salary as 
severance, Robocop quickly morphs into a common criminal as he steals cars and 
murders for hire, necessity, and pleasure. Second, in his 1998 novel The Tattooed Soldier, 
Los Angeles based, U.S.-Guatemalan author, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and 
professor at the University of California, Irvine, Héctor Tobar focuses on the lives of a 
victim of war crimes and the victimization of a death squad member in the Guatemalan 
civil war. Following the brutal murder of his wife, Elena, and his son, Carlos, Antonio 
37 
 
Bernal, the victim, flees Guatemala in hopes of escaping his impending death, only to 
find himself unemployed, homeless, and subject to revenge following a chance encounter 
with his family’s murderer. Meanwhile, Guillermo Longoria, the victimizer, who was 
forcibly conscripted into the Guatemalan military at the age of 17 and retired as a 
sergeant in the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army, also relocates to Los Angeles 
seeking refuge from his war-torn homeland. Through their respective protagonists, both 
ex-soldiers with similar experiences, Castellanos Moya and Tobar disrupt the binary 
narrative of victim and victimized and shed light on the conditions which produce their 
criminality.   
Post-conflict Central American crime narratives can be said to both portray and 
problematize the asymmetrical practices of violence and binary of victim and victimizer. 
As such, I argue that crime fiction is the vehicle to critically engage questions of 
criminality, or acts of violence and common crime, and liminality. According to Bjørn 
Thomassen, liminality refers to “moments or periods of transition during which the 
normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way 
to novelty and imagination, construction, and destruction” (1). The post-conflict period in 
Central America may be read as a liminal moment because the fabric of society is 
reimagined as both victims of war crimes and the victimized assume new social positions. 
In El arma en el hombre, Castellanos Moya highlights the processes of self-
understanding and behavioral changes as ex-soldier Robocop returns to life as a civilian. 
In The Tattooed Soldier, Tobar problematizes the possibility that both victims of war 
crimes and those victimized by military forces can coexist in the post-conflict period vis-
38 
 
à-vis the relationship between Antonio Bernal, the victim, and Guillermo Longoria, the 
victimizer.  
As a consequence, the authors give voice to protagonists whose experiences with 
state institutions or state legitimized-violence during the period of armed conflict has the 
potential to disrupt and complicate the relationship between victim and criminal. These 
protagonists include ex-soldiers, family members of victims, and detectives who work 
both in- and outside the law. These liminal protagonists – Robocop, Antonio Bernal, and 
Guillermo Longoria – assume the narrative position, traditionally occupied by an 
“investigator or detective figure,” and critically respond to and question the hegemonic 
and neoliberal forces at play both during the period of armed conflicts and the post-war 
period. Therefore, through my analysis of the liminal narrative voices of Robocop in 
Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Antonio Bernal and Guillermo 
Longoria in Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier, I demonstrate how in postwar 
literature violence is inscribed in Central American society and on the bodies of 
neoliberal subjects across Central America and its diaspora. Remnants of military 
violence, for example, materialize as ex-soldiers and guerillas return to civilian life, 
where they redeploy their military training as a means for gainful employment in 
underground criminal networks across Central American and the disaspora. 
The signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords on January 16, 1992 not only 
officially marked the end of the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, but also initiated the 
transition into the non-temporally bound post-war period. In the years immediately 
following the signing of the peace accords, the death toll was double the average 
recorded during the civil war. In 1996, it reached a peak of 156 homicides per 100,000 
39 
 
habitants, which had diminished slightly by 2006, in which 56.2 homicides per 100,000 
habitants was recorded, still being the highest in all of Latin America at that time (Wieser 
205). The visibility of the relationship between war-time and post-war crime and violence 
is ever present and rapidly expanding in El Salvador. Underlining the causal relationship 
between the Civil War and post-war criminality, William H. Castro asserts that “in the 
period following this uncivil Civil War, […] a criminal globalization establishes itself in 
El Salvador, emerging precisely through the dissemination of the specters of crime, or as 
[…] Ellen Moodie calls them, ‘crime stories’” (125). Castro notes that these crime stories 
“appear at both the popular level of the fear of rampant crime, or rather, the rampant fear 
of crime, and at the elite or elitist level of media representations” (125).  
This criminal globalization is due in part to the United States’ military and 
economic interventions, the expansion of transnational drug trafficking, and the 
demobilization of the Salvadoran military. In his study on the economic borders, Andrés 
Aluma notes that “esta asociación económica multinacional ha transformado la región 
entera, desplazando las fronteras económicas [y a sus habitantes] hacia el sur de 
Norteamérica, y convirtiéndolos en sujetos móviles del mercado necesarios para el 
funcionamiento del sistema neoliberal impuesto por los élites políticas y económicas de 
la región” (np). Instability in the local economy results from the displacement of 
economic borders and Salvadoran citizens. The local Salvadoran economy has suffered as 
a result “[del] gran número de remesas que los emigrantes reenvían a su país de origen 
[…]. Esto resulta en que los criminales de la posguerra no persiguen fines políticos, sino 
económicos” (Wieser 205), as evidenced by an increase number of carjackings, robberies, 
and drug trafficking, among others. Literary and cultural production, for its part, critically 
40 
 
responds to these changes while simultaneously reflecting the reality which remains 
following the period of armed conflict, emphasizing the ways in which remnants of the 
armed conflict permeate the Salvadoran society.  
These conditions not only frame political and historical discourse, but also inform 
contemporary literary and cultural practices throughout the Central American isthmus 
and diaspora. El Salvador, the context to which Castellanos Moya himself responds and 
out of which he emerges, is not immune from social, economic, and political issues 
which plague the post-war society. Aluma asserts that “Horacio Castellanos Moya intenta 
hacer lo suyo pero adaptado a la realidad sociopolítica y cultural salvadoreña, una crítica 
a las fracturas históricas, la fuga de personas y las desigualdades económicas de este país 
centroamericano” (np). Not surprisingly, the recurrence of violence is a thread that both 
connects and entraps texts and individuals within and across borders. Studying the 
connections between the armed conflicts and the economy, Sheila Candelario highlights 
that “después de un siglo de dictaduras brutales, guerras civiles y masacres […] un 55 por 
ciento de la población vive aún en niveles de pobreza sin esperanzas de cambio dentro de 
la nueva economía dolarizada impulsada por una ideología neoliberal, excluyente 
representada por el sector financiero e industrial” (np). The economic violence and 
inequality visibilizes the violence which accompanied the imposition of neoliberalism.  
As such, post-war Salvadoran narrative and cultural production critically responds 
to and contests the imposition of the neoliberal paradigm, economic violence and 
inequality, and the mobility of violence across borders. According to literary critic and 
scholar Ana Patricia Rodríguez, “contemporary Central American diasporic writers like 
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Francisco Goldman, Hector Tóbar, and Marcos McPeek 
41 
 
Villatoro, among others, often write in response to various forms of violence” 
(“Diasporic” 7). She argues that these authors “grapple with Central America as a site of 
unresolved historical crises that often extend into the lives of Central Americans outside 
of the isthmus” (“Diasporic” 7). As a result, throughout the Central American isthmus 
and the diaspora, the crime fiction genre has experienced a boom in both production and 
consumption. Speaking to the critical and political potential of the genre, Sergio Ramírez 
points out that “el género sirve […] para retratar las sociedades en que vivimos, como 
una nueva manera de realismo mágico, más eficaz que cualquier otro. O una especie de 
naturalismo del siglo veintiuno, lo negro, lo sucio, lo desencarnado. […] La novela 
policíaca se convierte así en un vehículo para contarnos cómo son los países en que 
vivimos, o para recordárnoslo” (“Historia Negra, Novela Negra” np). Considering crime 
fiction as a mirror which reflects transnational corruption, as Ramírez suggests, allows us 
to critically examine the ways in which societies are reflected, to question relations and 
paradigms of power, and to analyze the power of language itself. 
The historical moment from which Central American crime fiction emerges is of 
crucial importance. Literary critic and scholar Misha Kokotovic notes that detective 
fiction emerged in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan civil 
wars of the 1970s and 1980s (15). Characterized by a noir sensibility of corruption, 
decay, and disillusionment whereby social order is the source of criminality rather than 
justice, Kokotovic proposes that these texts form part of a greater Latin American literary 
phenomenon which he terms neoliberal noir (15). He states that “since about 1990, most 
of the continent has experienced something of a boom in narratives that use elements of 
detective or crime fiction to criticize the effects of the neoliberal, free market capitalism 
42 
 
imposed on Latin American societies over the past two decades” (15). He continues that 
“the strikingly senseless violence and criminality of all these postwar works of neoliberal 
noir represent a sharp turn away from the revolutionary utopianism of wartime literature, 
in which violence was employed in the service of social justice or, when exercised by the 
state, symbolized injustice” (26). Expanding upon these neoliberal noir generic 
conventions, Horacio Castellanos Moya problematizes the demobilization of soldiers as a 
source of criminality immediately following the end of the armed conflict in El Salvador 
and comments on their recidivism into delinquency as a component of the neoliberal 
condition in El arma en el hombre (2001).  
While the reader accompanies the protagonist’s transformation from highly 
decorated soldier to common criminal who steals cars and murders for necessity, hire, 
and pleasure, Castellanos Moya sheds light on the active institutional agents responsible 
for these crimes. This chapter examines the post-war transition whose disarmament 
processes were accompanied by a recycling of arms and war-time criminality vis-à-vis 
the protagonist, Robocop’s, involvement on both sides of the law. I specifically 
illuminate how Robocop’s identity is constructed as a palimpsest of institutional, – both 
national and international – economic, and political practices in conjunction with an 
internal struggle closely aligned with his curated and programmed subjectivity as a 
soldier. This institutional palimpsest embodies Donna Haraway’s theorization of the 
cyborg, which she defines as a “hybrid of machine and organism” (2190. The cyborg 
becomes a metaphor for the “disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and 
personal self of contemporary cultural theory suited to the West’s late capitalist social 
order” (2205). Following Haraway, Robocop is a cyborg – half man, half machine. As 
43 
 
such, I suggest that liminal subjectivity and criminality resulting from the conflict 
highlight the processes which strip the victims of their subjectivity and transform them 
into criminals. Castellanos Moya’s novel ultimately reconceptualizes the crime narrative 
both to expose the societal danger of this post-conflict society as seen through the 
perpetrator’s perspective, and, perhaps more importantly, to foreground the recycling of 
legitimized war-time violence by this new protagonist of violence. 
The relationship between cultural productions and periods of transition is 
undeniable. Rafael Lara Martínez reiterates the role that contemporary literary projects 
assume as vehicles for actively expressing, appropriating, or contesting the 
disillusionment that overshadows the transition to peace: “Un desengaño, una clara 
convicción sobre la imposibilidad por renovar un mundo corrupto y vencido, guía buena 
parte de los proyectos literarios actuales” (np). Presented from a criminal protagonist’s 
perspective, these texts, which can be read as both an extension of and a deviation to the 
post-war testimonio, emphasize the narrative’s political power: “Hay que restaurar la 
lengua: la herramienta del poeta y los únicos útiles que posee toda sociedad para 
representarse, para pensar sobre sí misma. El texto moyano es tanto una exposición de la 
violencia igual que un acontecimiento del idioma: una obra literaria” (np). Studies 
surrounding Castellanos Moya’s literary trajectory underscore recurring themes including 
violence, common criminality, and the decay of urban centers, just to name a few, 
stylistic and expressive techniques, and the manipulation of the narrative point of view. 
Sheila Candelario observes that “su obra se lanza a la búsqueda, a la necesidad de 
confrontar la realidad histórica/política/social de El Salvador desde múltiples voces que 
se hablan entre sí en diálogos intertextuales, contra-dicen y contra-ponen, se entrecortan 
44 
 
en un juego de signos que apenas toca la complejidad de un referente variable y confuso” 
(np). This unsteady and confusing or confused referent refers to the post-war neoliberal 
condition and accompanying upsurge of crime which extends throughout the Central 
American isthmus and crosses borders into the corresponding diasporas. These shared 
conditions permeate Castellanos Moya’s narrative works through a critical, and, 
frequently outlandish, commentary on “la pasada tormenta, recuperar la memoria de lo 
que ocurrió luego de finalizar la guerra interna en el pequeño país centroamericano, el 
drama de vivir en tiempos de paz” (Vides 21). The contradictory juxtaposition between 
drama and peace is recycled throughout El arma en el hombre through the narrative 
experience as told by the text’s problematic protagonist Robocop, the U.S. trained, 
institutionally programmed, and highly decorated soldier turned common delinquent and 
murderer upon disarmament. 
 The violence which erupted in the period following the signing of the Peace 
Accords in El Salvador contradicts the document’s mission and undermines the country’s 
transition to democracy. Referencing the Geneva Agreement signed on April 4, 1990, the 
Government of El Salvador and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional 
reaffirmed that their purpose was “to end the armed conflict by political means as 
speedily as possible, promote the democratization of the country, guarantee unrestricted 
respect for human rights and reunify Salvadoran society” (“Chapultepec Agreement” 2). 
Prior to examining specific instances of post-war criminality, paying special attention to 
Robocop’s delinquency and violent acts in El arma en el hombre, it is important to 
understand the lingering impact that a war has both on a society and the participants 
involved. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry points out that “war destroys persons, 
45 
 
material culture, and elements of consciousness (or interior culture) […]. The losing 
[entity] must erase part of the slate and begin to re-imagine itself, re-believe in, re-
understand, re-experience itself as an intact entity, but one not having some of the 
territorial or ideological attributes it had formerly” (92-3). The Salvadoran society began 
the processes of re-imagining, re-believing, re-understanding, and re-experiencing itself 
in the period of disarmament.  
These processes were particularly difficult on the soldiers because they stripped 
the very ideological foundation with which they had been programmed, as evident in the 
relationship each soldier had with their weapons. Robocop, for example, recognized the 
economic potential of his stockpile: “Esa primera tarde, tirado en el camastro, con la 
certeza de que no había regreso a las barracas, pensaba que gracias a Dios se me había 
ocurrido ir acumulando fusiles y las granadas, porque ahora me servirían para salir 
adelante” (El arma 14). His complete reliance on his weapons as the only source for 
future success and employment illustrates the ways in which he has embodied the 
violence from the war. Or rather, as Scarry emphasizes, “although a weapon is an 
extension of the human body (as is acknowledged in their collective designation as 
‘arms’), it is instead the human body that becomes in this vocabulary an extension of the 
weapon” (67). During the war, Robocop, therefore, is stripped of his identity as a 
Salvadoran citizen and man as he becomes one with a weapon, a soldier who was trained 
by and among the military elite. Based on this military training and desubjectification, 
Robocop is viewed only as a weapon whose mere presence infiltrates and terrorizes the 
post-conflict society. 
46 
 
 Considering the transnational military training and intervention, it is entirely 
possible to view the eruption of violence in the post-conflict era as a symptom of an 
increasingly global worldview. Lara-Martínez underscores the omnipresence of violence: 
“La violencia afecta todos los estratos sociales. […] Por años la violencia [era] algo que 
ocurría únicamente en el extranjero. […] Hace siglos alguien declaró que ése era un tema 
recurrente de la historia humana. La globalización ha iniciado un mercado mundial, 
equitativo de redistribución de la violencia” (np). Not only is globalization considered the 
principal culprit of the recycling and redistribution of violence, but, as Robocop clearly 
points out, violence is the most direct means of engaging and actively participating in the 
global market. In El Salvador, the recycling of violence also stems directly from the 1993 
Amnesty Law which granted impunity to the perpetrators of war crimes: “Mientras en 
algunos países se llevaron a cabo juicios en contra de los criminales de guerra, en 
Centroamérica vemos la ausencia de un dispositivo jurídico-legal que permita a la 
Sociedad aspirar a una posible restitución, aunque sea simbólica, por los crímenes 
cometidos” (Pérez 50). Facing legal and judicial inaction, literary production assumes the 
active role of not only reflecting, or reflecting on, the post-conflict conditions, but rather 
is the discursive space from which an ethical critique is articulated.  
Echoing Ramírez’s comments on crime fiction, Lara-Martínez underscores the 
value that post-conflict literature possesses, specifically in relation to or as an extension 
of the testimonio: 
La literatura es la paradoja que revela un estado de violencia y corrupción, al 
tiempo que nos confronta con los obstáculos para verificar tal hallazgo. […] La 
novela como espejo o representación de lo real, nos incita no a descubrir una 
47 
 
verdad factual irrefutable, como en el testimonio clásico, sino a considerar la duda 
e indecisión. En lugar de inculcarnos la fe en los hechos narrados, el texto nos 
incita a la reflexión, a una toma de posición crítica frente a los acontecimientos. 
(np) 
The emphasis on taking a critical stance and the questioning of official histories opens the 
discursive space to expand social and ethical inquiry of the perpetrators of violence. If the 
post-conflict novel is the critical space from which to confront and reflect on the events 
of the civil war, one must consider the critical potential of a narrator who not only 
executed state-sanctioned acts of violence, but also continues to perpetuate heinous acts 
of violence prior to realigning himself with the United States’ anti-narcotics agency. As 
Werner Mackenbach points out, then, “muchos de estos textos literarios privilegian sobre 
todo la mirada de las consecuencias de estas relaciones de violencia en los individuos y 
sus relaciones personales” (np). In line with Mackenbach, El arma en el hombre could, 
then, be conceived as a novel of consequences, consequences that, perhaps, lie entirely 
outside the protagonist’s control.  
Castellanos Moya’s protagonist Robocop is an incarnation of the tension between 
man/victim and machine/criminal; or rather, Robocop is a cyborg soldier, part man, part 
machine, as his name implies. In her foundational text “A Manifest for Cyborgs,” Donna 
Haraway defines the concept of the cyborg as one which rejects rigid boundaries between 
material, social and political constructs.2 Haraway defines the cyborg as “a cybernetic 
                                                          
2 According to Vincent B. Leitch, general editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and 
Criticism, “Like the feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Haraway is interested in exploring 
those boundaries, borders, and borderlands where our jumbled personal and collective 
identities are constructed and contested. […] While Anzaldúa investigates boundary 
confusion in geographical space and racial identity, Haraway explores and affirms the 
48 
 
organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a 
creation of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political 
construction, a world-changing fiction” (Haraway 149). The post-conflict social reality in 
Central America is wrought with tensions between systemic violence and oppression and 
the recycling of war-time criminality. Not only are the dichotomies between mind and 
body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, among others, called 
into question ideologically, they are also inscribed upon and within the cyborg’s material 
and ideological construction: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled 
post-modern collective and personal self” (2205). Both the practices of inscription and 
dis- and re-assembly rely upon communications technologies and biotechnologies, which 
Haraway defines as “the informatics of domination,” or the industrialization and 
codification of information (2202).  
Furthermore, Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” serves as point of departure 
for more contemporary articulations of the cyborg soldier and economy. As Melina 
Pereira Savi points out, Haraway “invites the reader to give in to the pleasure of 
confusion of boundaries, as well as for the responsibility in their construction” (182).3 
The responsibility in articulation and disarticulation of boundaries emphasizes the 
presence of external forces, structures, and institutions. Therefore, in reference to modern 
war practices, Chris Gray underscores how practices have evolved based on newfound 
                                                          
breakdowns in […] boundaries that have resulted from post-World War II technoscience” 
(2188).  
3 In her article “How Borders Come to Matter?”, Pereira Savi studies the relationship 
between Gloria Anzaldúa and Donna Haraway’s methods and texts. Specifically, she 
argues that Anzaldúa “is herself a cyborg writer, as she devises technologies of 
engagement with both the Mexican and the American side of her” (182).  
49 
 
commitment to technological and scientific innovation, alongside the acceptance of the 
complete mobilization of a society for war (Cyborg Citizen 55). Specifically, he states 
that “postmodern war depends on a new level of integration between soldiers and their 
weapons, what are called human-machine weapon systems or, in other words, cyborg 
soldiers” (56). The dependence upon the trained soldier who is promptly discarded 
following the end of the armed conflict is palpable throughout Castellanos Moya’s text. 
Furthermore, in his text Postmodern War, Gray provides the cases of elite U.S. soldiers 
invading countries, the training of death squads, the killing of civilians with high-tech 
weapons, and victims of terrorism as examples of possible cyborg participants in armed 
conflicts as an entry point into a study of the difficulties in separating the good guys from 
the bad guys (197). The examples illustrate the relationship between man and machine, 
whether institutional, ideological, or mechanical, which modifies and codifies the human 
body. According to Gray, “the basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these 
modifications, whether it is of ‘wetware’ (the mind and hormones), the ‘software’ (habits, 
skills, disciplines), or the ‘hardware’ (the physical body)” (195-6). Robocop’s wetware 
and software are transformed through U.S. backed military training and education, while 
his hardware is reconfigured following his injury and capture. His hardware is restored in 
order to carry out the functions and tasks of the United States anti-narcotics agency. The 
human is not only the basic currency of war but also the material that is most damaged, 
regardless of how it has been modified and on which side of the conflict it spent.  
The protagonist, Robocop, represents both perpetrator and victim, both machine 
and human, both state-sanctioned and underground criminality. Candelario notes that in 
El arma en el hombre, Robocop “es una máquina aniquiladora desprovisto de conciencia, 
50 
 
engendro perfecto para el nuevo orden del capital globalizado donde toda frontera se 
desvanece y el crimen se desplaza en la narrativa por México, Guatemala y Estados 
Unidos a través de una[s] red[es] internacional[es] dedicada[s] al tráfico de autos robados 
[…], de drogas, armas y otros contrabandos” (np). Robocop, therefore, embodies the 
confluence of a highly trained and programmed killing machine with an individual whose 
subjectivity and agency have been used up and discarded by the same institutions. As 
Mark Colvin stresses, “chronic criminals are made, not born. They emerge from a 
developmental process that is punctuated by recurring, erratic episodes of coercion. They 
become both the recipients and perpetrators of coercion, entrapped in a dynamic that 
propels them along a pathway toward chronic criminality” (1). These coercive forces can 
be direct or interpersonal, which Colvin defines as “the use or threat of force and 
intimidation aimed at creating compliance through fear,” or indirect or impersonal, which 
is defined as “the pressure arising from structural arrangements and circumstances that 
seem beyond individual control, such as economic and social pressure caused by 
unemployment, poverty, or competition among businesses or other groups” (5). 
Robocop’s identity and subjectivity are constructed by both direct and indirect coercive 
forces, including forced conscription, threat of imprisonment, and impoverished 
conditions upon his disarmament, among others.  
El arma en el hombre both opens and concludes with a reference to the 
protagonist’s identity. The novel opens as the protagonist identifies himself: “Los del 
pelotón me decían Robocop” (9) and concludes with the exchange between the 
protagonist and Johnny, an anti-narcotics agent in the United States: “Es tu chance de 
convertirte en un verdadero Robocop’, me dijo Johnny, incorporándose, sonriente” (132). 
51 
 
First, his nickname which is assigned to him establishes an explicit connection to the 
1987 film Robocop directed by Paul Verhoeven, in which the gravely injured Detroit 
police officer is converted into a cyborg. Specifically, Calendario situates Robocop’s 
formation within the global political and economic climate: “Este Robocop es la 
transmutación centroamericana del personaje del cine norteamericano, es el producto de 
la tecnología e ideología bélica transnacionalizada de la Guerra Fría, un engendro 
puramente humano cuya existencia se define por las armas, la tortura, la muerte y la 
ausencia del remordimiento” (np). Second, the United States’ intervention is made visible 
not only through this cultural comparison, but also through the anti-narcotics agent’s 
offer of redemption. According to Castro, Castellanos Moya himself meditates on this 
paradoxical relationship in an interview with Enzia Verducchi: “the United States is 
responsible for spreading ‘máquinas criminales’ […] throughout the Americas, and El 
Salvador specifically” (126). Therefore, Castro elucidates how this relationship is 
portrayed in El arma en el hombre:  
The protagonist of El arma dramatizes the fact that, at least in preset-day El 
Salvador, there can be no terrorism without the United States […]. Moreover, by 
representing this connection through the figure of Robocop, Moya articulates the 
causal continuities between the terrorist violence of the Salvadoran state apparatus 
during the Civil War period and the imposition or importation of a law and order 
regime that would desire to differentiate […] between ‘the criminal’ and ‘the 
citizen,’ between the ‘terrorist’ and the ‘non-terrorist’. (126) 
In stark contrast to Haraway’s optimism for the cyborg body’s survival in a postmodern 
society, or perhaps, to be more precise, the necessity of being a cyborg to have a chance 
52 
 
at survival, Castellanos Moya illustrates the precarious circumstances surrounding the 
cyborg soldier’s reintegration into civilian life during the post-war period.  
Robocop himself admits that “convertir[se] en civil fue difícil” (12). As many 
critics have noted, and as I will illustrate in the coming pages, it was not only difficult for 
Robocop to return to civilian life, but rather impossible. For example, Calendalario sheds 
light on the processes which underwrite this problematic transformation: “El arma en el 
hombre [representa] los engendros y mutaciones de sujetos dislocados, formados y 
moldeados por la guerra y que ahora navegan la madeja del nuevo orden de la violencia 
criminalizada en El Salvador” (np). In addition to the relationship between the 
transformative potential of the armed conflict and its inscription on the cyborg body, it is 
crucial to delineate the instances in which cyborg criminality emerges by a passive agent, 
or rather in the absence of human agency as visible through the absorption or erasure of 
the individual through institutional processes, and as an active agent, or rather, as an 
agent responding to the institutional forces levied against his being. The tension that 
arises between passive and active agent of criminality permeates post-conflict crime 
fiction texts: “Las novelas se abstienen de crear una división maniquea entre bien- y 
malhechores, sobre todo por la ausencia de personajes decentes, honestos, con códigos 
morales inamovibles” (Wieser 215). The lack of clearly defined good and bad guys, 
which are characteristics of the traditional crime fiction text, also produces an empathetic 
bond between reader and criminal protagonist. This empathetic bond, on the one hand, 
stems from the reader’s ability to discern the state’s manipulation and mistreatment of the 
individual and allows the reader to see these problematic figures, like Robocop, as 
victims of the state. On the other hand, this bond also forces the reader to confront 
53 
 
varying degrees of heinous crimes, in accordance with their own moral compass.  As 
Ileana Rodríguez points out, these discarded individuals and demobilized soldiers find 
themselves in a post-war society lacking economic opportunities and have no other 
option than to align themselves with those who fought alongside the opposition and 
common delinquents; or rather, “son ellos los que forman el verdadero sub mundo de la 
transición a la ‘democracia’” (np). 
Robocop is no exception. Fully aware of his positionality within the institutional 
hierarchy and its manipulation, Robocop acknowledges how he has been formed and 
transformed by Salvadoran and transnational military and political systems.  In 1983, at 
20 years old and employed in the same factory as his mother, the young man who would 
become Robocop was forcefully conscripted into the military, a memory he explicitly 
recounts: “Regresaba de mis labores, cuando un retén de soldados detuvo el autobús a la 
salida de Mejicanos: nos bajaron, exigieron documentos, hubo registro en busca de 
armas, y a mí y a otros tres nos ordenaron a subir a un camión militar” (El arma 13). 
Robocop, who “medía un metro noventa y pesaba ciento noventa libras” (13) was ordered 
to the Acahuapa batallion, “la tropa de asalto” (9), based solely on his physical stature. 
This conscription and assignation, moreover, symbolize the institutional inscription upon 
Robocop’s body and identity and signal the moment in which he loses his agency and his 
programming begins. The military replaces and redefines Robocop’s conceptualization of 
family, a realization that became all the more clear following the signing of the Peace 
Accords, which punctuated Robocop’s tenure as a decorated soldier:  
Pese a las charlas en las que los jefes nos explicaban los alcances de la paz y 
presentaban opciones para nuestro futuro, supe que mi vida estaba a punto de 
54 
 
cambiar, como si de pronto fuese a quedar huérfano: las Fuerzas Armadas habían 
sido mi padre y el batallón Acahuapa mi madre. No me podía imaginar convertido 
de la noche a la mañana en un civil, en un desempleado. (12) 
His activity in the war and his participation with the Acahuapa batallion further isolates 
Robocop from his family: “No tengo familia en el país. Mi madre y mis dos hermanas se 
largaron a Estados Unidos desde el comienzo de la guerra y cuando supieron que yo 
había ingresado al batallón Acahuapa no quisieron volver a saber de mí” (14). First, 
family isolation represents a tool of war to further institutionalize the soldiers, as it 
produces a sense of allegiance to the military. Second, it also represents the educational 
system within which his ideology is formed: “Llegué a sargento gracias a mis aptitudes; 
mi escuela fue la guerra. Los instructores me tomaron aprecio: en una ocasión me 
enviaron a Panamá, a un curso intensivo de un mes; otra vez estuve en Fort Benning, 
durante dos meses, en un entrenamiento para clases y suboficiales” (El arma 9).  
Extending the metaphor of the production of the cyborg soldier, this military 
training and education, therefore, can be read as the coding behind the software and 
hardware programming, understanding that “codes, for example, are attempts to make 
meaning irrecoverable, or, at the very least, to embed that meaning in multiple tiers of 
arbitrarily sequenced signs in order to divert the opponent’s energies into hours of 
incomprehension” (Scarry 133). By encoding Robocop with a United States-backed 
militaristic ideology, the state effectively breaks any cultural and meaningful connection 
he has with the Salvadoran society and his Salvadoran cultural identity, thereby 
producing “[una] identidad mutilada” (Colín 94). Ultimately, this coding is the first step 
to dehumanize the soldiers by deconstructing their very foundation of morals, in addition 
55 
 
to breaking down their communicative capabilities, which expresses one of Haraway’s 
anxieties marking the transition from old hierarchical dominations to new networks 
which she terms as the informatics of domination (Haraway 2202). Based on this brief 
passage, it is evident that Robocop is not only utilized as a weapon for and against the 
Salvadoran state, but rather that he is weaponized, a crucial component of the United 
States interventionist practices having been trained on U.S. bases in both Panama and 
Fort Benning, Georgia, a reference to the School of the Americas.  
The United States’ presence not only informs his military training, but also 
provides Robocop with an opportunity of salvation upon the condition of his employment 
as an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency. As the novel concludes, Robocop, 
having been captured, is in a Texas hospital recovering from a gunshot wound which 
physically deformed his face. During his interrogation, the anti-narcotics agent explains 
his current predicament to him: “Se sentó en la misma silla, junto a mi cama, y me dijo 
que pusiera muchísima atención, se había abierto una oportunidad única de salvar mi 
vida. Ellos habían revisado mi hoja de servicio durante la guerra en el batallón Acahuapa 
y creían que yo merecía una segunda oportunidad” (El arma 131). It is clear to the reader 
that this deserving of a second opportunity refers to the former relationship that Robocop 
had with the United States, specifically in reference to his military training: “El trato era 
éste: yo les contaba todo lo que sabía y, a cambio, ellos me reconstruirían (nueva cara, 
nueva identidad) y me convertirían en agente para operaciones especiales a disposición 
en Centroamérica” (El arma 131). The physical, institutional, and identitarian 
reconstruction emphasizes the passive position of Robocop at the hands of the corrupt 
56 
 
state, while simultaneously illustrating how easily the state discards these damaged 
goods.  
For example, Robocop describes the state in which he found himself immediately 
following the signing of the Peace Accords: “Entonces quedé en el aire: mis únicas 
pertenencias eran dos fusiles AK-47, un M-16, una docena de cargadores, ocho granadas 
fragmentarias, mi pistola nueve milímetros y un cheque equivalente a mi salario de tres 
meses, que me entregaron como indemnización” (9). Having been stripped of his family, 
job, and agency, among other things, Robocop draws his sense of identity from the 
weapons he was able to stockpile from the war. He also learns that his compensation 
should have been the equivalence of one year’s salary, which highlights how, when his 
former bosses and terrorists came to an agreement, “[lo] tiraron a la calle” (9). Robocop 
learns from fellow ex-soldiers that the government withheld a large part of their 
compensation and that these other ex-soldiers were actively questioning and making 
demands from the state and the military. Robocop “no quería participar en un 
movimiento en contra de la jefatura de las Fuerzas Armadas, podía considerarse traición” 
(15-6). In this moment, his ideological programming is complete as Robocop still abides 
by the teachings instilled within him regardless of how the state mistreats or takes 
advantage of him.  
 The inability to confront his former superiors is just one of the challenges he faces 
in his return to civilian life. As Wieser notes, “la trama muestra que no sólo fue difícil 
sino imposible. El término de la lucha armada, que hasta el momento fue su sustento 
legal, vacía su existencia de sentido. Robocop sigue ejerciendo en la época de posguerra 
lo único que ha aprendido: luchar y matar” (210-11). As I have previously mentioned, 
57 
 
few economic opportunities were available to the cyborg soldiers returning from war, 
which catapulted them into the only sectors that were familiar to them. Anne Balsamo 
reminds us that “cyborgs are a product of fears and desires that run deep within our 
cultural imaginary,” (32) which, in the context of El Salvador, refers to the traumas 
resulting from the twelve-year civil war, the reconciliation of these crimes alongside the 
rampant impunity for the perpetrators of the violence, and the return of these perpetrators 
to the Salvadoran society, among others. Moreover, Balsamo highlights the positionality 
of the cyborg body within the hierarchy of domination: “Cyborg bodies, then, cannot be 
conceived as belonging wholly to either culture or nature; they are neither wholly 
technological nor completely organic. In a similar sense, cyborg bodies cannot be 
completely discursive. Cyborgs are a matter of fiction and a matter of lived experience” 
(33). The fiction and lived experience from which the Salvadoran cyborg soldiers, like 
Robocop, emerge refers to the reality of forced conscription and victimization, and 
subsequent dismissal from the state while receiving false promises of autonomy and 
national pride. Following this line of thought, Haraway reminds us that these cyborg 
soldiers are not entirely innocent within this process. She states that a cyborg body “does 
not seek unitary identity and to generate antagonistic dualisms without end; it takes irony 
for granted. […] Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect 
of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The 
machine is us, an aspect of our embodiment” (2219). Acts of violence and criminality, 
both state sanctioned and personally motivated, not only permeate the cultural, economic, 
and social tapestry of the post-conflict period, but also constitute the very foundation of 
the post-war embodiment. 
58 
 
Comparable to Robocop’s struggle to readjust to civilian life, in Héctor Tobar’s 
The Tattooed Soldier, Guillermo Longoria, a retired sergeant in the Jaguar Battalion of 
the Guatemalan military, finds himself in a similar situation in Los Angeles. Longoria 
received military training at Fort Bragg and in the Panama Canal zone, specifically the 
John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare, and the School of the Americas (29). It 
becomes evident to the reader that the psychological and physical preparation he received 
through his military training stripped him of his identity; or rather, he was no longer 
Guillermo, the young boy who was forcefully recruited for the military at a movie theatre 
while watching E.T. (33), but now identified himself as Longoria, a trained killer. 
Returning to the processes which produce cyborg soldiers, it is important to understand 
the ways in which Longoria is programmed and coded. The coding of his software and 
wetware are most impacted during his stay at Fort Bragg, where the cleanliness and 
orderliness of the barracks leaves a lasting impression; or rather, turns into an obsession 
which is visibilized in the way in which his Westlake Arms apartment is kept: “The 
apartment wasn’t much to look at, just a single room with a door leading to a bathroom. 
A bare tile floor the color of algae, a dresser, and a set of barbells in the corner. How 
predictable. […] The place felt like a barracks” (Tobar 174). This obsessiveness which 
materializes in his daily routine of cleaning his apartment reflects Longoria’s ideological 
programming. His apartment lacks decorations or personalized details, other than the 
equipment, or tools, used to train his body, which has been converted into a weaponized 
machine. In his article “Born in the USA,” Dale Pattison claims that “Obsessed by 
cleanliness, a neurosis he evidently learned in ‘the antiseptic army base’ in North 
Carolina, Longoria continually remarks on the growing migrant population in Los 
59 
 
Angeles, which he associates with the political contamination of Central America. […] 
This privileging of institutional discipline shapes his thinking in both public and private 
contexts” (127). Upon migrating to Los Angeles, Longoria was surprised to find that he 
was no longer protected by the military institution, but rather that he belonged to the 
Guatemalan diaspora, and as Oriel María Siu notes, “becomes just another subject of 
exploitation” (105).  
In contrast to the action-packed narrative in Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el 
hombre, Tobar employs both chronological and geographical alternations, flashbacks and 
a free indirect third-person narrator to move between the novel’s two protagonists in The 
Tattooed Soldier. While Robocop narrates his return to civilian life and his involvement 
with an underground criminal network, Longoria’s experience unfolds between 
flashbacks to military campaigns in Guatemala and his mundane, daily routine in Los 
Angeles. Tobar effectively juxtaposes these flashbacks alongside Antonio Bernal’s 
experience living as a homeless, undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles to illustrate 
the ways in which violence transgresses both physical and psychological boundaries. 
Alongside the perpetrator-victim diatribe, the reader must question what motivates the 
perpetrator. What silent, psychological forces generate such heinous acts? What remnants 
remain? In The Tattooed Soldier, Guillermo Longoria, “a retired sergeant in the Jaguar 
Battalion of the Guatemalan army” (20), which is synonymous for the death squad, 
received military training through Fort Bragg and the Panama Canal zone, the John F. 
Kennedy Center for Special Warfare and the School of the Americas (29). It becomes 
evident to the reader that the psychological and physical preparation he received through 
this military training desubjectified him; or rather, he was no longer Guillermo, the young 
60 
 
boy who was recruited for the army at a movie theater against his will (33), but now 
identified himself as Longoria, a trained killer. However, no amount of training could 
prepare Longoria for the deafening cries that would forever haunt him: “This was the 
worst thing to remember, the sounds children make when they are dying. The flutter in 
the throat. Crying because they’re bleeding all over the floor and it doesn’t make any 
sense. […] Only bullets can stop that sound, only more bullets can stop them moaning for 
their mothers” (64). According to Longoria, living with the last cries of the girls and boys 
was the biggest sacrifice (65). However, it was a sacrifice that Longoria fully bought into 
as he believed in the military’s mission of eradicating the political and social 
contamination which opposed the Guatemalan government.  
Reconciling Longoria’s peasant background and his involvement in the 
Guatemalan military in which he shared a social, cultural and economic upbringing with 
most of his victims, Tobar “exposes the violent social mechanisms that force Longoria to 
abandon the cultural practices of his childhood […]. As a result, The Tattooed Soldier 
depicts the destruction of indigenous lifeways not as inevitable result of historical 
progress but as the preventable result of Guatemala’s colonial legacy of racialized 
violence” (Minich 217). The social mechanism responsible for dis- and re-assembling 
Longoria’s identity is the military: “He was called Guillermo when he was a child. In the 
army he became ‘Longoria.’ Longoria knew things Guillermo never dreamed of. The 
army was a cruel place, it was not for the weakhearted people. But the army made you a 
man. The army made you do terrible, violent things, but they were things that had to be 
done” (Tobar 63). This passage emphasizes the transformative potential of the military, 
specifically by highlighting the erasure of young Guillermo. Through this erasure, it 
61 
 
invisibilizes the state’s culpability in the forced conscription and victimization of young 
men across the country. It also underscores the rhetoric which fueled the military 
campaign and simultaneously acknowledges the responsible agents of the “terrible, 
violent things”:  
This thing they were fighting was a cancer, and sometimes the children were 
contaminated with it too. You killed the cousins and the uncles to make sure the 
virus was dead. That’s what the officers said, and you had to believe it. The 
parents passed the virus along to their children. It made you want to kill the 
parents again and again, even after they were dead, because if it wasn’t for the 
fucking parents you wouldn’t have to kill the children. Guatemala was like a 
human body, that was how Lieutenant Colonel Villagrán explained it, and if you 
didn’t kill these organisms the body could die. (63-4) 
For Longoria, this explanation not only justified his participation in the military 
campaigns, but also perpetuates the ways in which he views social dynamics in Los 
Angeles. In his Westlake Arms apartment complex, Longoria comments on the presence 
of “noisy children” who were “rowdy and insolent” and that “there were days when [he] 
thought the same kind of infection was spreading her in Los Angeles, although the 
symptoms might be different from the ones in Guatemala. Los Angeles could use a 
thorough cleansing” (64). Longoria’s obsession with hygiene, disease, contamination, 
and cleansing symbolizes the processes through which the military indoctrinated him by 
erasing his peasant background through forced conscription, by cleansing his social and 
cultural connections to his past vis-à-vis military training both in Guatemala and 
alongside U.S.-forces, and by making it difficult to assign guilt to the responsible parties.  
62 
 
 The ideological and militaristic indoctrination is the study of several pointed 
scholarly studies. In “Mestizaje as National Prosthesis,” Julie Minich notes how this 
indoctrination makes Longoria a compelling character, “despite his brutality, is the fact 
that his view of Guatemala as a human body in need of violent cleansing requires the 
erasure of his own Quiché background from the body politic” (220). She also argues how 
Longoria’s personal narrative mirrors that of the militaristic ideology: “Although 
Longoria is not literally killed in the war, he comes to perceive his own identity as a 
threat to the Guatemalan national body and to seek the erasure of that identity” (220). As 
such, Longoria’s transformation from a dirty, barefoot peasant to a clean, uniformed 
soldier mirrors the rhetoric used justify the military’s brutal campaigns. However, Tobar 
underwrites the military presence with the soldier’s cultural and social upbringings in a 
particularly evocative scene:  
Now jaguars were spilling from the church too, and for a moment it was like a 
game on a playground. Children running in circles around the huts, soldiers 
chasing after them with clumsy strides because they were so big and the boys and 
girls were so little. The children were crying, but it sounded like laughter to 
Longoria, the excited laughter of the schoolyard. You can’t get me, you can’t get 
me. (247) 
The juxtaposition of laughter and crying echoes the scene in the movie theatre the day 
Longoria’s childhood and innocence was stolen from him. It also emphasizes Longoria’s 
waning humanity, as the terrified children resembled a schoolyard game which illustrates 
his inability to empathize with them. Not only does this fragment refer back to the 
soldiers’ childhoods, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to their backgrounds: 
63 
 
And then the soldiers looked like campesinos again. Because this was hard work, 
raising the machete to cut and hack. They chopped and grunted like men trying to 
clear a sugarcane field, strings of perspiration running down their necks. Steel 
against bone. Hack, hack. This was work you couldn’t do without spattering pink 
and red and brown all over you. The Jaguars looked like camouflage campesinos, 
dirty and sweaty, muscles working in machetazos. (247) 
As previously mentioned, a crucial component in the military indoctrination is the erasure 
of the soldiers’ backgrounds. Therefore, as evident in this passage, Tobar illustrates the 
utilitarian employment of the campesino background while problematizing the legacy of 
colonization and exploitation. The young boys forcefully conscripted into the military 
and brutally subjugated parallels the history of land and labor exploitation that the 
indigenous communities have experienced throughout history.  
  Not only does Tobar problematize the indoctrination of the military, but also 
makes references to the Cold War and testimonio literature. As Ricardo L. Ortíz points 
out, “in one striking passage that recalls Menchú’s descriptions in the testimonio of 
atrocities inflicted on indigenous Guatemalans by the junta’s death squads, Tobar 
imagines just such a scene of mass murder, but from the perspective of the perpetrator, 
not the victim” (81). In this scene, Tobar further questions paradigms of power within the 
military ranks:  
Setting fire to the church was Longoria’s responsibility, the first important one 
they had given him since he joined the Jaguars. […] If Longoria didn’t set the 
fire, if he didn’t get the box to work, the sergeant would laugh at him, he would 
think that the jaguar on Longoria’s arm was a fraud. [...] All the bodies had been 
64 
 
dragged inside the church. If the people in the church miraculously came to life 
again, they wouldn’t hear the sound of the flames. They wouldn’t hear anything, 
not even their own screams, because one of the Jaguars had cut off their ears to 
fill a little burlap bag with souvenirs. Screams were the last sounds the people in 
the church made when they still had ears and could hear themselves. […] 
Longoria made the walls of the church come alive with his cigarette lighter. (247-
8) 
The perspective from which this scene is narrated is of utmost importance. As Ortíz 
remarks, “in rendering such a scene from Longoria’s point of view, Tobar presents to the 
reader a detailed account of the force of ideological indoctrination on the kind of young 
men the Guatemalan army regularly abducted, as they do Guillermo, into violent service” 
(81). This indoctrination reveals the depths to which Longoria’s wetware, or mind, has 
been reprogrammed. This passage also describes the victims as lifeless, fragmented 
objects and souvenirs for the soldiers, while the building and flames are the life which 
cleanses the Guatemalan countryside. Marta Caminero-Santangelo elaborates upon the 
reconfiguration of the extended metaphor of contamination and cleansing as the “cancer” 
becomes a “virus,” which is “something not originating within the body but ‘foreign’ to 
it. The ‘organisms’ that they must kill become the people themselves rather than more 
simply the contaminating ideas. In this re-imagined construct of Guatemala-as-body, the 
people killed […] are conceived as ‘foreign’ to Guatemala, not properly part of the 
national body at all” (186).  
While Robocop’s “hardware” was reconfigured via a facial reconstruction, 
Longoria’s tattoo of a jaguar, which he had done during his training at Fort Bragg, is a 
65 
 
material representation of his institutionalization and employment as a mere weapon. The 
jaguar tattoo, from which the novel’s title is derived, is layered in meanings. It identifies 
Longoria as a member of the Jaguar Battalion and connects his indigenous roots to a 
history of violence. Pattison articulates the connection between the image of the jaguar 
and its significance with Mayan practices: Even though “the Guatemalan military sought 
to claim power through the image of the animal, Longoria seems unaware of the irony in 
the military’s campaign to eliminate political opposition in the countryside by murdering 
indigenous peoples, the very communities most intimately connected to the country’s 
Mayan roots” (120-21). On the other hand, in her reading of The Tattooed Soldier as a 
trauma narrative, Crystine Miller points out “[…] the tattoo also symbolizes the collision 
of U.S. foreign policy and domestic Guatemalan politics as it is wrought on the body of 
an indigenous peasant and then made invisible once Longoria immigrates to the United 
States and simply becomes “Latino/a” (366). The tattoo is a clear symbol of U.S. 
involvement in the Central American country, as it is immediately known to fellow 
Guatemalan soldiers that the jaguar is “an American tattoo,” a symbol of transgression, 
fear, and disgust. In agreement with Miller, Pattison notes that Longoria is labeled as a 
product that is “Made in the USA,” a product of the United States foreign policy (121). 
However, the tattoo’s meaning is lost along Longoria’s migration. Miller also claims that 
“when the tattoo loses its meaning through Longoria’s immigration, the violence of the 
U.S.-sponsored civil wars that produced large numbers of emigrants, many of whom tried 
to come to the United States, is also rendered invisible” (366). As U.S.-interventionist 
policies become invisible, so too does the victimization of individuals like Robocop and 
Guillermo Longoria; therefore, through their use of Robocop and Longoria as 
66 
 
protagonists, Castellanos Moya and Tobar actively contest this discourse and 
problematize the criminalization of ex-soldiers returning to civilian life following the 
armed conflicts.    
In conclusion, Robocop and Guillermo Longoria embody the confluence of highly 
trained and programmed killing machines with individuals whose subjectivity and agency 
have been used up and discarded by the same institutions. As Mark Colvin stresses, 
“chronic criminals are made, not born. They emerge from a developmental process that is 
punctuated by recurring, erratic episodes of coercion. They become both the recipients 
and perpetrators of coercion, entrapped in a dynamic that propels them along a pathway 
toward chronic criminality” (1). These coercive forces can be direct or interpersonal, 
which Colvin defines as “the use or threat of force and intimidation aimed at creating 
compliance through fear,” or indirect or impersonal, which is defined as “the pressure 
arising from structural arrangements and circumstances that seem beyond individual 
control, such as economic and social pressure caused by unemployment, poverty, or 
competition among businesses or other groups” (5). Robocop and Longoria’s identity and 
subjectivity are manipulated by both direct and indirect coercive forces, including forced 
conscription, threat of imprisonment and impoverished conditions upon his disarmament, 
and the interventionist policies of the United States. Through fragmented, polyphonic and 
filtered narratives, these texts not only complicate the construct of criminality but also 
make visible the ideological and institutional forces at play in the production of these 
liminal criminals. These texts ultimately contest the idea of a post-conflict period across 
Central America and the diaspora as these societies themselves are dissolved, dis- and re-
assembled as killing machines; or rather, they are reassembled as societies in which 
67 
 
criminality and the perpetuity of violence result directly from the victimization of the 
society at large.  
 
  
68 
 
Chapter 2: Legacies of Violence and Revenge in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier 
(1998) 
 
  In “Revenge, Forgiveness, and the Magic of Mediation,” Kenneth Cloke studies 
how revenge manifests and the roles it plays in conflicts between individuals. As he 
states, “nearly everyone, at some point in their lives, imagines, dreams, or pursues some 
act of revenge, the purpose of which is to balance out some previous harm or injustice. 
Revenge begins simply with anger, which is universal” (67).  Anger is not only a 
universal feeling, but rather serves as “a kind of map to the source of the conflict” (67). 
Both emotions – anger and the desire for revenge – are present in Héctor Tobar’s The 
Tattooed Soldier as the novel’s other protagonist Antonio Bernal situates and defines 
himself in various social, economic, and cultural contexts as he confronts individual 
legacies of violence and seeks retribution for the crimes committed against his family. In 
Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Antonio Bernal plots revenge on his wife and son’s 
murderer following a chance encounter in Los Angeles. In his study, Cloke suggests that 
there are many sound reasons for seeking revenge such as obtaining justice and fairness, 
finding release from anger, making the perpetrator feel like a victim, comprehending the 
crime, equalizing the “victim” and the “perpetrator,” and satisfying the perpetrator’s 
“right” to be punished, among many others (69-70).  
 The protagonist, Antonio Bernal, in Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier experiences 
profound anger as he contends with deeply personal legacies of violence and disrupts 
legal and judicial paradigms. He expresses his anger through his thirst for vengeance 
which effectively transforms him from victim to perpetrator of justice; or rather, it is 
69 
 
precisely through his liminal criminality that Bernal effectively seeks and receives justice 
in a system that has all but failed him. In this novel, Bernal is the agent which exposes, 
disrupts, and redefines the historical, political, and social discourse. Antonio Bernal, for 
his part, is a homeless, undocumented immigrant living in Los Angeles, California. His 
legacies of violence are rooted both in historical, political violence stemming from the 
Central American civil wars and in the practices of racialization and criminalization that 
he faces in his daily life in the United States. Thus, coinciding with the 1992 riots 
following the acquittal and mistrial of the police officers responsible for the beating of 
Rodney King, Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier portrays a polyphonic and multi-ethnic 
Latino community in Los Angeles, California, while critically engaging the transnational 
ramifications of the Guatemalan Civil War by employing both the victim and 
perpetrator’s points of view. This backdrop highlights the significant participation of the 
Latino population in race riots, “from the ‘Zoot Suit’ Riots of 1943 (characterized by the 
flaring of Mexican-White hostilities) to the 1992 riots catalyzed by the Rodney King 
verdict, in which a majority of arrests within city limits were actually from Latino 
neighborhoods” (Caminero-Santangelo 178). Tobar establishes parallels between Antonio 
Bernal’s individual legacy of violence and the 1992 riots to contest history and acts of 
violence and inequalities against communities of color.  
Historically, various types of revenge have been classified based on the agent in 
power; or rather, a family member is the agent in power in direct, personal revenge and 
the state assumes power and possesses the exclusive right to punishment when revenge is 
sought through legal means (Cloke 69). Antonio Bernal is an agent of direct, personal 
revenge and his experience of lived violence and revenge represents one of the multiple 
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narratives which emerge following the period of armed conflicts. Anger and revenge 
manifest within a cultural, political, and social system of complex relationships. Tobar’s 
political thriller The Tattooed Soldier effectively illustrates how crime fiction contests 
dominant ideologies and historical narratives. In “Crime and Politics,” Cathy Cole states 
that “crime fiction observes and dissects contemporary political issues more openly and 
unambiguously than do other genres. Its protagonists take sides, expose, and hold forth 
about not just the crime, but also the social conditions that have formed the criminal” 
(205). In Central American post-conflict crime fiction, readers encounter both the 
criminal, or perpetrator of the crimes being investigated or uncovered in the text, and the 
liminal criminal, or the victim turned criminal through her/his individual quests for 
justice. Similarly, acts of revenge also reveal the external social or institutional forces 
which produce both the victim and perpetrator. As Cloke reminds us, acts of revenge 
produce a reciprocal relationship:  
Revenge strips the actor of the title ‘victim’ and takes away the mantle of respect 
due by sympathy to one who is acted on. Revenge cuts both ways. All violence 
wounds the perpetrator as well as the victim. […] It takes power away from the 
victim. When accomplished by the state, revenge is inhuman, impersonal, 
abstract, cruel, and supports a culture of violence. […] Revenge does not 
acknowledge the prior victimization of the perpetrator or focus on the system that 
created it. It blames the victim and diverts attention from institutional and social 
change. Revenge is socially divisive and may be reenacted for several 
generations. (70) 
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Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier problematizes the conditions which produce both the 
perpetrators of the violent crimes under investigation and the liminally criminal 
protagonists. Antonio Bernal, therefore, not only exposes the historical discourses and 
contexts which underwrite his individual legacies of violence and the collective legacies 
of violence across Central America, but rather shines a light on the conditions which 
produce his liminal criminality.  
The personal transformation of the protagonists from victims to liminal criminals 
or perpetrators coincides with the narrative exploration of transnational political violence. 
In “There Will Be Blood: Writing Violence,” Benjamin Percy highlights the political and 
transformative potential of violence, specifically in a narrative: “Violence is a powerful 
and simple way to embody conflict. Violence is redemptive. Violence is transformative. 
But more than that, violence is a necessary reflection of this world and our wounded 
lives” (64). On the one hand, violence is the vehicle through which a conflict is both 
deeply inscribed on the parties involved and is resolved. Therefore, violence is the means 
through which the victim can redeem her/himself and through which her/his liminal 
criminality emerges. In his pursuit of justice, Antonio Bernal expresses his feelings of 
anger and revenge through acts of subjective violence. In Violence, Slavoj Žižek defines 
subjective violence as “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1). Following 
their eviction, Antonio and his housemate José Juan arrive at the homeless camp, greeted 
with a sign reading “Coming Soon: Crown Hill Hotel and Finance Park” (42). The 
unfinished plans for the finance park highlight the impoverished conditions in which 
Antonio and José Juan find themselves and the role the market plays in an individual’s 
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life. With their remaining possessions in a Hefty garbage bag, Antonio confronts an older 
man attempting to steal from him: 
‘Bastard!’ he shouted. The thief raised his arms meekly and cried out, ‘Please 
don’t hit me!’ […] We have almost nothing, and this man wants to take it from us. 
Antonio drove his fist into the man’s face, the nose cartilage snapping under his 
knuckles. Another punch, this one like hammering nails into the ground, a 
clenched fist to his temple. A weak scream from the thief, and then one more 
punch, to the mouth. ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ Antonio yelled. ‘Hijo de la gran puta, 
no te metes conmigo.’ (Tobar 43) 
This fragment intermingles both Antonio’s actions and his inner thoughts, as indicated by 
the usage of italics. His inner thoughts reflect the anguish and desperation he feels at his 
current circumstances and his fear of losing his meager belongings materializes through 
his violent reaction. Antonio’s violent reaction is an embodiment of his now emotionally 
and physically exposed and vulnerable state. His state of homelessness further 
marginalizes him in a culture which invisibilizes the presence and struggles experienced 
by undocumented immigrants in the United States.  
In contrast to Cloke’s emphasis on the reciprocal and transformative potential of 
revenge, Lynn Mie Itagaki emphasizes the negative relationship between revenge and the 
justice system. In Civil Racism, Itagaki notes that “since revenge is generally negatively 
regarded as a criminally extralegal and uncivilized justice system, those who commit acts 
of revenge or acts perceived as revenge are criminals (working against the state) and 
primitives (working against ‘the civilizing mission’)” (106). Driven by fear and 
desperation, Antonio Bernal’s acts of violence and criminality highlight his victimization 
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at the hands of institutional forces and rejects the notion that his criminality is an act of 
savagery. Tobar also explicitly calls attention to Antonio’s humanity and precarious 
conditions. First, having heard Guillermo Longoria’s voice, Antonio is jilted with facing 
the conditions surrounding Longoria’s past:  
The soldier, the killer of his wife and son, was a peasant. This discovery had 
thrown Antonio off course and derailed his impulse to revenge. […] His rage had 
fled, and now there was only a vacuum in its place. […] God knows what led this 
peasant to join the army, to become one of the army’s hired killers. God knows 
the person he was before and who he has become since. The easiest thing would 
be to forget about the man. (163) 
Outwardly, Antonio’s anger and rage temporarily fade as a response to Longoria’s voice. 
However, his thoughts, presented in italicized text, show an acknowledgement and 
understanding that Longoria had not chosen to join the armed forces, but rather was a 
peasant who had been forcibly conscripted and weaponized by the military. Second, 
sitting around a campfire in the homeless camp, Antonio discusses options for attacking 
Longoria with Frank, Larry Greene, who is affectionately known as the Mayor, and José 
Juan. The Mayor suggests hiring a guy for fifty bucks and Frank recommends that 
Antonio do it himself: “Just club the guy. With a pipe, a hammer, whatever. Push him in 
front of a bus” (177). While the Mayor and Frank suggest that people get killed “for just 
any stupid reason,” José Juan interjects and states that “Antonio doesn’t want to kill 
anyone […]. He just wants justice” (177). Privy to Antonio’s war time baggage, José 
Juan explicitly distinguishes between murder and revenge for justice, a critique which 
undermines Itagaki’s assertion that criminals who seek revenge are savages.  
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Returning to his encounter with the thief, Antonio acknowledges how his reaction 
made him feel: “It felt good to hit this man, to feel his own arms doped with adrenaline, 
to feel his wrists cut through the air as he pummeled the man’s face. […] For a moment 
he felt strong and free; fury was a much better drug than self-pity” (43). Violence is 
transformative and redemptive. For Antonio, subjective violence and criminal acts initiate 
the processes of redemption, reconciliation, and transformation at both an individual and 
collective level. The individual level refers to how he contests legal inaction, reconciles 
the violence committed against his family, and transforms the emotional and political 
fabric of his family. The collective level refers to the ways the national and historical 
discourse is contested and reconciled by liminal criminals actively seeking and obtaining 
justice. In Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Antonio Bernal seeks justice for the brutal 
murder of his wife, Elena, and son, Carlos. The text not only questions the source of 
criminality and violence in the post-conflict society, but rather, and perhaps more 
importantly, questions the restoration of justice itself, which is defined as “the demand 
for order” (Feibleman 23). In “Justice, Law and Culture,” James Feibleman states that 
“justice is tied to the defense of social order and therefore to the restoration of order 
through the rejection of disorder or injustice” (25). In Tobar’s text, justice is found extra-
judicially as Antonio steps outside the law to track, surveil, and kill his family’s murderer 
and social order is restored through violence and criminality. However, Antonio faces 
various challenges based on his economic and social positionality. These differences also 
inform the reader’s understanding and acceptance of his liminal criminality as a viable 
tool for seeking justice in a system where justice is all but absent.  
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Following the brutal murder of his wife Elena, an intellectual actively 
participating in protests against the government, and infant son, Antonio Bernal flees 
Guatemala in hopes of escaping his impending death, only to find himself unemployed, 
homeless and captivated by the possibility of revenge. Meanwhile, Guillermo Longoria, 
the killer of Bernal’s family and a retired sergeant in the Jaguar Battalion of the 
Guatemalan army, also relocates to Los Angeles after the war, fleeing justice in 
Guatemala. They are both fractured by the violence of the war and their chance encounter 
sets Antonio on his own personal journey of revenge, while Guillermo struggles to 
readjust to civilian life, subject to acts of domestic violence against his girlfriend. On the 
one hand, Antonio’s quest for revenge serves as a vehicle through which he receives 
justice for his wife and son’s brutal murders, while it also inverts the power dynamic 
between Antonio and Longoria. Antonio becomes a liminal criminal as he takes matters 
into his own hands, avenges his family’s killings, and confronts the limitations of justice 
in Guatemala underscoring the ways in which violence is inscribed in the Guatemalan 
society and highlighting how it has traveled across borders and pervades the Guatemalan 
diaspora in the United States. On the other hand, Longoria, no longer an elite soldier in 
the Jaguar Battalion but rather a poor immigrant living in Los Angeles, becomes the 
object of Antonio’s rage and revenge and of the Central American community’s disgust. 
Longoria is, as the text describes him, the “matón,” the disliked and disgraced bully. 
Noting the judicial entanglements in the novel, Oriel Siu states that “at the most 
basic level, The Tattooed Soldier criticizes impunity in postwar Central America, a reality 
that forced both victims and perpetrators to coexist in the same social spaces without the 
intervention of functional legal entities” (103). Antonio and José Juan occupy the liminal 
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social space of the homeless camp and Longoria resides adjacent to one in his Westlake 
Arms apartment: “Behind Sergeant Longoria’s building was an alley where a group of 
these heroin addicts lived, adding another layer of scent to the putrid sweetness of the 
alley’s dumpsters. Longoria saw the addicts and breathed in their smell every morning 
when he took out his trash” (Tobar 22). Even though Longoria lived physically separated 
from the homeless addicts, their body odors infiltrated his senses and his apartment and 
blurred the spatial boundaries between them. MacArthur Park represents the social space 
in which Antonio and Longoria coexist and in which Antonio begins his quest for justice:  
[Longoria] turned and caught a swift movement, the whistling displacement of air 
by some narrow object, the sound of a man grunting. Reflexively he raised his 
right arm in front of his face. The object struck his forearm, sending a pulse 
through his body. Under attack. Somebody is trying to kill me. He dove for the 
grass and rolled away, a flash of military training kicking in. […] The two men 
were facing each other now, Longoria lying on his back […], Antonio standing on 
the lawn, […] the tattooed man breathing heavily but still alive. Finish him. For 
Elena and Carlos. (Tobar 208) 
MacArthur Park represents the social space shared by communities of politically and 
economically disenfranchised individuals, homeless drug addicts, and individuals who 
spend their free time enjoying leisure activities like chess. It also represents the physical 
and social space in which Antonio assumes a physical and symbolic position of power 
over Longoria.    
The confluence of narrative voices reflects the face-to-face encounter between 
Antonio and Longoria. The reader is privy to both men’s internal thoughts, which subtly 
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portrays an unspoken understanding between the two: “Under attack. Somebody is trying 
to kill me. […] Finish him. For Elena and Carlos. […] He looks like he really wants to 
kill me. […] I have wounded him. I have him where I want him. Now he will suffer. He 
will die. The head. Concentrate” (208). This silent understanding alludes to the 
invisibilized violent past that forms the foundation of their relationship. The scuffle ends 
as Longoria flees and Antonio is momentarily handcuffed and interrogated by a police 
officer: “Antonio said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. If he told the police that the 
tattooed soldier had killed innocent people in Guatemala and that Antonio had found him 
in MacArthur Park, would they believe him? The police couldn’t care less about 
international politics” (210). Apathetic to international politics and the conditions which 
produced Antonio’s liminal criminality, the police officers had already assumed he was a 
drug dealer, “because after all this was MacArthur Park” (210). Ultimately, in Longoria’s 
absence, the police officers let Antonio go because “they really didn’t feel like doing any 
more paperwork that afternoon” (210). MacArthur Park, therefore, represents the space 
where Antonio contests impunity and legal inaction against Guatemalan war crimes and 
highlights the presence of legal inaction of police officers in Los Angeles.  
In addition to historical impunity and current legal inaction, Antonio’s status as a 
homeless, undocumented immigrant further exacerbates his condition of residing outside 
the law. Questions of the legal, cultural, and social (in)visibility of Central Americans 
have been the object of many studies. Following Arturo Arias and Claudia Millian’s call 
to question how Central Americans become visible or invisible across social, political 
and intellectual paradigms, Crystine Miller, for example, suggests that “The Tattooed 
Soldier positions Central American immigrant literature as an intervention that 
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destabilizes the notion of a collective Latino/a identity, which has been so central to the 
field” (365). I would add that Central American post-conflict crime fiction, for its part, 
can be read as an intervention which destabilizes the notion of a post-conflict period 
because war time criminality and victimization is recycled and reconfigured in the post-
period. As Antonio illustrates, remnants of war time violence and his victimhood travel 
across borders and fuel his quest for revenge and justice upon seeing Longoria in Los 
Angeles. In her study on the trauma narrative, Miller suggests that Tobar’s refusal to 
resolve the conflict, which originated during the country’s civil war, between two 
members of the Guatemalan diaspora “illuminates the way U.S. imperial forces 
disparately affect racial and class positions within the Guatemalan diaspora and then 
seemingly level these differences by incorporating Guatemalan migrants into 
homogenous notions of a subjugated Latino identity” (371). As Antonio and Longoria’s 
collective past is erased, the Los Angeles police officers assume that Antonio is a 
homeless, drug addict in MacArthur Park. Left unacknowledged, however, is how 
Antonio’s criminality resulted from his U.S.-sponsored victimhood during the 
Guatemalan civil war.  
Antonio’s liminal criminality both functions as his only access to justice and 
symbolizes a critique of the United States’ interventionist policies. Tobar’s treatment of 
revenge in The Tattooed Soldier contests the notion that revenge seekers are savage 
criminals by demanding that readers not only understand the conditions which produced 
these acts but also, and perhaps more importantly, by evoking an empathetic relationship 
between the reader and the criminal protagonist. As previously mentioned, José Juan 
understands the historical baggage that Antonio carries with him and defends Antonio’s 
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quest for justice. Furthermore, Itagaki highlights the complicated relationship between 
revenge and the legal system: “Revenge is the foundation of the criminal justice system 
itself […]. Because revenge usurps the authority of the state in its mandate to punish, it is 
condemned as extralegal tribalism […]. Vengeful acts are perceived to violate the rules of 
civilization, and avenging agents are seen as harbingers of the end of civilization” 
(Itagaki 122-3). As acts of revenge are frequently exercised against those deemed 
unworthy of justice or to whom justice is not accessible, Itagaki argues that “Tobar posits 
revenge-taking as an alternative justice system, a recourse for overlooked victims and 
unaddressed crimes. Thus, Tobar explicitly refutes a prominent discourse about the L.A. 
Crisis that maligns racial minorities as perpetrators of senseless destruction” (120). While 
Itagaki’s argument specifically addresses the riots in Los Angeles, I would add that 
Tobar’s text represents a recourse for the overlooked victims of the Guatemalan civil war 
and the unaddressed crimes of the Guatemalan government, military, and death squads.   
 The narrative perspective in Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier alternates between the 
flashbacks and internal monologues of its two protagonists: Antonio Bernal, victim of 
political and military violence, and Guillermo Longoria, ex-soldier of the Guatemalan 
death squads and perpetrator of political and military violence. Elena’s point of view is 
also represented in retrospective chapters set in Guatemala. Itagaki remarks that “Tobar’s 
juxtapositions – of protagonist and antagonist, Antonio/Elena and Guillermo, Guatemala 
and the United States, people and the state – expose the inner working of U.S 
imperialisms and global capitalism both within and without the nation-state” (107). 
Following Itagaki, I would add that these juxtapositions further the critique of neoliberal 
violence and U.S. interventionist policies as Tobar explores the ways in which the social, 
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economic, and cultural ramifications travel across borders inscribed on the victims’ 
bodies and disrupt the psychological contours and physical construction and composition 
of the diaspora. While the nuances of individual legacies of violence and economic 
misfortune remain hidden, Antonio reflects on the physical condition shared by all living 
in the homeless camp: “All the people here seemed to have the same vacant expression 
and hunched posture. They looked like walking question marks. […] Antonio began to 
imagine that he was somehow responsible for their plight. […] Somehow he had tainted 
the prosperous Americanos with his condition […], an extension of his tortured past” 
(Tobar 41). The curvature of the body highlighted the physical demands of sleeping on 
the ground and rummaging for food and necessities among discarded trash.  
Antonio’s reflection urges the reader to consider the circumstances leading to 
each individual’s condition of homelessness and the intersections, both national and 
international, between individual and collective legacies of violence. These intersections 
influence Antonio’s relationship to his current state of homelessness, to the individuals 
living in the homeless camp, and to his access to justice. As Antonio and his roommate 
José Juan are being evicted, Antonio reflects on his social status in the United States:  
Antonio took a deep breath and tried to compose himself, pushing his glasses up 
the bridge of his nose, a habit of his at moments when he felt close to violence. 
They were circle glasses, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror 
he would sometimes remember the day he first put them on, a decade ago, when 
he was a student at the university in Guatemala. […] Somehow, the ideas and 
learning that made him strong in Guatemala had slipped away once he crossed the 
border, lost in translation. (Tobar 4) 
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Recalling the fear and violence he experienced in Guatemala, Antonio reacts 
automatically to stressors by pushing up his glasses. While the glasses are associated with 
his militancy as a student in Guatemala, implicitly revealing his social and economic 
position, they now represent his undocumented immigrant status and descent into 
homelessness in Los Angeles. Intellectual, economic, and social standing are invisibilized 
along with the military and political violence that he, and Guatemala, experienced 
because of U.S. interventions in Central America.  
The psychological contours refer to the memories and trauma resulting from the 
Guatemalan civil war and the persistent struggle for justice for heinous acts of violence 
and war crimes committed against them, their families, and their community at large. 
After arriving to the homeless camp, Antonio sorts through his Hefty garbage bag and 
reflects on his last day in Guatemala:  
On that day many years ago it was not a plastic bag he carried but a cardboard 
box tied with dirt-colored twine. As today, it held all of his possessions, although 
he could not now remember exactly what he possessed at the time. He was 
standing in the central square of San Cristóbal Acatapán, the box at his feet, 
because he was fleeing that horrible little village, taking the first step in the 
journey that would lead, eventually, to Los Angeles. He was leaving behind a 
house with floors that were covered with reddish black blood. (Tobar 16)    
Antonio’s journey to and experience in Los Angeles are disrupted by physical and 
symbolic violence and displacement. Following the murders of his wife, Elena, and 
young son, Antonio not only confronts feelings of inadequacy, despair, and depression 
resulting from his inability to protect his family but is also overcome with a sense of 
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strength to avenge their deaths following a chance encounter with his family’s murderer 
in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. This tumultuous journey for revenge complicates 
Antonio’s victimhood as he transforms himself into a perpetrator of violence.  
Commenting on the discursive practice of violence and the struggle for 
representation, Yajaira M. Padilla suggests that “with their often stark and disparaging 
portrayals of neoliberal society, these contemporary texts suggest that free-market 
doctrine has created a rather than attenuated disparity and that the transition toward 
democracy is plagued by the persistent discriminatory and oppressive practices of the 
past” (134). Tobar explicitly addresses U.S. backed war crimes, in which “the enemies of 
the government had to disappear in a fashion that would allow the army to say it wasn’t 
responsible” (136). Antonio and Elena Bernal were just two of these “enemies of the 
government.” For Antonio Bernal, haunting memories of his family’s murder follow him 
as he seeks stability in Los Angeles, a space in which the oppressive and discriminatory 
practices of the neoliberal agenda relegate him to a space of social, political, and 
economic invisibility. During his eviction, Antonio himself comments on his invisibility 
and presumed criminality: “But now Mr. Hwang was threatening to call the marshals, the 
police of evictions. To have the police come here and treat me like a criminal. I was a 
bus boy, but that doesn’t make me a criminal” (Tobar 5). Antonio is aware that others 
unjustly perceive him as a criminal based solely on his status as an undocumented Central 
American immigrant and low-wage worker. After fleeing Guatemala, Antonio is doubly 
invisibilized: first, in Los Angeles as an undocumented immigrant, and second, within the 
broader United States’ social fabric, as a victim of U.S.-backed political and military 
violence.  
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Within Guatemala, however, Antonio and his wife Elena are victimized by 
military and political violence. Elena’s legacy of violence is revealed to the reader 
through a narrative break which disrupts the two protagonists’ – Antonio and Guillermo – 
accounts of daily life and the current political, economic, and cultural climate in present-
day Los Angeles. Having been subjected to internal exile for protection, Elena and 
Antonio sought “refuge from the terror of the capital in a small town where no one would 
know who they were [because] any fool can see it’s only a matter of time until they 
[came] after [them]. It’s too dangerous to be a student in this city. It’s a death sentence” 
(Tobar 107). Being cooped up inside the house, a profoundly bored and pregnant Elena 
spent many hours by the window, staring into the street, upon which the frequency of 
funeral processions for young children piqued her interest. After giving birth, Elena had 
resolved to investigate the source of the children’s death – Colonia La Joya:  
Before them was an entire hillside covered with trash, a panorama of filth. Plastic 
bags, toilet paper, rotting vegetables, animal bones. […]. Yellow lemon rinds, 
green papaya skins, white eggshells […]. The leftovers of a thousand meals […]. 
People came here to dump buckets of excrement-soiled paper they kept next to 
their toilets to avoid clogging their pipes. All this rotting food and shit was 
becoming a permanent part of the landscape, altering the topography of the slop, 
killing off the vegetation. […] ‘We found it,’ she said as much to herself as to 
Antonio. ‘We found what’s killing the babies. All this trash is contaminating the 
river. It’s so obvious.’ (131-2) 
Following the discovery of the town dump and its impact on water quality, Elena 
attempts to improve these conditions and to protect the children living in Colonia La Joya 
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by writing an anonymous letter to local officials, wherein she demands the government’s 
attention and remedying of the town’s poor water quality. Ultimately this letter leads to 
her and her son’s murder.  
Following Antonio and José Juan’s eviction, with which the novel opens, the 
narrator reveals that “Elena was killed three weeks after she wrote a letter. Antonio could 
still remember it was exactly three weeks. Elena wrote the letter because she could never 
remain silent in the face of an injustice. Elena was reckless […] Elena’s letter caused her 
death and the death of their son, but Antonio would always love her for her recklessness 
[…]” (55). Elena’s demand for clean water and assassination on account of her protest to 
local authorities prompts Antonio’s migration to Los Angeles, a space in which he finds 
himself living in a homeless camp and watching as others bathe themselves in unclean, 
contaminated water:  
‘That?’ Antonio said. ‘That’s not a river, that’s a sewer.’ ‘No, it’s not that bad,’ 
Chino answered. ‘There’s sewer pipes that come in with green water that has lots 
of chemicals and oils in it. We stay away from those. But if you go to the middle 
the water’s cleaner. We don’t go all the way in, we just splash ourselves. […] 
Antonio didn’t want to shower in the mission, and he was afraid of being 
poisoned if he went to the river. In Guatemala rivers were known to be carriers of 
disease. (Tobar 73) 
Both the community of Colonia La Joya in Guatemala and the homeless camp in Los 
Angeles relied on the only resource available to them – water contaminated with 
chemical and human waste. The metaphor of contaminated water across the Americas 
brings to the fore the experience of people living on the margins in Guatemala and the 
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United States. The connections that Tobar establishes between Guatemala and Los 
Angeles illustrates how, as Pattison points out, “The Tattooed Soldier makes the simple 
claim that nations are never protected from the violence they export; Antonio, Longoria, 
and the 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in [the United States] are political 
bodies produced in large part by the United States’ policies at home and abroad” (115). 
The sheer visibility of their presence and participation disrupts the United States’ 
hegemonic forces and political and institutional structures. Physical and symbolic 
violence materializes when victims of national and international state-sanctioned violence 
find themselves sharing the same liminal space in the diaspora, such as the homeless 
camp and MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.  
 In addition to the political and military violence to which Antonio and his family 
were subjected in Guatemala, Antonio bears witness to the oppressive forces produced by 
the violence of neoliberalism. As previously mentioned, Antonio’s legacy of violence is 
demarcated by his fleeing Guatemala with his possessions in a cardboard box and his 
arrival to the homeless camp in Los Angeles carrying all his possessions in a Hefty trash 
bag. In his essay “The Violence of Neoliberalism,” Simon Springer states that violence is 
both temporally and politically positioned: “The material ‘act’ of violence itself is merely 
a confluence in the flows of oppressive social relations, and one that is persistently 
marked with absolutist accounts of space and time, when instead violence should be 
recognized as being temporally dispersed through a whole series of ‘troubling 
geographies’” (154). Antonio’s mental and emotional preoccupation with the past 
produces bouts of depression and intense mood swings, as his economic and occupational 
instability further exacerbates his anxieties about his future.: “He hates me when I get like 
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this. Who can blame him? Poor man, to have put up with Antonio so long. What have I 
done to deserve such a patient friend? José Juan did not seem to like the Antonio who 
wanted only to sleep, the friend who seemed to be on the verge of suicide every few 
weeks” (Tobar 40). At the same time, Antonio further separates himself from his current 
community: “Not knowing the day depressed him. It was another sign of his withdrawal 
from the world of normal people, from clocks and calendars, healthy meals and locked 
doors. So strange to live in a world where the days had no names” (Tobar 73). The reader 
can intuit that a world without clocks and calendars refers to his condition of 
unemployment, as Antonio’s days no longer revolve around clocking in and out. The 
world of normal people, of healthy meals, and locked doors, furthermore, refers to one’s 
participation as an active consumer and neoliberal subject.  
 The legacy of violence which alters the psychological contours of the Guatemalan 
diaspora in Los Angeles in conjunction with the physical homelessness experienced by 
many undocumented immigrants provides the lens through which “Tobar explores the 
psychic and material costs of peace without justice as it affects Latinas/os, undocumented 
immigrants, and the homeless” (Itagaki 119). The psychic and material costs which 
burden Antonio materialize through the baggage which he must drag around Los 
Angeles. His baggage contains his few remaining possessions, the guilt of not having 
given Elena and Carlos a proper burial, anger at his family’s killer, and fear of his 
newfound desire for revenge, among other things. The novel opens with a heated 
exchange between Antonio, his roommate José Juan and their building manager, a 
Korean immigrant named Hwang, who was evicting them:  
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Voy a ser uno de los ‘homeless’. It did not seem right to him that man who loved 
to read, a man with Crimen y Castigo and El Idiota and countless other works of 
real literature scattered on the floor of his apartment, would be called this ugly 
word. And at the same time it made perfect sense, the logical conclusion to years 
of living in this cold alien country. No Spanish equivalent captured the shame and 
sooty desperation of the condition, and so this compound, borrowed word would 
have to do: home-less. (5) 
Antonio experiences varying degrees of homelessness three times in the novel. First, he 
and Elena are forced to leave their home in the capital and to seek refuge from military 
violence. Second, Antonio loses his home and the hope of returning home to Guatemala 
following his family’s brutal murder. Third, Antonio and José Juan lose their apartment 
and relocate to the homeless camp in Los Angeles. During his eviction, Antonio realizes 
that his status as a privileged and educated university student in Guatemala does not 
translate to economic and social status in Los Angeles, which as Pattison notes, “because 
of their legal status and their lack of economic mobility, [undocumented immigrants] are 
in fact cast into an extra-legal space not unlike what they experienced in Guatemala” 
(118). It is in the precarious space of war induced migration to Los Angeles that Antonio 
and other undocumented immigrants from Central America must find refuge.  
In Seeking Community in a Global City, Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz 
Chinchilla discuss the ways in which Central American immigrants had to adapt to 
uncertain conditions in Los Angeles during this time. Like other immigrant groups, 
Central Americans faced many of the same problems as other inner-city residents of low-
wage jobs, poverty, interethnic tensions, gangs, drugs, and crime (180). Their status as 
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new-arrivals in the city further amplified these problems: “Guatemalans and Salvadorans 
have had to secure a place for themselves within a context of strong anti-immigration 
feeling and legislation, which aggravated their vulnerability” (181). Lastly, Hamilton and 
Stoltz Chinchilla emphasize the ways in which Central Americans living in Los Angeles 
impact the local economies of their countries of origin: “As a source of remittances, 
Guatemalans and Salvadorans in the United States have played a major role in the 
economies of their respective countries, one that the governments have recognized and 
sought to maintain” (181). The maintenance of family ties and the strain of financially 
supporting their loved ones in their home countries materializes in the transactions of El 
Pulgarcito, the remittance service center where ex-soldier Guillermo Longoria works in 
The Tattooed Soldier. During his tenure in the Guatemalan special forces, Longoria’s 
actions and military missions were responsible for dismembering and separating families. 
In Los Angeles, at El Pulgarcito, Longoria worked for “Carlos Avilés, who opened every 
letter to check for political messages, [and] the owner himself, who wasn’t above a little 
pilfering in the first place” (Tobar 25). Tobar highlights how, even outside the isthmus, 
Longoria works alongside individuals who perpetuate political oppression, steal from 
fellow Guatemalans, and invisibilize their shared conditions. 
 Undocumented immigrants are invisibilized by oppressive economic, legal, and 
social agents of the neoliberal condition; or rather, undocumented immigrants are 
invisible to those who exercise the power to invisibilize.  Upon finding himself homeless 
and dragging around all of his belongings in a black Hefty garbage bag, Antonio 
recognizes that his new state further complicates his liminal state in Los Angeles:  
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Antonio was living on the streets, carrying everything he owned in a plastic bag, 
and no one would look him in the eye. He was used to being unseen. There was 
the invisibility of being a busboy, of walking between tables unnoticed, a shadow 
rolling the cart, clearing the dishes. But this was another kind of invisibility. 
People now made a point of turning away from him, just as Antonio had turned 
away from the hopeless men he saw in this same condition. Those men pushed 
belongings around in shopping carts. Now he could see how practical it was to 
have a shopping cart. (9-10) 
In previous interactions with homeless men, Antonio judged the “hopeless men” pushing 
their belonging in a shopping cart and invisibilized them and their individual legacies of 
symbolic or subjective violence. In short, there are two types of invisibility of 
undocumented immigrants living in Los Angeles, one that is accepted and one that is 
criminalized. Antonio’s low-pay material labor is accepted as it fulfills a utilitarian 
function within the neoliberal market. Yet, as a homeless and hopeless individual, 
Antonio is excluded from participating in the market; or rather, he is prevented from 
perusing a local store and filling his shopping cart with bought items and is relegated to 
using a discarded cart in the street as his only means of transporting his remaining and 
found belongings. This invisibility inevitably criminalizes the condition of homelessness 
and makes visible, in Antonio and José Juan’s case, their undocumented legal status as 
they are prohibited from many forms of gainful employment. The isolation and 
invisibilization underscores the political and economic ramifications of the United States’ 
interventionist policies throughout Central America, whereby undocumented immigrants 
are relegated to low-wage, dangerous jobs with no access to government assistance 
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programs to which they contribute through direct and indirect taxes. These neoliberal 
practices, for their part, undermine the construction of a post-conflict society in Central 
America as they produce and perpetuate various forms of violence against subjects 
intrinsically linked to aggravated and impoverished conditions.  
 Conscious of his own condition and fall from society, Antonio is surprised to find 
that many citizens of the United States endured the same oppressive economic and social 
forces. This awareness leads Antonio to consider their plight: “Refugees. That was the 
term for people who lived like this, in makeshift tents, on barren ground. This was 
something new. He did not know that gringos could be refugees. These gringos don’t 
deserve this” (41). As Antonio imagined that he was responsible for tainting “the 
prosperous Americano dream” (41) with the legacy of violence, which extended from his 
past and the murders of his wife, Elena, and son, Tobar makes clear that the violence of 
neoliberalism not only transcends geographical borders but is also inscribed upon the 
vulnerable and disenfranchised bodies of immigrants and the poor. Refugees also 
represent a disruptive force because, as Humphrey explains, “the victims have no 
effective national citizenship because they have lost the protection by the state or from 
the state. Their social displacement reveals the boundary of exclusion, the human waste 
produced by the violent solutions for social renewal based on homogenizing and 
hegemonizing ideologies” (93).  
The individuals living with Antonio in the homeless camp have all lost 
protections of the state, either due to their undocumented status or to the inability to pay 
for legal and judicial assistance, as they are unable to collect pay and benefits or fight the 
charges in court. Considered the homeless community’s political advocate, the Mayor 
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attends the weekly Board of Supervisors meetings and fought the county in court to raise 
their General Relief Payments, which were currently two hundred and ninety-seven 
dollars:  
[The Mayor’s] got his name on a couple of lawsuits too. Greene versus the 
County of Los Angeles. Has a nice sound to it, like a boxing match. In this corner, 
Larry Greene, homeless man. In that corner, L.A. County. The county’s a real 
heavyweight. The Mayor’s got a good left hook, the county’s got the fancy 
lawyers, the best money can buy. (Tobar 46) 
Presenting the process to request and collect government assistance as a boxing match 
brings to the fore the symbolic and systemic violence that the homeless community faces 
daily. First, the homeless individuals do not have access to justice since they are unable 
to pay for legal services. Second, the fees associated with filing a court claim further 
exacerbate their impoverished conditions and serve as a deterrent for advocating on their 
own behalf. Third, state agents retaliate against individuals exercising their rights, as seen 
each time the homeless camp was disassembled and disposed of, and Antonio and his 
new friends are forced to relocate their camp. In relation to the violence of the market, 
Itagaki underscores that the homeless community in Los Angeles is a group of economic 
refugees; or rather, “the people least responsible for their economic exploitation; less 
obviously, they are internally displaced people whose predicaments and numbers are 
harder to track since they move within rather than across national borders. Their numbers 
are acceptable collateral damage of the hierarchies of capitalism” (134). Along similar 
lines, therefore, I argue that the ensuing violence among these economic hierarchies is 
directly tied to the violence of neoliberalism and deconstructs the notion that a post-
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conflict society is possible, both in the country where the civil war took place and in the 
diaspora.  
Having suffered the political and military violence in Guatemala and the resulting 
violence of neoliberalism in Los Angeles, Antonio acknowledges and understands his 
social condition, as well as the responsibility which befalls him if he hopes to receive 
justice for the wrongdoings committed against him: “The responsibility of bringing him 
to justice had fallen to him because there was no one else to do it. They lived in an 
interval of history without courts, without the passionless procedures of official justice, 
and so this act had fallen to him, a man living on his own in a strange city, a homeless 
man” (Tobar 229). Rationalizing his plan to avenge his wife and son’s death, Antonio 
considers the relationship between Longoria and himself: “There is a balance between us. 
We are opposites balancing a scale, we are mathematics. I am tall, he is short. I live 
under the sky, he lives under a roof. He has a girlfriend, I am alone. He has a job, I do 
not. He is the killer, I am his victim” (229). This realization, along with his desire for 
revenge, ignites a fire within Antonio which leads him to obsessively surveil and 
thoroughly investigate his victim, the killer Guillermo Longoria.  
Following days of careful observation and memorization of Longoria’s routine, 
Antonio breaks into his apartment searching for evidence that confirms his identity while 
providing material justification for his revenge. Not quite prepared for what he would 
find, Antonio discovers such evidence tucked away in a white envelope in the back flap 
of a photo album:  
He put the album on the bed and scrambled to pick them up. He was squatting to 
look under the dresser when he saw the bodies, three corpses lined up on a cement 
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floor. A morgue had fallen from the album and spilled around his feet. Corpses 
with their eyes open. Corpses with their pants pulled down, the seahorses of their 
genitals exposed. Corpses with their arms folded over their chests. Corpses with 
their hands missing. Peasants in green shirts. Living men, in camouflage, posing 
with the corpses, as if to say, We’re alive and they’re dead. And here is the 
tattooed soldier, the painted killer, standing over a child lying face down on a dirt 
path. (175) 
On the one hand, these photos justify Antonio’s desire for revenge given that Longoria 
lacks remorse for his participation in the violence. Instead, Longoria sees his victims as 
trophies and relics from his tenure as a decorated soldier. On the other, these photos 
effectively portray how both parties, the perpetrators and the victims, are reduced to 
pawns manipulated by the political players. Thus, this sacrifice, the inability of both the 
victim and perpetrator to escape one’s violent past, problematizes the international 
relationship between Central America and the United States. The reader understands the 
weight of Longoria’s actions as the perpetrator of senseless violence throughout the war. 
However, the collection of photos emphasizes how the young men were involuntarily 
forced to assume these roles, stripping them of their identity and humanity, and shipping 
them to the North for superior training. This training ultimately reveals the United States 
government’s desire to protect its economic and political interests with little regard for 
the destruction that resulted in Central America.  
 As Masiello has suggested, the neoliberal market has a tendency to erase the 
memories of the past that bound individuals together, while literature possesses the power 
to create meaning in and out of the ruins. So, too, Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier attempts 
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to make meaning out of past and present violence in the aftermath of the Guatemalan 
civil war and the 1992 Los Angeles riots:   
The promise of real-life violence or chaos was just about the only thing that could 
entice the apartment dwellers to break the burglar-proof seals on their doors and 
venture into public space. Fires, gang shootings, marital slugfests that spilled out 
onto the street: friendships were made and love affairs ignited in these magical 
moments when people gathered in the hallway, on the sidewalk or the front steps 
[…]. (8) 
It is important to note that the public spaces in this scene – the hallway, the sidewalk or 
the front steps, the homeless camp or the tunnel – mark the transitional “in-between” 
spaces. This liminal space is one that establishes connections based on their collectively 
silent response in the face of violence, and, perhaps more importantly, provides the space 
to step outside legal and judicial boundaries. For example, in the tunnel beneath Los 
Angeles, Antonio faces his own violent criminality and obtains justice for the violence 
against his wife and son by leading Longoria to his untimely death. Contemplating his 
victim, Antonio ponders:  
Would he ever forget the horror of the eyes, the face of a man at the moment he 
reached for his last breath? The soldier with the peasant’s voice. He would carry 
this memory next to the image of Carlos and Elena on the steps of their home in 
San Cristóbal. Twin images, emblazoned on the front and back of a book filled 
with his wanderings. The blood of Los Angeles was colorless in the black-and-
white light of the tunnel. The blood of Guatemala was crimson under a tropical 
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sun. The blood of Los Angeles might soon begin to fade. The blood of Guatemala 
was indelible. (Tobar 304) 
Living in a liminal state between the violence in Guatemala and Los Angeles, Antonio is 
caught between defining places and moments in his life: a bus stop in Guatemala and 
MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where he has two close encounters with Longoria. 
When Antonio and Longoria finally meet again in a tunnel beneath Los Angeles, their 
roles are inverted: the victim and the perpetrator switch places, and Antonio, who leads 
Longoria to his death, becomes the liminal criminal in the quest for justice. Antonio’s 
liminal criminality will never be brought to light nor will the United States’ crimes 
committed against the Guatemalan society. 
 Immediately following Elena and Carlos’s murder, Antonio knows he must flee 
Guatemala to save his own life; however, carrying his possessions in a cardboard box, he 
is aware that he could never fully leave his past behind. Reflecting upon all that he has 
lost, Antonio remembers the day he left. Confronted not only with this tremendous loss 
and his forced escape, Antonio comes face-to-face with his family’s murderer while 
awaiting his bus in Guatemala. The paralyzing fear and silence perpetrated by Longoria 
that day follows Antonio as he flees Guatemala into the diaspora in Los Angeles. Not 
looking back and confronting the man who killed his family, Antonio replays forever the 
scene: “Look at him. Why are you afraid? […] Drop the box. Drop it and confront the 
man. […] Antonio shuffled along with the other passengers, keeping the vague form of 
the killer in his field of vision” (19). Unwilling to confront the killer, Antonio’s only 
reaction is to study and memorize every detail of his physical appearance:  
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He was dressed like a civilian but looked like a soldier. The shaved head was the 
giveaway. Antonio memorized the face: the dark features, the long nose, the 
protruding ears, something childlike in his eyes. […] On the killer’s left arm […] 
halfway between the wrist and the elbow, there was a mark on the skin, yellow 
and black. A tattoo of a yellow animal with its jaws open. (19) 
For the moment, this silent act of observation and memorization is Antonio’s only 
plausible act of defiance against Longoria. Actively confronting him would result in his 
immediate demise; therefore, Antonio sublimates his threatening capabilities to a single 
object: the image of a yellow tattoo, representing the power of the “soldier’s identity,” yet 
his lack of individual identity. The tattoo will also serve as the ultimate sign of his 
subsequent surveillance and investigation as Antonio seeks revenge.  
 Antonio’s second public encounter with Guillermo takes place in MacArthur Park 
in Los Angeles, California. Similar to his experience at the bus stop, Antonio is faced 
with both silent rage and inaction as his past quickly rushes back. While watching a 
friendly game of chess in the park, Antonio notices that “everyone else was in sweaters 
and coats, but the younger chess player was wearing a navy blue T-shirt that clung to his 
muscular frame. A soldier, Antonio told himself” (77). Recalling this previous 
memorization, Antonio reflects upon the conformity of a soldier’s appearance: “They get 
their heads shaved when they’re in the army, and they never change. […] The former 
soldiers who were now drug dealers, criminals, and hustlers of all sorts. The younger 
player lifted his left arm and picked up a chess piece. […] The arm was raised just long 
enough for Antonio to make out the tattoo of a yellow animal” (77). The prior 
desubjectification of Longoria transforms his identity from a strong, intimidating soldier 
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to this single tattoo, which symbolizes his prior military training in the United States. 
However, Longoria has not lost all of his power over Antonio: “The killer’s face. Antonio 
spun in the flux of decades and countries, time and space distorted. The present, the past, 
somewhere in between” (79).  
Tobar’s intentional and affective blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries 
highlights the lack of protection from the migration and movement of political violence: 
“Once created, political violence permeates borders, dissolving imagined distinctions 
between the developed North and the Global South. [Antonio’s] temporal confusion 
provides him with his first opportunity to process political trauma by dwelling in the 
indeterminate moment” (Pattison 121). This liminal temporality duplicates the spatial 
tension between public and private, which problematizes neoliberalism’s potential to 
break significant borders. If inherent to neoliberalism is the erasure of memories that 
bound individuals together, Tobar effectively pushes against this notion in The Tattooed 
Soldier through Antonio’s never-ending quest for revenge. The memory linking Antonio 
and Guillermo together is the propelling force not only behind the narrative action within 
the novel, but rather behind Antonio’s search for personal retribution. This personal 
search, therefore, symbolizes the collective action of the victimized, albeit at the 
individual level, in Central America who reject the imposition of the neoliberal market 
and seek alternative paths for revenge, reconciliation, or justice. Therefore, together the 
fragmented voice and perspective, alongside the disjointed narrative form, illustrate the 
effects of the neoliberal market while simultaneously manufacturing new forms of 
violence which undermine the construction of a post-conflict period. 
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To conclude, Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier can be interpreted as a revenge 
narrative that problematizes the construction of historical discourse. Specifically, through 
Antonio Bernal and Guillermo Longoria, the novel brings to the fore the liminal 
criminalization of victims of political violence and the victimization of perpetrators of 
political violence. Distancing itself further from generic conventions, Tobar’s treatment 
of narrative voice creates an empathetic bond between the reader and Guillermo Longoria 
and forces the reader to endure the emotional and psychological journey which Antonio 
Bernal must confront in his search for justice. Ultimately, The Tattooed Soldier 
emphasizes how political violence is inscribed on the bodies of victims and perpetrators 
alike and is the very foundation upon which (in)justice is established. The soldier’s tattoo 
is a visual reminder of his victimization at the hands of the United States and Guatemalan 
militaries and of post-war impunity. Antonio’s anger and fear-driven quest for justice 
materializes through physical acts of violence and revenge. Antonio Bernal and 
Guillermo Longoria’s relationship illustrates how neither victims of political violence and 
victimized perpetrators of political violence can truly receive justice, as the judicial 
system is predicated upon their victimization, marginalization, and disenfranchisement.  
 
  
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Chapter 3: Broken Law, Law Breakers in Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012) and Marcos 
McPeek Villatoro’s Minos (2003) 
 
 While previous chapters of this dissertation examine how individual and 
collective historical legacies of violence shape neoliberal subjectivities in a corpus of 
contemporary transnational Central American crime fiction, this chapter focuses on 
Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos and Daniel Quirós’ Verano rojo (2012), two novels 
that interrogate liminal justice in post-conflict contexts and texts.4 In Minos, Salvadoran 
American homicide Detective Romilia Chacón aligns herself with a wanted drug runner 
and fugitive, Rafael Murillo, to access vital information in the investigation of her sister’s 
murder in Atlanta, Georgia. This illegally obtained information not only leads Chacón 
and the FBI to the wanted serial killer, but also results in Chacón’s promotion in the FBI 
on the case. In Quirós’ novel, Verano rojo, protagonist Don Chepe, a former insurance 
agent is contracted extra-judicially by the Costa Rican police force to investigate cases of 
murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking, and robbery, among other crimes. In Verano rojo, 
                                                          
4 This chapter examines one installment in two crime fiction series. In McPeek Villatoro’s 
Romilia Chacón series, protagonist and Homicide Detective Chacón investigates the 
murder of her sister Catalina by the serial killer, the Whisperer/Minos. Throughout the 
series, the individual investigations that Chacón conducts provide further details relating 
to her sister’s case. In this chapter, I analyze Minos, the second installment in the series, 
which highlights Chacón’s relationship with criminal suspects, her sister’s murderer, and 
the emotional toll that this investigation has on her. In Quirós’ Don Chepe series, 
protagonist Don Chepe works alongside the Costa Rican police department, but he is not 
officially employed by them. In Verano rojo, the first installment in the two-part series, 
Don Chepe investigates the murder of a close friend, la Argentina, employs 
nontraditional and illegal techniques, and uncovers clues leading to his suspect. In both 
series, McPeek Villatoro and Quirós establish parallels between the individual murder 
cases and unsolved historical crimes and interrogate how these investigations have been 
insufficiently addressed.  
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following the murder of his friend Iliana, referred to as la Argentina, Don Chepe 
immerses himself in the shady underworld of drug smuggling, illicit international 
business transactions, and explorative tourism practices in Costa Rica. Chacón and Don 
Chepe’s law-breaking crime fighting techniques reveal and problematize the collution of 
criminal elements and national and international law-making machines.5 Through a 
comparative analysis of these two figures, I argue that their criminality and 
performativity as “detectives” effectively “break the law;” that is, create liminal criminals 
of the detectives. For example, Romilia Chacón, legally employed by the Nashville 
Homicide Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and Don Chepe, deputized but 
not formally employed by the Costa Rican police force, carry out the essential detective 
functions while undermining the legal process through their acts of criminality.  
Crucial to this analysis is an understanding of the relationship between the law-
making machine and the detective. The parts of the law-making machine are the crimes, 
the criminals, and the rest of Us, the law-abiding citizens (Sistare 271). Distinguishing 
between legality and illegality establishes and maintains the social division between 
society and the criminal other. In “Punishment, Identity, and Difference,” Christine 
Sistare argues that the code of law is created and maintained by this division. She states 
                                                          
5 In Justice, Law, and Culture, James K. Feibleman defines the system of laws upon 
which the law-enforcement machinery operates based upon questions of consistency, 
completeness and categoricity. He states that “a legal system is consistent if none of the 
laws conflict. […] [C]onsistency requires that all of the laws in the system belong in the 
system, and completeness requires that all of the laws that belong in the system are in the 
system. […] Categoricity uniquely determines the system it describes. […] That the laws 
of a society are categorical is guaranteed by the fact that they all follow from the same 
theory of reality and all exist on the same level of analysis” (24). These definitions 
provide a framework against which the literary analysis will be constructed, specifically 
regarding Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe’s investigations, criminality, and subsequent 
prosecution of the “criminals.”  
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that the division is between “the legitimate members of the Social Group [and] the 
pretenders. The offender is one whose criminality sets him/her off from the group as a 
false member. The criminal is the wolf among the sheep, the player who cheats, the 
enemy within, the antisocial personality; in every metaphor, it is the Other who 
masquerades as one of Us” (271-2). Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe work 
simultaneously as criminal others and agents within the code of law itself; therefore, their 
criminality and institutionally privileged positionality expose the internal contradictions 
upon which the law-making machine operates.  
In addition to designating the criminal other as one who exists outside societal 
norms, Mark Colvin underscores the roles that self-image and perception play: “Self-
image plays a role in creating criminal behavior; the public’s moral stance towards 
certain criminal behaviors (while greatly influenced by politics and the media) is the 
context against which self-images of criminals are created)” (2). Romilia’s publicized 
legal indiscretions are overshadowed and overwhelmingly forgiven because in a previous 
assignment and novel (Home Killings), she solved the Jade Pyramid killings. For 
example, Romilia reflected on how her reputation followed her across borders: 
Lieutenant McCabe “had my file from Atlanta, which held two incidents that lay like 
blots of shame on my record. My reputation as a hot-head had followed me to Nashville, 
but luckily I had a boss who kept that reputation locked in his file cabinet” (McPeek 
Villatoro 20). Previous legal indiscretions did not prevent Romilia from pursuing all 
leads, both legal and illegal, in the case of her sister’s murder. Don Chepe and his 
outsider status generates a liminal state where he is simultaneously trapped and defined 
by his legality and criminality.  
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The identification, classification, and persecution of, and at times by, criminals 
reveal the violence which is inscribed in the law-making machine. In “Critique of 
Violence,” Walter Benjamin interrogates the intersections between violence and law, 
because “the task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its 
relationship to law and justice” (277). Therefore, Benjamin explains how the legal system 
operates and emphasizes how its actions are historically situated with regards to 
sanctioned and unsanctioned violence. He states that the legal system “tries to erect, in all 
areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can 
only be realized by legal power” (280). While violence in the hands of an individual is 
seen as a danger to the legal system, Benjamin points out how the legal system is, by 
nature, a system of violence because “all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-
preserving” (287). He defines law-preserving violence as “a threatening violence” (285) 
and law-making violence as “power making, and, to that extent, an immediate 
manifestation of violence” (295). The police institution and police violence, according to 
Benjamin, are examples of law-making violence because “its power is formless, like its 
nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states” (287). 
The structural and material violence of the police and judicial apparatuses in McPeek 
Villatoro and Quirós’ novels reveal the complexities of law-preserving and law-making 
violence. The threatening presence of Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe not only leads 
them to uncover leads and networks of transnational criminality, but also places them in 
jeopardy as the criminals under investigation seek to retaliate or escape.  
Therefore, the process of bringing one to justice and violence of the law are 
inextricably related. In “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Jacques 
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Derrida clearly articulates the origin of law with this threatening violence. Derrida claims 
that the first characteristic related to law “is ‘to enforce the law,’ or ‘enforceability of the 
law or contract.’ […] Applicability, ‘enforceability,’ is not an exterior or secondary 
possibility that may or may not be added as a supplement to law. It is the force essentially 
implied in the very concept of justice as law” (5). Similar to Benjamin, Derrida examines 
the violence internal to the system of law; however, Derrida emphasizes the external 
forces through which law itself materializes:  
The word ‘enforceability’ reminds us that there is no such thing as law that does 
imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of 
being ‘enforced,’ applied by force. There are, to be sure, laws that are not 
enforced, but there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or 
enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, 
physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive or 
hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth. (6)  
The force which will be analyzed in this chapter are the techniques employed and tools 
utilized, both legal and illegal, by Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe in their murder 
investigations. Enforceability in these cases refers to their affiliation with police 
institutions and state apparatuses and the material violence of their law breaking and the 
structural violence of the broken law. Romilia and Don Chepe’s criminality disorders, 
disrupts, and repositions the power structures within their respective departments and 
complicates the identification and separation of the “criminal other” from “the rest of 
Us.” Their criminality, for its part, functions in the same way that the law is maintained:  
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Once established, law is maintained through force; it is maintained as an 
apparatus of violence that disorders, disrupts, and repositions preexisting relations 
and practices all in the name of an allegedly superior order. That order 
demonstrates its ‘superiority’ in ferocious displays of force and subjugating, 
colonizing, ‘civilizing’ acts of violence. Violence thus may be said to be integral 
to law in three senses: it provides the occasion and method for founding legal 
orders, it gives law (as a regulator of force and coercion) a reason for being, and it 
provides a means through which law acts. (Sarat 5)  
If justice is obtained through a system of laws which derives its legitimacy from violence, 
I argue that Romilia and Don Chepe’s criminality and legal indiscretions illustrate how 
the system of laws is broken; or rather, if an investigation is conducted through criminal 
or non-enforceable means, justice can never truly be attained. Their criminality and 
liminal positionality both within and outside the system of laws sheds light on the 
system’s internal contradictions, limitations, and failures to provide justice to victims of 
both individual and collective or historical legacies of violence.  
 To argue that Romilia and Don Chepe are disruptive figures that shed light on the 
institutional failures and shortcomings of national and international state apparatuses, it is 
important to trace the evolution of the detective figure in contemporary detective and 
crime fiction. According to Amelia Simpson, “detective fiction is generally understood to 
be a type of narrative constructed around the solving of a crime problem, in which a 
detective, or a figure who carries out the functions of a detective, is assigned a primary 
role” (10). In McPeek Villatoro and Quirós’ novels, the protagonists investigate and 
attempt to solve a series of murders, all the while they uncover or engage in additional 
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acts of illegality and criminality. There are two frameworks which inform this study, that 
of classic detective fiction, the ‘whodunit’, and the hard-boiled detective novel, or novela 
negra. According to the canonical typology established by Tzvetan Todorov in the late 
1970s, classic detective fiction consists of two stories: the story of the crime and of the 
investigation (44). The ways in which the investigation is presented allows the reader to 
attempt solving the puzzle, which “provides a reassuring view of society in the 
mechanistic crime-to-solution sequence” (Simpson 11).  
In contrast to the investigative nature of the classic detective novel, “more 
typically align[ed] mystery conventions with anxieties over contamination, irrationality, 
and the threat posed to imperial modernity by unassimilated racial and cultural 
difference” (Pearson and Singer 4), the hard-boiled detective novel emerged in the United 
States in the 1920s. The hard-boiled novel, or novela negra, is defined in Demetrio 
Estébanez Calderón’s Diccionario de términos literarios as “a narrative subgenre (related 
to the detective novel), that appears in North America at the beginning of the 1920s and 
in which its authors attempt to reflect, from a critical consciousness, the world of 
gangsterism and organized criminality stemming from the violence and corruption of the 
capitalist society of the era” (Close 143-4). Crucial to the novela negra is the critical 
consciousness vis-à-vis the intersections between subjective and systemic violence; or 
rather, an overt representation and subsequent questioning of criminality inherent to the 
capitalist system which manifests itself through individual, physical violence. This 
critical consciousness speaks to the reasons why crime fiction is used synonymously with 
detective fiction, given that crime is the force which drives both the narrative discourse 
and the detective’s investigation.  
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McPeek Villatoro and Quirós’ novels, for their part, combine elements of the 
classic ‘whodunit’ with elements of the novela negra, specifically in the construction of 
their protagonists’ subjectivity. Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe embody and perform the 
law as they engage in illegal investigative techniques and criminal acts. Therefore, 
McPeek Villatoro and Quirós’ detectives deviate from class detective figures. In her 
critical study on Roberto Bolaño’s work, “La narrativa policial como un género de la 
Modernidad: la pista de Bolaño,” Magda Sepúlveda explains the role of the detective 
figure: “La novela policial propone un detective que logra desentrañar la verdad gracias a 
ensayar una conciencia fuera del tiempo y del espacio, que instaura la verdad como un 
‘saber’” (110). Furthermore, commenting on the relationship between the individual and 
the society in which one lives, Sepúlveda states that the boundary separating the detective 
from the criminal “es la tarea del detective, por eso este personaje se esfuerza en 
examinar los casos sin considerar sus vínculos personales, incluso en la gran mayoría de 
los policiales negros, el detective debe romper los lazos afectivos que ha ido 
desarrollando en el transcurso de la investigación para ser capaz de mirar el delito como 
un objeto de estudio” (111). McPeek Villatoro and Quirós effectively break with this 
characteristic of the detective or crime fiction novel.  
Romilia Chacón and Don Chepe are unsuccessful at distancing themselves 
temporally, physically, and mentally from the cases they are investigating since some of 
the victims were family members, friends, and lovers. Their personal and emotional 
investments in their cases also undermine their ability to establish an objective truth, 
which impacts how the reader experiences and follows along the investigation. Or rather, 
as Sepúlveda points out, the reader and the detective share similar conditions: “La 
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estructura policial tiende a situar al lector en una condición similar a la del detective, pues 
este receptor también creará un mundo de conjeturas que le permitan explicar lo 
sucedido. […] La lógica del lector ha quedado tan polemizada como la racionalidad del 
detective. Estamos todos perdidos” (114-5). Moreover, McPeek Villatoro and Quirós 
humanize the criminals in such a way that both the detectives and the reader can identify 
with their lived conditions and develop an empathetic bond with the criminals. This 
empathetic bond further illustrates how the system of laws is broken by the inability to 
clearly identify and distinguish between the “criminal other” and “the rest of Us.”  
 In the prologue of Home Killings (2001), the first installment of McPeek 
Villatoro’s Romilia Chacón series, the reader is introduced to the protagonist, Romilia 
Chacón: “I’m twenty-eight, Latina, and a southerner. Atlanta was my hometown. Now 
Nashville is where I hang the few skirts I own. I’m a bonafide rookie homicide detective, 
having made the cut only six months ago” (vii). In the opening lines, the complexity of 
Romilia’s identity is revealed with regards to her profession, geographic location, and 
cultural influences. This opening passage also overtly introduces the series as one of 
detective fiction while it subtly deviates from these conventions: “I’ve only seen three 
murdered bodies in my life, the latest one being this young guy Diego Sáenz. Still, I’m 
good at this. I know I’m good because I think about murder all the time. I have that right. 
My big sister’s killer gave me the right six years ago. He also gave me obsessive 
vengeance […]. Used sparingly anger is the best fuel” (vii). In traditional detective 
fiction, detachment between the reader and the criminal and between the detective and 
the cases being investigated is paramount to the narrative arc as one does not want the 
criminal to seem too “human” (Simpson 11).  
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In this opening passage, Romilia explicitly states what drives her professionally, 
reveals her personal investment in the investigation, and complicates her desire to bring 
her sister’s murderer to justice by stating that she has an “obsessive vengeance.” The 
questions which I seek to answer are the following: How does the racialization and 
gendering of Romilia’s professional and personal subjectivity impact her agency as a 
Latina detective in the South? How does her sister’s absence shape her investigative and 
coping skills? How does her obsession with her sister’s murderer undermine her 
professional authority and the processes of justice? I argue that Romilia’s liminal 
criminality is a byproduct of these external social, political, and cultural forces. As she 
works through the grief and anger following her sister’s murder, Romilia’s liminal 
criminality materializes by using her privileged position as a detective to illegally acquire 
classified information to track her sister’s murderer while simultaneously becoming 
romantically involved with Rafael Murillo, a wanted criminal and former member of the 
Guatemalan death squads. Her state-legitimized liminal criminality contends with both 
the legacy of violence stemming from her sister’s murder and the collective legacies of 
violence resulting from U.S. interventionist policies in the Central American civil wars. 
 In contrast to narratives that trace Central American migration to urban centers, 
such as Los Angeles in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Romilia finds herself 
among the evolving Latina/o population in the South, a location imbued with problematic 
race and cultural relations. In his study on Appalachian Latino poetics, “Andando entre 
dos mundos,” Michael Dowdy notes that “as Latino and Appalachian, they are ‘the other 
America’ twice over” (127). This double-othering stems from the peripheralization of the 
Appalachian region in discourses of U.S. economic and social progress. Dowdy 
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subsequently elaborates the similarities between the Appalachian region of the United 
States and the Amazon and Andes as the national and multinational “sacrifice zones” for 
corporations: “Sacrifice turns the euphemism of ‘development’ to ‘destruction,’ 
clarifying power relations between ‘region’ and nation. In some parts of Appalachia, after 
all, corporations ‘control up to 90 percent of the surface land and 100 percent of the 
mineral resources” (128-9). The relationship between the market and the seemingly 
isolated region conceal the patterns of wealth that flow from the region: “Neoliberal 
keywords conceal these consequences in triumphal terms of economic ‘freedom,’ job 
‘creation,’ energy ‘independence,’ and ‘clean’ coal” (129). The growing Latina/o 
population in the rural South frequently finds themselves employed and trapped within 
systems of labor exploitation. In “Sleuthing Central American Identity and History in the 
New Latino South,” Yajaira M. Padilla points out that the new Latino labor force is 
attracted to the South given affordable housing and the demand for low-skilled workers; 
however, “still subject to extreme forms of exploitation, given the undocumented status 
of many, this new labor force is a vital element of chemical, automobile, furniture, 
poultry, and meatpacking factories as well as more traditional agricultural industries and 
construction” (378). As a result, the surrounding communities evolved to provide “the 
necessary equipment for survival – taquerías, little Mexican markets, immigration paper 
selling […]” (Home Killings 16). Economic privilege, for its part, is an underlying theme 
throughout the series and underwrites the migratory experience of many Central 
Americans following the period of armed conflicts and one’s access to legal 
representation and justice, as we witnessed with Antonio Bernal in The Tattooed Soldier.  
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Returning to the opening lines in Home Killings, Romilia identifies herself first as 
a Latina, second as a Southerner, and third as a rookie homicide detective. The 
complexity of her identity is the subject of several scholarly texts. For example, in “Hot 
on the Heels of Transnational America,” Wendy Knepper examines how Romilia’s 
professional identity mirrors the changing demographic of the U.S. south and the shifts in 
cultural perspectives. She states that “just as the Latina in the United States represents a 
hybrid figure, someone who negotiates aspects of her American and Latina selves, the 
Latina detective novel represents a hybrid discourse, a blend of the feminist detective 
novel and ethnic detective novel” (157). Moreover, Knepper emphasizes the political 
potential of the Latina detective novel to give voice to these multi-faceted, transnational 
and cross-cultural experiences: “the Latina detective acts as a border-crosser [whose] 
unique transcultural feminist perspective and hybrid socio-cultural methods of detection 
lead her to uncover and reconstitute a more comprehensive understanding of 
contemporary America” (158). One border which Romilia continually crosses is the 
linguistic barrier between Spanish and English.  
In Home Killings, the reader learns that Romilia is hired by the Nashville 
Homicide Unit to investigate Diego Sáenz’s murder precisely because she speaks 
Spanish:  
Though his driver’s license told me little about this case, it quickly explained why 
I was the detective put on it. Sáenz was Hispanic. People like Sáenz were the 
reason the Nashville Homicide Unit hired me. […] Before I arrived, my boss, 
Lieutenant Patrick McCabe […] and his small retinue of southern white dicks had 
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found their deductive reasoning and acumen stunted by their inability to speak 
Spanish. (16) 
Linguistic, racialized, and gendered social constructions define the positionality between 
Romilia and her white, male superiors: “Take the smartest monolingual gringo in the 
world and put him in a roomful of Spanish speakers, and you’ll have yourself one 
insecure, frightened, regressive, pissed-off, stupid-feeling individual. It only takes a 
couple of cases in which language differences become an issue in order for someone like 
McCabe to throw up his hands and beg for help” (16). The space for Romilia Chacón 
emerges as a direct response to the department’s deficiencies. Or rather, Romilia is hired 
to fulfill a specific need, one of supporting the “monolingual gringo,” which reifies the 
social and professional positionality between colleagues. This assignment further 
complicates the relationship between Romilia and her traumatic past; for example, as Ana 
Patricia Rodríguez notes in “Heridas abiertas de América Central,” “el periodista latino 
asesinado, y sujeto de la investigación de Chacón, ahora forma parte de la intimidad de la 
muerte con la cual ella vive día tras día. Estas primeras líneas de la primera novela de la 
serie nos revelan, en breve, la trama y el trauma personal y profesional de Romilia 
Chacón” (429). Viewing Romilia as a tool of Spanish translation and interpretation for 
the Nashville Homicide Unit undermines her intelligence, agency, and professional 
capabilities: “And even with her solving that very big case, the one called the Jade 
Pyramid Killings, she’s still who she is: a Hispanic woman in an all-white force that’s not 
going to make her Lieutenant overnight” (184). This lack of professional mobility reveals 
systemic and institutional racism upon which the Nashville Homicide Unit operates.  
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 Romilia’s linguistic identity is but one site of negotiation of her “multiple subject 
positions” (Padilla, “Sleuthing” 379). Romilia works within a hypermasculine state 
apparatus, which in turn impacts the ways in which she performs or underperforms her 
gender, regardless of the reaction that a situation warrants. For example, after her young 
son Sergio accidentally overdoses on methamphetamine, Romilia relies on this 
performance to independently track and arrest Peaches, the drug dealer responsible:  
I knocked. A little guy came to the door. Peaches. The fuzz on his chin gave away 
his nickname. […] ‘Oh man, I am in bad need of a hit.’ I smiled. My hair was 
thick over my neck, falling before my shoulder. My voice was as feminine as I 
could possibly make it. I sounded horny. My dress enhanced the effect: a red skirt 
that stopped a good five inches above my knees, with a red stretch top over my 
cupped red bra. All the clothes my mother didn’t know I owned. (Minos 159) 
Similar to her utilitarian function as a Spanish translator and interpreter, Romilia 
performs her gender in such a way to trap Peaches and legally gain access inside his 
apartment, the access she needs to make an arrest. However, of great importance is 
Romilia’s awareness of this performance as she consciously makes her voice feminine, a 
characteristic that would normally undermine her authority as a respected, competent 
homicide detective. Knepper, for her part, discusses these performances as responses to 
Romilia’s “double colonization” that Latinas experience both within the Latino 
community and society at large: “Latino and American constructs of gender tend to differ 
considerably, which can lead to a conflicted sense of femininity. The interplay of gender, 
ethnicity, and cultural difference plays an important role in the Latina detective’s 
relationships to communities and contributes to her sense of self in a Latina-American 
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vision of society” (160). Her actions are not without repercussions. Following her 
encounter with Peaches, Lieutenant McCabe reminds her how her actions are perceived: 
“Look, I know it’s difficult, what happened to Sergio. But it’s not going to help you to fly 
off the handle, taking things into your own hands. They’ll say you can’t handle the job. 
And I don’t think I need to remind you, how some guys think about women on the force: 
that a woman lets her personal life get in the way of her work” (Minos 166). As Romilia 
takes things into her own hands and sidesteps legal protocol, a topic to which I will return 
later, her boss equates her reaction to a mother’s and a woman’s emotions.  
In addition to her linguistic performativity, Romilia must also perform her gender; 
or rather, she must adhere to the expectations that are born out of systemic violence and 
ingrained patriarchal standards. As Padilla notes, Romilia “continuously has to 
renegotiate her identity both on the basis of gender as she struggles to be a ‘good cop’ 
and a ‘good mother’ as well as on the basis of her ethnicity” (“Sleuthing” 379). These 
processes of re-negotiation evolve as she travels west across the United States as the 
series progresses. In one encounter in Memphis, Tennessee, Romilia acknowledges how 
both gender and ethnicity impact her investigative abilities. While following a lead on her 
sister’s murderer, Romilia meets Darla, a young police officer in Memphis: “She was 
about my age, and still in blue; this could have created jealousy had it not been for the 
success of my last case. I was also Latina, and she African American. Again, yet another 
factor to consider here, in the South: one ethnic minority making it before the other. Yet 
Darla did not act pulled one way or another by that” (Minos 127). As this reflection 
shows, Romilia is aware of how her positionality is socially constructed; that is, as a 
Latina detective in the South, she earns respect only because of her solving of the Jade 
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Pyramid Killings. However, she acknowledges the underlying competition between both 
women and minority populations in the South. 
In her personal and family life, Romilia contends with legacies of violence that 
span generations and cross spatial, symbolic, and temporal borders. Additionally, she 
works within a system of laws that perpetually fail its most vulnerable communities and 
simultaneously undermines her cultural and personal identity. These are but two of many 
conditions which fuel Romilia’s propensity to act on emotional, anger-fueled reactions 
and break laws in her quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice. As Mark Colvin 
reminds us, “chronic criminals are made, not born [and] this propensity for criminal 
behavior, defined as ‘criminality,’ must be distinguished from acts of crime” (1).6 
Romilia’s criminality, for its part, is a product of the United States’ interventionist 
policies during the Central American civil wars, of the state’s failure to capture her 
sister’s murderer, and of her employment as an agent of these same state apparatuses. 
While completing her initial police training, Romilia admits in a casual conversation to 
Bobby, a man who appeared to randomly run into her at a Kroger’s supermarket, the true 
reasons she joined law enforcement:  
                                                          
6 In Crime and Coercion: An Integrated Theory of Chronic Criminality, Colvin also 
defines the three most frequent categories of criminality. Chronic offending refers to 
frequent and continual engagement in predatory street crime, including homicide, rape, 
burglary, and assault, among others. Exploratory offending refers to infrequent, 
temporary, or sporadic engagement in street crimes, which may or may not be predatory. 
At times predatory and chronic, white-collar crimes most typically refers to criminal 
violations of trust by an individual or group who otherwise engages in legitimate and 
respected activities (2). Romilia Chacón legal indiscretions align most closely with white-
collar criminality as she breaks public and institutional trust in the course of her criminal 
investigations.  
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‘Then you get your uniform?’ ‘Yeah. But I’ll move on.’ ‘To what?’ She did not 
smile. ‘Homicide. Of course.’ ‘I see. So you want to find your sister’s killer.’ 
‘Always.’ He saw Catalina in the hard pools of her eyes. ‘And what will you do 
when you find him?’ ‘Kill him, of course.’ She leaned over the table. ‘Why do 
you think I want to be a cop? It puts a gun in my hand legally.’ He shook his 
head, understanding. She shifted. ‘Oh, you didn’t hear that from me,’ she said. 
She laughed. But it was uncomfortable. A concern over incrimination, that 
someone would dig this guy up, and he would bear witness to this conversation in 
the coffee shop in Kroger’s. (183) 
Even though Romilia is unaware of Bobby’s true identity, the reader witnesses an 
exchange between Romilia and her sister’s murderer, the same serial killer she is hunting. 
The setting of this conversation also parallels the coffee shop where Bobby and Catalina 
first met. Additionally, this conversation reveals Romilia’s criminality with two key 
details. First, she admits that her intention is to kill her sister’s murderer. This admission 
contradicts her supposed quest for justice; or rather, as fellow officers frequently ask her, 
is she seeking justice or revenge? In this exchange with Bobby, Romilia exposes that she 
is driven by her desire for revenge. Second, she acknowledges the protection that being a 
police officer will provide her since it puts a gun in her hands legally. As Austin Sarat 
reminds us, “law depends on violence and uses it as a counterpunch to the allegedly more 
lethal and destructive violence situated just beyond law’s boundaries. But the violence on 
which law depends always threatens the values for which law stands” (3). This legal 
protection is subsequently the source of state-sanctioned corruption and police brutality 
against vulnerable communities. Sarat also points out that this threatening violence, 
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which forms the foundation of the system of laws, is carried out “directly by legal 
officials, some by citizens acting under a dispensation granted by law, and some by 
persons whose violent acts subsequently will be deemed acceptable” (3). Considering the 
circumstances surrounding Catalina’s brutal murder, Romilia’s criminal actions are not 
only deemed acceptable but eventually lead to recognition and a promotion with the FBI.  
Once Romilia explicitly acknowledges her intention, it becomes more difficult for 
the reader to ignore or write-off her propensity for criminality and the tools she uses in 
her investigations. After solving the Jade Pyramid killings in Nashville, Tennessee, 
Romilia’s obsessive investigation intensified while she was home recovering from a 
related injury. Lieutenant Patrick McCabe, Romilia’s boss, and Jacob ‘Doc’ Callahan, the 
Medical Examiner who worked closely with the Homicide Department, gifted Romilia a 
laptop, which Doc explicitly justifies: “The word is out on how computer illiterate you 
are, Romilia. Patrick and I have decided to take advantage of your condition. We’re 
bound and determined not to leave you in the past millennium. You will learn the 
Internet” (19). First, their desire to take advantage of Romilia’s condition underscores her 
positionality within the department and emphasizes her lack of agency within the 
departmental hierarchy. She is not provided time to simply recover; but rather, Lieutenant 
McCabe and Doc Callahan gift her this computer with the intention that these new skills 
will improve her utilitarian function for the department. Second, Doc’s assertion that 
Romilia will learn the Internet can be interpreted as a friendly jest between colleagues, or, 
perhaps more importantly, as an official order from her superiors. Tones of masculine 
power and superiority underwrite the friendly dynamic between colleagues. With this 
computer, however, Romilia spends the evenings searching the Internet for information 
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on the Whisperer, her sister’s murderer, because as she states, “obsession becomes easier, 
more fluid, with the Internet” (27).  
Alongside the investigation of her sister’s murder, Romilia also pursues leads on 
Tekún Umán, a known drug runner, who previously tortured one of Romilia’s confidants 
in Nashville, Tennessee. Regarding her interest in Tekún Umán, Lieutenant McCabe 
again confronts Romilia about her intentions:  
‘So this is a vengeance thing,’ he said. ‘No. It’s a legal thing. Tekún Umán 
tortured that boy, cut him up.’ And then the images flashed through me, of a 
sixteen year old boy who trusted me with information on Tekún Umán, and that 
same boy, a week later in a hospital with one less eye and the Spanish word for 
narc cut into his stomach, all because I was careless: Tekún Umán had found out 
about Gato Negro, because of me. (36) 
In this case, Romilia’s incessant thirst for revenge on her sister’s murderer blinds her 
from the ongoing investigation and leads to grave consequences for her informant, the 
young boy known by his street name Gato Negro. This mistake becomes another of 
Romilia’s obsessions and fuels both her detective work and criminality, which as 
Rodríguez points out, “además de sugerir que la detective puede corromperse y caer en la 
criminalidad, la atracción de Chacón por Murillo también señala las afinidades entre 
estos personajes, pues ellos comparten más que la trama policial de las novelas: 
comparten el reciente legado traumático de Centroamérica” (“Heridas abiertas” 435). 
After receiving access to confidential databases, Romilia acknowledges the work at hand:  
Obsession, it’s part of the job, right up there with forensics and psychological 
profiles. I could focus it: I wouldn’t get my boss in trouble trying to use the pass 
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code on other websites, such as the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. I would 
be a good detective: focus on Rafael Murillo, aka Tekún Umán. Keep my sight 
focused, that was the way of keeping me from going under (39).  
Romilia’s work, for its part, is two-fold. First, the material labor refers to Romilia’s 
investigation of Murillo using departmental and federal databases. Second, the immaterial 
labor refers to the internal struggle to not misuse these resources at the risk of implicating 
both her boss and herself.  
 The relationship between Romilia Chacón and Rafael Murillo is not simply one of 
Homicide Detective and wanted criminal: Romilia saves Murillo’s life, Romilia blames 
Murillo for her son’s accidental overdose on methamphetamine, and Romilia accepts 
Murillo’s unsolicited help in the investigation of the Whisperer/Minos, the serial killer 
responsible for her sister’s murder. Murillo’s help was accompanied by a romantic 
gesture, which complicates the detective-criminal relationship: “After he fled, he sent me 
the letter and the gold ring, proclaiming his undying love for me. Mi amor, Tekún had 
said. No other man had used that line on me. ‘If it were not for you, I would not be alive 
in this instant, writing this letter. It is because of you that I exist. And now, my existence 
desires only to think of you’” (27). Referencing this pivotal scene, Padilla points out that 
“this significant turn of events – as Romilia and Murillo’s seemingly frictional 
relationship also gives way to sexual attraction – is a literary recourse meant to further 
the detective narrative by providing an open ending and the potential for future 
encounters” (“Sleuthing” 393). These future encounters, to which Padilla alludes, also 
includes Murillo’s hidden participation and influence in the Nashville Homicide 
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Department’s investigations as his criminal activities provide Romilia with vitally 
important information.  
The second written correspondence and first e-mail, Romilia receives from 
Murillo arrives via the hacked e-mail account of “Cowgirlx14, or something like that:”  
Mi amor, How are you? Convalescing? I hear Wilson left you wounded. Nicked in 
the jugular, and yet you live. Marvelous. No doubt it’s that Salvadoran blood of 
yours. Just too strong, to stubborn, to die that easily. Tell me, are you the one 
checking in on that horrible Serial Killer website every fifteen minutes? There are 
too many moments in a day, Romi; too many empty opportunities in which I am 
driven to think of you. tu (30)  
Referencing “that Salvadoran blood of yours,” Murillo alludes not only to their shared 
collective and traumatic histories, but rather to the strength and perseverance of Central 
Americans. As I have already noted, this legacy of violence is the driving force behind 
Romilia’s professional path. Rodríguez points out that “en la novela A Venom Beneath 
the Skin, se nos explica que Chacón experimenta su salvadoreñidad como una herida 
abierta […]” (“Heridas abiertas” 436). This “herida abierta” is transformed and agitated 
with each new encounter with Murillo. Noticing perfect grammatical structures and 
accent usage, Romilia meditates on the signature tu: “And so the lack of an accent on the 
final word, the signature, was no mistake: he had chosen to use his nickname, or at least 
the initials of his nickname, Tekún Umán. Of course, ‘tu’ without an accent also means 
‘yours’” (30). This romantic tension underwrites the very foundation of Romilia and 
Murillo’s relationship as they cross legal, cultural, and professional boundaries, and 
reveals the similarities between the two: “La atracción mutua entre Chacón y Murillo 
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señala la posibilidad de que ella pueda perder el control, cometer un desliz y caer en el 
‘lado oscuro’ de la ley o, más bien, en el borde liminal de la criminalidad que también es 
el lugar sin límites de su deseo” (Rodríguez, “Heridas abiertas” 434). 
Disguised under the pretense of the investigation, Romilia also actively sought out 
Murillo. Arriving in New Orleans, Romilia’s internal dialogue revealed the contradictory 
feelings she held for Murillo: “And why was I looking for Tekún Umán? Because the 
bastard’s drug dealings had come home to me, to my son. A lie, or half-truth. I was here 
because he had given me more information in one book rate mailed package than I had 
ever been able to acquire in six years. If he could do that, maybe he could give me more” 
(Minos 219-20). Frustrated and dissatisfied with the official investigation, Romilia “was 
becoming more and more illegal” (234) by willingly and actively associating herself with 
Murillo, a known felon and fugitive of the law. Perhaps more important, however, is the 
way in which trust manifests itself. When Romilia handed over the illegal documents to 
the FBI, she failed to surrender Murillo’s letter, illustrating her lack of trust in the FBI. 
Murrillo also questions Romilia: “You didn’t show them the letter because you don’t 
trust them. Do you? You don’t trust them because the Federal Bureau of Investigation has 
failed to bring down your sister’s killer. You blame them for letting the Whisperer get 
away” (230). Romilia’s lack of institutional trust perhaps stems from patterns and 
practices of systemic violence, racism, and oppression, while her trust in Murillo, a 
wanted criminal, stems from their shared cultural and collective histories. Or rather, 
Romilia identifies herself in Murillo.  
In “Salvadoran-American Sleuthing in the U.S. South and Beyond,” Padilla 
investigates the relationship between the two characters and its parallels with U.S. and 
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Central American history. She states that “aside from her Salvadoran heritage, Romilia’s 
process of Latina identity formation is heavily influenced by her interactions with Rafael 
Murillo – another Central American-American – which lead her to ‘unearth’ a Central 
American history that is unfamiliar to her, but just as pivotal for understanding her 
cultural and ethnic identity” (129). Therefore, as Romilia conducts the criminal 
investigations, she must contend with two legacies of violence: the personal legacy 
stemming from her sister’s murder and the collective legacy of civil wars, systemic 
violence, and oppression supported by U.S. interventionist policies. Padilla points out 
that “in essence, then, Romilia and Murillo also evoke the ‘two sides’ of Central 
American civil war history: the popular and armed struggle of the people versus the 
oppression of the oligarchic state” (145). Their shared liminal and, now, criminal state as 
Central American immigrants in the United States speaks to their shared solidarity and 
mistrust of institutional forces. However, regardless of her mistrust, Romilia is employed 
by the FBI and in so works for the “oppressor;” therefore, by received illegal documents 
and aid from Murillo, Romilia has transformed herself from an FBI agent to an 
accomplice in federal crimes and further breaks the law-making machine which she is 
trained to uphold. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering Romilia admitted her 
intentions to legally acquire a gun and use all measures necessary to find and seek 
revenge on her sister’s murderer. Is Romilia a law-breaker or is the law already broken? 
McPeek Villatoro’s novel illustrates that justice can never fully be achieved when the 
instruments used are broken.  
 Cultural and professional solidarity form the very foundations of contending with 
personal and collective legacies of violence. As Simon Spring notes in “The Violence of 
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Neoliberalism,” “as members of the assemblage we call humanity, we each have a moral 
obligation to stand up and speak out as an act of solidarity with those whom the violence 
of neoliberalism has targeted, and those who have been silenced by the complacency of a 
stifled collective imagination wherein neoliberalism is considered an inexorable force” 
(159). As members of this post-conflict, cross-generational collective, Romilia Chacón 
and Don Chepe represent the intricacies upon which one’s social and political 
subjectivity is founded. Returning to Sistare’s argument, she reminds us that each 
individual is susceptible to becoming the “criminal other,” that “then, all that truly 
distinguishes Us from Them is discovery. Any one of us might have a ‘brush with the 
law;’ any might be suspected, investigated, accused, tried or punished” (274).  
 Romilia and Don Chepe not only risk being discovered as the “criminal other,” 
but rather professionally and socially operate from this liminal positionality. On the one 
hand, Romilia Chacón stood up and spoke out on behalf of the victims of the Salvadoran 
civil war, oppressive policing practices against vulnerable communities in the United 
States, and across cultural and generational boundaries. Problematic, however, was the 
fact that she was employed by the Nashville Homicide Unit and, later, the Federal Bureau 
of Investigations, two institutions which symbolize those responsible for systemic and 
symbolic violence, both within the United States and abroad. On the other hand, Don 
Chepe investigates the death of his friend, Ilana Echeverri, known as “la Argentina,” 
neither within nor outside the law, but rather alongside the law. Don Chepe, for his part, 
represents a liminal positionality in which he is both an asset for official investigations 
and is also left unprotected. The precarity of his positionality provides him the space to 
pursue all leads and obtain vital information through any means necessary.  
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 The detective figure, we must remember, fully exists in the in-between: between 
justice and cynicism, between truth and motives, between law and outlaw, between 
explorer and voyeur (Docker 230). As a figure that exists and operates in this perpetually 
liminal position, Docker notes that “while opposing the incompetence or compromises of 
the Law, the detective stands for another liege lord, or rather lady, Justice” (225). 
Personal vengeance and rampant impunity underwrite the detectives’ quests for justice in 
McPeek Villatoro’s Minos and Quirós’ Verano rojo. Romilia contends with and defends 
herself against accusations of revenge-based actions and Don Chepe reveals his personal 
and professional history with Costa Rica’s institutional powers, which ultimately leads 
him to knowing the victim of his investigation:  
Nos habíamos conocido hacía muchos años, poco después de que me mudé de la 
capital a Paraíso, donde construí una casa con los escasos ahorros de un ex agente 
del Instituto Nacional de Seguros, la compañía de seguros del Estado, la única en 
el país. En el INS, yo había sido uno de esos tipos que envían a investigar los 
accidentes de carro y los reclamos de seguro que hacen los clientes. (Verano rojo 
14) 
Having moved to Paraíso, “donde podía dedicar[se] a fomentar el olvido” (14), Don 
Chepe finds himself fulfilling the roles of detective, without the protection of the state, 
thereby amplifying the delicate balance between law and justice. In “Force of Law,” 
Jacques Derrida states that law is not equivalent to justice: “Justice is an experience of 
the impossible. A will, a desire, a demand for justice whose structure wouldn’t be an 
experience of aporia would have no chance to be what it is, namely, a call for justice” 
(16). Law is the element of precise calculation, whereby justice is the experience of the 
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improbable, “that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is 
never insured by a rule” (16).  
 Both Romilia and Don Chepe embody these experiences in the moments in which 
they decide to step outside the confines of the law to fulfill their duty as a law-enforcing 
detective. The murder of Romilia’s sister fueled both her desire to work as a law 
enforcement officer and her propensity for criminality, whereby Don Chepe recounts a 
starkly different beginning to his detective career:  
Hacía un tiempo, yo había empezado a ayudar con cosas en el pueblo. Todo 
comenzó un día en el bar de dona Eulalia. Era domingo y yo me tomaba las 
cervezas de todos los días. Un finquero local, al que siempre le daba la borrachera 
vaquera, le había faltado el respeto a dona Eulalia y después de rehusaba a salir 
del lugar. Cuando el Gato llegó, al hombre le pareció una buena idea tratar de 
partirlo de machetazos. Yo lo había convencido de que soltara el machete después 
de quebrarle un par de costillas. (20-21) 
Similar to Romilia, Don Chepe stepped in to protect not only his friend, doña Eulalia, but 
also her establishment, a bar which serves as a location of cultural, personal, and, later, 
professional exchanges. Having protected el Gato, the nickname of el cabo Hernández, 
corporal in “la Guardia Rural,” (19) Don Chepe earned recognition for his quick response 
and willingness to place himself in harms way for justice. Don Chepe also recounts how 
his past influences his legal and professional mobility: 
 Antes de trabajar para el INS, yo había pasado varios años en Nicaragua, 
luchando en la Revolución, donde había aprendido a hacerme entender. En 
Paraíso no caía de mal alguien con ese tipo de experiencia. A partir de ese día, 
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terminé echando mano en varios casos: robos, drogas, asesinatos, ese tipo de 
cosas. Todo extraoficialmente, por supuesto. Después también me empezaron a 
buscar personas del pueblo y del área que necesitaban ayuda con algún asunto 
personal. Los trabajos no daban mucho, pero aunque sea mataban el aburrimiento 
y ayudaban a pagar los pocos gastos que tenía. (21) 
This passage reveals three vitally important details. First, the Nicaraguan Revolution 
bolsters his positionality and underwrites the individual investigations which he carries 
out. Second, the variety and abundance of crimes which he investigates illustrate how the 
post-conflict society is transformed by a growing presence of violence. In 
“Centroamericanidades,” Arturo Arias affirms that “most Central American citizens were 
now exposed to the greatest crime wave in their history, with the added caveat that 
neither individual nor governmental institutions had any control over these mobile, 
translocal, transnational groups, better armed and financed than the governments of the 
territories in which they operated” (17). In the case of Costa Rica, Quirós comments on 
the presence of transnational criminal networks vis-à-vis the expanding drug trade, the 
presence and treatment of the undocumented migrant population, and the impact of the 
rapidly growing tourist and capitalist market. Third, Don Chepe acknowledges his liminal 
positionality and inherent criminality as he states that pay is low, all investigations are 
“extraofficial,” and he works for both the state and individual citizens.  
 At the scene of la Argentina’s murder, Don Chepe’s liminal positionality 
materializes in contrast to el Gato’s official status, which is visibilized because “el cabo 
llevaba el uniforme azul oscuro de la Guardia Rural, que se ponía solo en ocasiones 
‘oficiales’, cuando tal vez tendría que verse con sus superiores” (19). El Gato’s dark blue 
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uniform distinguishes him simultaneously from Don Chepe’s liminal positionality and 
from the privileged positionality of his superiors. In Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault 
argues that “the mechanics of power” is “the point where power reaches into the very 
grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, 
discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (39). In both novels, McPeek 
Villatoro’s Minos and Quirós’ Verano rojo, hierarchies of power control distribution of 
information, cooperation between investigative units, and, at times, disciplinary actions 
against agents, among others. In contrast to the law-preserving or law-making aspect of 
power, Foucault emphasizes the productive aspect of power, which he defines as “a new 
‘economy’ of power, that is to say procedures which allowed the effects of power to 
circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted and ‘individualized’ 
throughout the entire social body” (119). In this text, Foucault explicitly addresses the 
establishment of prisons and their transformative economic potential as an instrument 
both of surveillance and repression, the productive aspect of power provides the 
framework upon which both Romilia and Don Chepe deviate from institutional and 
established protocol and carry out their investigations in highly individualized, albeit 
criminal, ways.  
 In Quirós’ Verano rojo, Don Chepe unknowingly conducts two investigations 
surrounding the death of his friend Ilana Echeverri. In Tzvetan Todorov’s foundational 
work The Poetics of Prose, he states that every great book operates between two genres, 
“that of the genre it transgresses, which dominated the preceding literature, and that of 
the genre it creates” (43). Quirós’ text, for its part, transgresses formulaic constraints of 
the classic detective story through Don Chepe’s liminal criminality and the reliance upon 
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the victim’s input in (re)solving her own murder. This present corpus, therefore, creates a 
genre in which the victim is ever-present and through which the protagonists explicitly 
contend with transnational histories and legacies of violence. Todorov also states that the 
classic whodunit contains two stories, that of the crime and that of the investigation (45). 
Unlike the classic whodunit, Quirós’ Verano rojo contains multiple crimes and 
investigations. Notably, the central crime which Don Chepe is tasked with solving is the 
murder of Ilana Echeverri, or la Argentina. However, the liminal crimes of interest in this 
analysis include Don Chepe’s criminality, the illegal means through which he obtains 
evidence, and the police department’s complicity. Unlike classic detective stories, 
however, Quirós’ novel interweaves Don Chepe’s investigation with la Argentina’s, in 
which she sought to reveal the individual(s) responsible for the 1984 bombing in La Cruz 
which left four dead and more than twenty wounded. As she followed leads, she feared 
for her life and ultimately left clues for Don Chepe, leading him to her murderer. While 
Romilia’s sister implicitly fueled her investigations in McPeek Villatoro’s Minos, la 
Argentina plays an active role in the investigation of her own murder in Quirós Verano 
rojo.  
 As previously mentioned, Don Chepe’s liminal positionality and criminality stem 
from his working relationship alongside the police department, without receiving legal 
protection or full compensation. His mere “extraofficial” presence at the crime scene 
establishes his criminality and separates him from the law-making machine, or “the 
legally mismarked person in not, after all, one of Them, as suspected. Still, s/he is also no 
longer quite on of Us” (Sistare 272). Don Chepe’s liminal positionality warrants him the 
ability to pursue leads and track suspects without direct interference, but at times with 
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direct assistance, from the police department. For example, Don Chepe identifies the first 
two suspects of la Argentina’s murder as el Pinueve and el Zaguate, considering they had 
a previous encounter with her: “La cosa entre doña Ilana y ellos empezó un día en que 
[…] se le habían metido a robar a la casa. Se llevaron la televisión y un equipo de sonido 
que le había regalado un hijo que se le fue para los Estados Unidos. […] Creo que alguien 
le contó de las cosas que vendieron, por cierto baratísimas, lo más seguro para comprar 
droga” (29). Even though Don Chepe doubted that el Pinueve and el Zaguate were 
responsible, because “la manera en que fue cometido el crimen parecía demasiado 
calculado, demasiado nítido. Necesitarían de un carro, de una pistola, de dinero. Además 
de que parecía algo premeditado, bien organizado,” (30) he and el Gato tracked and 
violently threatened them:  
Escuché al Gato cargar su automática y abrí la guantera para hacer lo mismo. 
Tenía una Makarov 9 mm, una antigüedad, que había guardado de los tiempos de 
la Revolución, tal vez por sentimentalismo. Es difícil dejar la costumbre de 
siempre andar armado. […] El Gato les tapó la boca y les amarró las manos detrás 
de la espalda con cinta adhesiva de electricista. Yo los encañonaba, con el dedo 
sobre el gatillo […]. Después tomé el volante y salimos en reversa a toda 
velocidad. Sobre la calle principal, hice girar al Suzuki, enfilando hacia el este en 
medio de un remolino de polvo que lo cubría todo, como un cómplice. (46-7) 
In this fragment, it is important to note that el Gato is not just a passive bystander, but 
rather than he actively participates in this criminal activity with Don Chepe. Specifically, 
el Gato relies upon his training and heightens the threat of police violence by loading his 
gun. In “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin argues that “police violence […] is law-
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making, for its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the assertion of 
legal claims for any decree, and law-preserving, because it is as the disposal of these 
ends” (286-7). Therefore, both the systemic and material violence of the law-making and 
law-preserving machine materializes in el Gato. 
 As a member of the police force, el Gato’s actions reveal the underlying 
criminality upon which institutional practices and legal paradigm operate. The 
institutional criminality operates through systemic violence, which Slavoj Žižek defines 
as “not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that 
sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (9). 
Immediately after, Don Chepe intensifies his threats with the hope of getting a 
confession:  
En silencio me dirigí al carro y abrí la puerta de atrás, donde tenía guardada la 
gata, unos cables para la batería y un recipiente con gasolina que había llenado en 
Santa Cruz. […] Apagué los focos del carro y me dirigí hacia el Zaguate con el 
tanque en la mano. Me paré frente a él y lo abrí despacio, sin apuro. Luego 
empecé a tirárselo encima con lentitud […]. Su amigo lo miraba de reojo, sus ojos 
desorbitados por el terror, un tipo de berrido inhumano salía de su boca sellada. 
Creo que fue en ese momento que el Zaguate empezó a gritar. Pero yo la verdad 
no lo escuchaba. […] Solo sentía el calor y un deseo de ver ese fuego arder, 
seguramente tan lindo sobre la oscuridad de los llanos. (48-9) 
 Don Chepe learns that el Pinueve and el Zaguate had been paid two hundred dollars to 
surveil la Argentina, by an individual who had left their pay “en un armario en el cuarto 
número seis de las cabinas Pozo Celeste” (50). The two suspects were not the only ones 
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fearing for the worst outcome: “-Pensé que le iba a echar ese fósforo encima, Don Chepe. 
-Yo también, Gato, yo también…” (51). The juxtaposition of psychological fear and 
terror with extreme physical violence emphasizes how the legitimacy of violence negates, 
or invisibilizes, the illegality of it. According to Austin Sarat, “to say that law’s violence 
is legitimate is to juxtapose the alleged rationality of legal coercion and the irrationality 
of a violence that knows no law. […] It is to claim that the force of law serves common 
purposes and advances common aims in contrast to the atomic or sectarian savagery 
beyond law’s boundaries” (6).  
 In contrast to the overt threat of physical violence, Don Chepe engages in more 
subtle, or symbolic, forms of criminality throughout his investigation, including bribery, 
withholding evidence, and fabrication of the case, among others. The first time this 
occurs is when he follows el Pinueve and el Zaguate’s lead to Cabinas Pozo Celeste:  
Le inventé una historia de una mujer sueca que había conocido en un bar.  […] La 
verdad no sé para qué le inventé la historia, porque ni sé si me escuchó todo el 
cuento. Sin volverme a ver, me dijo que no podía dar el nombre de los clientes. 
Después de pasarle un billete de cinco mil, sacó de una de las gavetas del 
escritorio […] una libreta gruesa en la que estaban apuntados los nombres de 
todos los clientes desde noviembre del año anterior. La noche del asesinato, el 
cuarto número seis había estado ocupado por un tal Carlos Gardel… no me 
pareció gracioso. (55) 
This fragment illustrates that the hotel’s receptionist was not persuaded by the personal 
relationship that Don Chepe invented, but rather that he almost immediately revealed the 
client’s information upon seeing the five thousand colon bill laid upon the desk. After 
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spending ten thousand additional colones, Don Chepe gained access to inspect room 
number 6, which was supposedly occupied by la Argentina’s murderer the night she was 
killed. This exchange clearly illustrates the relationship between economic status and 
access to justice; or, at the very least, in a broken legal system, money is a more powerful 
instrument that investigative procedures or established protocol. We must remember that 
Don Chepe is working “extraoficialmente, por supuesto,” which highlights the mechanics 
of power within the Costa Rican society. On the one hand, it illustrates these corrupt 
practices have penetrated the society’s social fabric of the working class and the 
institutions responsible for upholding the law. On the other, this symbolic violence 
materializes through the productive potential of misrecognition and manipulation of 
power structures, specifically in the misrecognition of Don Chepe as an official 
representative of the Costa Rican police department. This misrecognition, for its part, 
opens the discursive space in which to problematize the efficacy and validity of a broken 
law-making machine.  
 At the center of Don Chepe’s investigation, are the clues, including newspaper 
clippings and letters, photographs, and an unlabeled key, among other items, left behind 
by la Argentina prior to her anticipated murder that also leads Don Chepe to uncover 
historical facts from Central America’s past. Within the sealed envelope of evidence, Don 
Chepe faces parallel investigations: one pertaining to la Argentina’s murder and one to 
the historical legacy of violence. The underlining event of Don Chepe’s investigation is 
the bombing of La Cruz on May 30, 1984: “El recorte decía que el 30 de mayo de 1984, 
cuatro personas habían muerto, y más de veinte habían sido gravemente heridas, al 
estallar una bomba en una casona en La Cruz, donde había una conferencia de prensa con 
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el líder de la ese entonces Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática (ARDE), el comandante 
Edén Pastora” (Quirós 70). Quirós interweaves the historical and fictionalized legacies of 
violence to illustrate how violence crosses corporal, spatial, and discursive borders. In his 
article “The First Draft of History,” Juan O. Tamayo establishes the connections between 
location and U.S. intervention. He points out that the bombing occurred at the La Penca 
guerrilla base in southern Nicaragua, and that the intended target, Edén Pastora, “had 
broken with the Marxist Sandinista government and launched a war against it along the 
southern border with Costa Rica while other ‘contras’ pushed in along the northern 
border with Honduras” (52).  
 Quirós’ portrayal of the bombing of La Penca highlights how it was an attack on 
two borders: the geographical border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the 
discursive border between politics and the free press. In Verano rojo, La Argentina’s 
collection of evidence identifies the victims of La Cruz: “Pastora fue herido, pero se 
recuperó después de haber sido llevado al hospital de Liberia y luego a una clínica en la 
capital. Sin embargo, otras cuatro personas, entre ellas una guerrillera del grupo de 
pastora, un chofer, un camarógrafo y una periodista, no habían corrido la misma suerte” 
(71). In La Penca, the bombing killed three journalists: reporter for Tico Times American 
Linda Frazier and TV crewmen Jorge Quirós Piedra and Evelio Sequeria Jiménez 
(Tamayo 51). According to Tamayo, “that the bomb went off during a news conference 
was a vicious violation of the neutrality that journalists should enjoy to be able to report 
on all sides of a conflict” (52). In Verano rojo, Quirós presents a fictionalized account of 
the bombing of La Penca, and, as such, manipulates the discursive borders between 
historical fact and fictional representation vis-à-vis la Argentina’s envelope of evidence.  
133 
 
 La Argentina’s evidence introduces the reader to Peter Olsson, a Swiss journalist, 
who had returned to Costa Rica to testify against Rodrigo Victor Gandini, the suspected 
bomber. According to a newspaper clipping, approximately twenty five years following 
the bombing, “Olsson había sido la persona que inconscientemente, según él, había 
llevado al autor del atentado a La Cruz. El autor del hecho se había hecho pasar por un 
fotógrafo alemán llamado Werner Michel, pero luego había sido identificado como 
Rodrigo Víctor Gandini, un ex guerrillero del ERP argentino” (Quirós 72). Twenty-five 
years of silence refers to how the reporting of the bombing in 1984 had been intentionally 
misguided by journalists to protect the United States’ involvement. In “Contra coverage – 
paid for by the CIA,” Martha Honey explains how the bombing was not the only attack 
on the free press. Honey references Dery Dyer, editor of The Tico Times, who explains 
that “untrue stories were planted for political purposes in the local press […] to delay the 
investigation by days, if not weeks, so that the trail got cold” (32). In this sense, Verano 
rojo can be interpreted as the response to the intentional misrepresentation of the 1984 
bombing and the vehicle which brings to the fore the evidence and suspects that were 
intentionally hidden and protected. This delay intentionally hid the United States and the 
CIA’s involvement in the bombing: “Felipe Vidal Santiago, a Cuban-American, [posed] 
as a foreign journalist and [worked] to help organize a southern front for the contras out 
of Costa Rica […]. Vidal admitted to procuring arms and other military supplies for the 
contras, to recruiting mercenaries and training guerrillas, to participating in raids in 
Nicaragua, and to coordinating efforts with unnamed U.S. officials” (Honey 32). On a 
historical discursive level, la Argentina’s envelope of evidence breaks the political and 
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historical silence and directs the attention to U.S. intervention and backing of the 1984 
bombing.  
 On a literary discursive level, la Argentina’s evidence breaks with generic 
conventions of a crime fiction text as the victim, and not the detective, provides the clues 
which lead to the potential identification and apprehension of the suspect. As previously 
mentioned, la Argentina prepared this packet of information prior to her murder, which 
indicates that she had anticipated her death. Within the packet of evidence, she leaves a 
photo that was taken in Managua in 1979 in which la Argentina appears alongside 
Gandini and the newspaper clippings lead Don Chepe to Olsson. Olsson, in turn, reveals 
that La Argentina had visited him:  
Vino a hablarme de La Cruz, ya sabrá que yo vine a hacer una declaración. […] 
Dejo que aún no estaba muy segura, pero que podría en el futuro tener 
información que serviría a mis intereses, que me ayudaría con la declaración, que 
podría usarse como evidencia ante la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos 
Humanos. […] Se notaba que había sido buena guerrillera, una verdadera 
profesional […]. (82-3) 
La Argentina meddles in Olsson’s investigation because she had been affiliated with 
Gandini during her tenure in Nicaragua. The evidence she leaves behind leads Don Chepe 
to Gandini and establishes a connection between the 1984 bombing and U.S. 
intervention; or rather, la Argentina posthumously conducts her own murder investigation 
and identifies herself as an accomplice to Gandini, the bombing suspect. Upon learning 
of Gandini’s plan, la Argentina fled Nicaragua and settled in Costa Rica, but she did not 
alert the authorities. This omission simultaneously places culpability on la Argentina and 
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comments on the inept justice system, which received international aid to execute and 
cover up political crimes.  
 The novel closes as Don Chepe’s murder investigation concludes. Upon locating 
Gandini, he and Don Chepe engage in a brief struggle:  
A Gandini, salir del cuarto con una pistola en la mano, disparando frío, sin decir 
nada, como una máquina. Un tiro me pegó en el hombro izquierdo […]. [D]isparé 
en dirección al cuarto. Los contenedores de gasolina se cayeron a mi lado y 
empezaron a regarse sobre el piso. Disparé cuatro veces […], sé que por lo menos 
una impactó a Gandini en el estómago y otra en el muslo derecho. […] 
Finalmente tuve que dispararle. […] Gandini, sin embargo, solo me miraba en 
silencio. (152-4) 
Gandini’s silence and machine-like operation indicates the previous training he had 
which instilled in him the necessary discipline to protect his superiors. In this case, la 
Argentina’s evidence and Don Chepe’s investigation allude to the United States’ 
involvement and as the intellectual authors of the bombing. As Don Chepe exits the 
house, he comments that the last thing he saw was Gandini lighting a cigarette and letting 
it fall to the gasoline-soaked floor: “Detrás de mí, sentí el calor de las llamas. […] Dos 
patrullas se estacionaron a mi lado. El Gato se bajó de una de ellas y vino a pararse a mi 
lado. Encendió un cigarillo y vimos el fuego crecer mientras fumábamos en silencio” 
(155). The novel closes as Don Chepe and El Gato watch as the fire envelopes the house 
and the extra-official investigation into la Argentina’s murder concludes without justice 
being served. On an individual level, Gandini will never face prosecution for the murders 
of la Argentina and Olsson nor for his involvement in the 1984 bombing. On a collective 
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level, with Gandini’s death, the intellectual authors of the bombing are still protected and 
will never face prosecution.  
 To conclude, Marcos McPeek Villatoro and Daniel Quirós bring to the fore the 
relationship between systemic, institutional violence and liminal criminality. In both 
novels, Minos and Verano rojo, the protagonists’ lack of trust in the police and law-
making institutions impede processes of justice as they utilize illegal tools to conduct 
their investigations. Romilia Chacón receives assistance from a known criminal and 
fugitive of the law and Don Chepe relies on evidence provided by his victim. Romilia and 
Don Chepe’s liminal criminality compensates for the justice system’s shortcomings and 
emphasizes how, in the face of impunity in the post-war period, justice cannot be 
received using traditional paradigms. Or rather, the protagonists’ liminal criminality 
corrupts the law-making machine and provides liminal justice for the victims.  These 
novels suggest that, within a broken judicial system, justice can only be achieved in the 
hands of the “law-breakers” – breakers of the system, breakers of individual laws.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
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Chapter 4: Playing the victim: Liminal Subjectivity in Jacinta Escudo’s El asesino 
melancólico (2015) 
 
 In her critical study “De la guerra a la post-guerra: Transición y cambios en la 
literatura salvadoreña,” Nilda Villalta examines how post-war Salvadoran literature 
privileges stories of the individual and explores the possibility that the individual 
advances despite social problems and stagnation. Villalta opens her analysis referencing 
Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez’s seminar on contemporary Central American 
literature which he taught at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1999. In this 
seminar, Ramírez comments on the relationship between Central American literature and 
its political dimension: “Primero: que la característica más importante es su dimensión 
política, una narrativa política […] no en el sentido de un alineamiento partidista sino 
más bien en el sentido de una intencionalidad por retratar la vida pública, la historia 
pública de la sociedad en la que surge” (Villalta 95). Intentionally portraying the intimate 
relationships of public life is political in nature because it sheds light on issues that 
penetrate the social fabric and transform the individual’s way of life.  
In this way, post-conflict Central American literature explores the relationship 
between the public and political spheres, and as Ramírez points out, returns to the 
individual: “Segundo: El tiempo de post-guerra en Centroamérica y en particular en El 
Salvador que coincide, además con el fin de siglo, ha dado como resultado un recuento 
hacia atrás en la historia, un ir hacia el individuo” (95). In this return to the individual, 
narratives explore issues including domestic relationships and violence, psychological 
and emotional turmoil, and struggles for economic and social mobility. At times, these 
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narratives make explicit the connection between an individual’s circumstances and the 
period of armed conflicts, as witnessed through the protagonists’ perspectives in Horacio 
Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier. 
Other narratives, such as Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos and Daniel Quirós’ Verano 
rojo, explore cross-generational legacies of violence through both temporal and spatial 
distance, and some texts, such as Jacinta Escudo’s El asesino melancólico, make no 
mention of the armed conflict nor situate the story temporally or geographically. This 
marked absence, for its part, leads to the overarching question: What is political about 
Escudo’s El asesino melancólico? 
Published in the aftermath of the Salvadoran civil war and belonging to the 
collection of post-conflict crime fiction, Jacinta Escudo’s 2015 short novel El asesino 
melancólico breaks with generic conventions and transcends political, cultural, and 
literary boundaries. The current analysis centers on Escudo’s most recent text; however, 
it is important to note that Escudo’s career began during the period of armed conflict in 
El Salvador. However, in “Una ciudad agresiva e inhóspita,” Olivia Elizabeth Amaya 
points out that Escudo’s literary production “no se ubica en ninguna generación o grupo 
de escritores que compartan una temática definida que los clasifique” (1). Escudo’s 
works are most frequently described as experimental and fragmented texts which 
critically engage the social and psychological decay resulting from the period of conflict. 
Referencing Escudo’s stylistic repertoire and critical voice, Amaya analyzes how 
Escudos presents the concrete results of the civil war, political potential of urbanization 
projects, and the fatigue of the individual in Contra-corriente (1993), Cuentos sucios 
(1997) and A-B-Sudario (2003): “Dicho deterioro se manifiesta en la psiquis de sus 
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personajes. […] A través de las voces presentadas en el discurso [del corpus] se puede 
visualizar a una sociedad que vive en constante ansiedad en el estrés del momento 
histórico como resultado de la crisis económica y la coyuntura política que 
históricamente ha afectado a los sectores mayoritarios” (1-2).  
Escudo’s 2015 short novel El asesino melancólico also explores the relationship 
between life and death, anxiety, and the feelings of emptiness and lack of personal 
fulfillment, among others. In El asesino melancólico, Jacinta Escudos inverts the 
traditional judicial process by emphasizing the victim’s desire to escape the emotional 
and psychological distress produced by a failed relationship. The novel portrays Rolanda 
Hester’s psychological decay resulting from her husband’s betrayal and her subsequent 
journey to hire someone to take her life. After being trailed and emotionally manipulated 
by Hester, Blake Sorrow considers taking the money offered and fleeing, once the job is 
done. A moment of lapsed judgment and a brief struggle ends with Hester being shot and 
Sorrow being incarcerated, leaving the reader questioning if true justice had been served. 
To date, Magadalena Perkowska’s analysis of intimacy and “la estética de lo banal” is the 
only study published on this text. In the article “Límites del ser y la estética de lo banal,” 
Perkowska examines this short novel as a post-utopic text and explores how intimacy 
permits one to investigate social and historical forces (223). Perkowska argues that 
Escudos’ novel explores “un sensorium insignificante que, por un lado, recupera lo 
cotidiano banal como un componente constitutivo y, además, resistente de la experiencia 
humana y, por otro, visibiliza la fragilidad del sujeto en el mundo contemporáneo, cuya 
subjetividad es moldeada por construcciones masmediáticas de los valores sociales y 
culturales” (223).  
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Taking Perkowska’s analysis of intimacy and banality as a point of departure, I 
analyze three key components – the anonymity of the city, the pragmatics of suicide and 
the duality of the “victim” – as vehicles to mobilize the liminal subjectivity and 
criminality resulting from the period of armed conflict. The conflation of emotional and 
subjective violence in the novel represents the anguish and desperation characterizing the 
neoliberal subject in the post-conflict period. This chapter will examine Hester’s agency 
as both “victim” and “perpetrator,” and her desire to narrate her own death as conditions 
not possible to the victims of the armed conflict. The absence of the investigative process 
will be shown to be characteristic of a truly and completely liminal crime narrative, while 
illustrating how the confluence of subjectivity and criminality underscores the neoliberal 
condition. This novel ultimately reconceptualizes the crime narrative to expose the 
societal danger of this post-conflict society and opens the discursive space to transgress 
formulaic constraints and transcend into a new critical mode. 
 Post-war Central American crime fiction has been the subject of numerous 
academic studies, most notably as Misha Kokotovic theorizes the characteristics of the 
neoliberal noir, where texts “share a sense of noir sensibility characterized by a pervasive 
sense of corruption, decay, and disillusionment, in which the social order itself, and 
particularly the state, is the ultimate source of criminality, rather than of justice” (15). In 
relationship to the utopic revolutionary texts, Beatriz Cortez also problematizes the 
postwar sensibility, whereby “la ficción de posguerra pone frente al lector un espíritu de 
cinismo. Este tipo de ficción pinta un retrato de las sociedades centroamericanas en caos, 
inmersas en la violencia y la corrupción” (27). The characteristics most frequently 
associated with these novels, therefore, are fragmented subjectivity, individual and 
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societal anguish, chaos, deterioration, and loss. In El asesino melancólico, the reader 
witnesses how these elements are manifested in both Rolanda Hester and Blake Sorrow 
as symbolic markers of the society at large. Pertaining to the generation of post-war 
authors, Aymara draws parallels between Escudos and Horacio Castellanos Moya: 
“Mientras Castellanos Moya analiza la mediocridad y el cinismo de la sociedad frente a 
la destrucción, Escudos presenta los resultados concretos de la guerra, del desgaste 
humano y de los proyectos fallidos de las utopías políticas” (1-2). Read alongside post-
conflict crime fiction novels, which manipulate the generic conventions of the crime 
novel, Escudos’s El asesino melancólico can be interpreted as an anti-detective novel, 
which Amelia Simpson defines as “those texts which significantly modify, elaborate on, 
or even radically transgress detective-fiction conventions [where] meaning is generated 
specifically and intentionally” (14).  
Escudos plays not only with content but also with form to such a degree that the 
reader experiences a disorientation from generic conventions symbolizing individual 
turmoil in a post-war society. Most notably is the emphasis on the fluidity between victim 
and perpetrator; or rather, Rolanda is victim to her failed relationship and the failed social 
order, while simultaneously the perpetrator of extortion and manipulation. In contrast to 
detective conventions, the investigation process is absent from El asesino melancólico. 
Additionally, as José Pablo Rojas González points out with respect to Escudos’ collection 
of short stories Cuentos sucios, “Los temas desarrollados en la literatura centroamericana 
se movilicen entre ‘lo público’ y ‘lo privado’; [estos] dos ámbitos se confunden, y ello 
siempre tiene consecuencias en las conformaciones identitarias, conformaciones que […] 
están marcadas por la violencia: no sólo es una región sufrida, en ella, también, habitan 
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sujetos olvidados” (2). The forgotten subjects in these post-conflict novels are the 
victims’ families searching for answers or, at times, vindication, ex-soldiers returning to 
civilian life, and entire cities whose identity has been destroyed. 
 In El asesino melancólico a key component of the reader’s experience is trying to 
identify the city where the action takes place. The novella opens with in a public parking 
lot and the first encounter between Rolanda and Blake, as Blake leaves his shift: “Al 
acercarse a la ventanilla del lado del conductor, vio una silueta oscura inclinada sobre el 
volante. Pensó que la persona estaba enferma. […] La silueta se movió. La ventanilla fue 
bajando lentamente. Poco a poco vio una cabellera rubia […]. Le molestó encontrarse 
con su mirada, hacer contacto visual. […]” (9-10). During the first encounter, the 
following exchange takes place:  
Ahí fue cuando escuchó aquello, cuando le pareció que ella dijo: 
¡Máteme!/¿Cómo?/¡Máteme!/Está loca. Es hora de cerrar. Tiene que irse./¿No me 
está escuchando?/La que no está escuchando es usted. Tiene que irse. Y rápido, 
que está lloviendo. […]/¿Podría llevarme a mi casa? No puedo manejar. No estoy 
en condiciones. Le pagaré./Lo piensa un momento. Nuevamente, no sabe por qué, 
acepta. (11) 
As Blake drives Rolanda home, the narrative lacks any mention or description of the city, 
the streets, the sounds, or the directions to her home. On the one hand, by erasing the 
cityscape, Escudos emphasizes the individual’s relationship to one another on a more 
intimate level, while humanizing the conditions which can be experienced regardless of 
geographic location or social standing, especially in a period of post-conflict. Similarly in 
Baile con serpientes (2001), Horacio Castellanos Moya portrays a conglomerated vision 
143 
 
of Central America as he does not name a specific city where the action takes place. 
However, Castellanos Moya fills the narrative with vivid descriptions of the city which 
interact with the violence. In Escudos, this absence is transgressive from the post-war 
crime fiction generic conventions as the violence is mapped onto the subject’s body and 
psychological state, rather than being mapped onto a specific geographic or cultural 
space. In addition to their encounters in the unidentified parking garage, Rolanda and 
Blake also travel three hours to a beach with black sand, which as Perkowska points out, 
could indicate the presence of a nearby volcano (232). This detail alludes to El Salvador, 
where the beaches have black volcanic sand, but does not confirm the narrative’s setting. 
These vague details – the distance between the city and the beach, the color of the sand – 
are the only identifying markers that Escudos includes in the text, which starkly contrasts 
crime fiction generic conventions that are based upon precision, surveillance, 
identification, and evidence.  
 In addition to the anonymity of the location, which undermines the integrity of a 
traditional investigation, Escudos also deviates from the form of a crime fiction text. 
Detective and crime fiction texts alike are action driven; that is, the detective surveils and 
tracks suspects, collects evidence, identifies relationships between the victim and 
perpetrator, and establishes a motive. As we have seen throughout this study, both form 
and narrative perspective in post-conflict Central American crime fiction deviate from 
these anticipated conditions. In Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre, an ex-soldier 
drives the action-packed narrative through a monologue in past-tense, which is revealed 
at the end of the novel to be a testimony provided to a DEA agent in Texas, following his 
capture. In The Tattooed Soldier, Héctor Tobar presents both the victim and perpetrator’s 
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perspectives as parallel and intersecting narratives, while the “crime” is simultaneously 
being planned and uncovered. In Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos and Daniel Quirós’ 
Verano rojo, the protagonists embody and perform the functions of the classic detective 
role but transgress legal and judicial boundaries as they manipulate their instruments to 
pursue personal vendettas. Even though the narrative perspective varies in these texts, 
they do anchor their narratives to the investigation and resolution of a crime; or rather, 
the narratives are anchored by the protagonist’s actions. In stark contrast to these texts, 
Escudo’s El asesino melancólico lacks explicit narrative action, explores the 
psychological and emotional states of the two characters, Rolanda Hester and Blake 
Sorrow, and only briefly mentions the criminal investigation and resolution of the crime. 
This notable absence of anticipated narrative characteristics emphasizes the political 
critique and potential of Escudos’ text.  
In “Crime and Politics,” Cathy Cole remarks that “crime fiction invites a 
politicized reading of its texts, not only through its political content and use of historical 
and social data, but also because of how it locates readers in its politics” (200). Across 
the corpus of post-conflict Central American crime fiction, the relationship between 
reader and criminal protagonist is crucial in understanding their political potential. 
Moreover, Cole notes that “over the decades, crime fiction has shown itself capable of 
political resistance […]. It has revealed the practices of race, class, and sexual politics, 
and has chronicled, first-hand, the effects of economic and social disadvantage, racial 
discrimination, corporate capitalism and economic rationalism on powerless citizens, be 
they victims or criminals” (202). In El asesino melancólico, Escudos explores the politics 
of domestic relationships, coercion, and extortion, along with psychological and 
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emotional manipulation. In Escudos’ text, the anonymity of location and lack of reference 
to a historical moment problematizes the viability of a post-conflict period as a critical 
construct because it forces the reader to acknowledge and accept that these issues occur 
across societies. The task at hand is to problematize the political and disruptive potential 
of this narrative inaction vis-à-vis an analysis of the relationship between the victim and 
perpetrator and the crimes committed and the subsequent judicial process.  
 In “Post-identidades post-nacionales,” Arturo Arias highlights the characteristics 
of Escudos work which, as he claims, makes her, “en efecto, una de las escritoras más 
interesantes de la nueva generación de narradores de posguerra”: “Escudos, a diferencia 
de la gran mayoría de ellos, experimenta intencionalmente con la forma, como 
mecanismo para brindarle a su escritura varias posibilidades de ubicar su textualidad 
articulando un espacio cultural singular fluido, una matriz simbólica, que recrea el 
espacio imaginario dentro del cual opera su sujeto” (134).7 In El asesino melancólico, 
narrative action develops through descriptions from the narrator, written correspondence, 
and fractured routines, which force the reader to confront the angst and desperation that 
both Rolanda and Blake experience. Additionally, Escudos plays with the structure of the 
text, at times dedicating a single page to one sentence or leaving large breaks between 
paragraphs, to build suspense and to disrupt generic conventions. For example, Rolanda 
                                                          
7 Escudos’ literary, creative, and cultural experimentation extends beyond traditional 
narrative forms: “El interés de Escudos por la elaboración de espacios alternativos se 
manifiesta en su blog, denominado Jacintario, que ella alimenta diariamente, 
constituyendo un caso cuasi único en Centroamérica. El mismo es descrito como una 
‘blogósfera’ en la cual ella elabora mapas literarios alternativos, pero el término que 
fusiona la palabra ‘blog’ con ‘atmósfera’, es indicativo de la intención de construir un 
espacio vital alternativo por medio de las palabras” (Arias, “Post-identidades, 134).  
 
146 
 
performs the functions of a dutiful wife and this routine is disrupted following the divorce 
from her ex-husband:  
Disciplinada, Rolanda Hester iba pasillo por pasillo en el supermercado, 
empujando la carretita, revisando su lista, tachando lo que ya tenía, viendo los 
productos y sus precios en los estantes, haciendo como que buscaba algo pero en 
realidad pensando. Así, mientras el observador creía ver a un ama da casa común 
que comparaba precios y calidad entre algunos productos, en realidad tenía en 
delante de sí a una mujer que miraba latas de atún mientras divagaba en lo suyo. 
Pensaba en la vida. Pensaba en la edad. Siempre pensaba en la muerte. Cada día, 
ahora más que nunca. Pensaba en cómo sería el momento mismo de la muerte. 
Que se sentiría. Cómo sería el después. Si sería igual que dormir. Si no habría 
nada. (25) 
The depth with which Rolanda contemplates her life, age, and the meaning of death 
contradicts the expected actions and intellect of the “ama de casa común;” however, as 
Rolanda later explains to Blake, she listened to and supported her husband: “Es 
que…hablábamos de cosas domésticas: de la casa, de las cosas que había que hacer. Él 
me contaba de su trabajo y yo le escuchaba y le daba ánimos…esas cosas” (75). Within 
the intimate space of her marriage, Rolanda discussed only the matters that pertained to 
her duties as a wife, which excluded her deepest thoughts on life, age, and death because, 
as she states, “no le interesaba saber esas cosas” (76). Rolanda, however, shared her most 
intimate, profound thoughts with Blake as both as a means of evoking empathy for the 
pain she felt and to entrap him in murdering her. Therefore, Escudos plays with the 
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tension between life and death to reveal that death, or aiding in someone’s death, is more 
intimate and significant than marriage and sharing a life.  
 In contrast to Rolanda’s internal, private thoughts about life, aging, and death, 
Blake Sorrow, whose last name evokes his state of existence, accepts his disposition 
without questioning it:  
El día en que Blake Sorrow cumplió 50 años, emprendió el único acto de valentía 
del que sería capaz en toda su vida: se admitió a sí mismo que era un fracasado. 
No tenía parientes, esposa ni hijos. No tenía una amante. No tenía un perro. 
Tampoco un amigo. No tenía profesión, dinero ni propiedades. […] No tenía eso 
que llaman ‘personalidad’. No tenía aficiones ni intereses. […] No hablaba con 
nadie. Nunca tuvo suerte con las mujeres. El sexo era para él un trámite penoso, a 
veces has ridículo. Hacía anos que había renunciado a intentar tener una relación 
con una mujer. (15) 
Blake’s perceived masculinity rests upon this single act of courage, of admitting to 
himself that he was a failure. This failure, however, is based upon external social factors 
that are considered necessary for a full life: the lack of relationships, connections, wealth 
and social status, and intimate relationships. Compared to the appearance projected by 
Rolanda and her anguish and despair following the collapse of her second marriage, 
Blake made no effort to hide his discontent nor to establish meaningful connections: “Se 
alegraba de no estar casado, de no tener que tolerar a extraños viviendo bajo su mismo 
techo. De no tener que hablarles, sonreírles, estar obligados a verles, convivir con ellos” 
(16). In fact, Blake rejected the very notion of marriage and family life, which he 
considered an obligation or work. The emotional and mental exhaustion conveyed in the 
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previous passage, through the repetition of “no tener que,” “tolerar”, “estar obligado”, 
highlights the emptiness upon which Blake has built his existence.  
 As the narrative progresses, the narrator builds tension and heightens the impact 
of Rolanda’s presence by placing the two characters in direct contradiction. Blake 
Sorrow’s days consisted of empty, repetitive routines:  
De lunes a viernes trabajaba ocho horas, de 10 de la mañana a 6 de la tarde. 
Sábados y domingos se levantaba cuando quería. […] Los domingos no hacía 
mucho. […] Hacía la siesta en el único sillón que había en la estancia. […] 
[V]olvía a quedarse dormido en el sillón hasta que anochecía. Entonces se metía 
en la cama y apagaba la luz. […] Sentía melancolía de que el día siguiente fuera 
lunes y de que tuviera que ir a trabajar. (21)  
This melancholy, to which the title of the text also refers, is not only the state in which 
Blake experiences each day of his life but is also the way the reader experiences Escudos’ 
text. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud defines melancholia and mourning 
as two conditions which describe an individual’s relationship with a profound loss. The 
distinguishing features of melancholia are “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of 
interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition in all activity, and a 
lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches 
and self-revilings and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (243). The 
first encounter between Rolanda and Blake disrupts his very existence for several 
reasons. First, his solitary bubble is punctured, and he is forced to communicate with 
someone. Second, his daily routine of working and returning home is disrupted by 
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Rolanda’s nagging presence and correspondence. Third, his thoughts are transformed as 
he begins imagining the various ways in which he could murder her.  
 This emptiness not only describes Blake’s emotional state, but rather highlights 
the social and cultural symptoms experienced in a post-conflict society. In Estética del 
cinismo, Beatriz Cortez points out that “la estética del cinismo muestra los síntomas de lo 
que está ausenta en la cultura de la posguerra centroamericana: la experiencia de la 
alegría, la lucha por defender el derecho que tiene el cuerpo de actual, el predominio de la 
vida por sobre la muerte, la inmanencia del poder” (38). Blake Sorrow, therefore, is an 
embodiment of “la estética del cinismo,” in which bodies and subjectivities are 
transformed or deformed by the political. As Perkowska notes, “Blake Sorrow encarna 
una negación radical de la fantasía optimista de tener una vida ‘normal’ y un sentido que 
la organiza, una trama individual que corresponda, más o menos fielmente, a la trama 
normativa única que modela cómo es la vida imaginable, válida y narrable” (225). Blake 
Sorrow is the physical incarnation of these social systems and the text itself provides a 
discursive space to explore the psychological and emotional symptoms of the post-
conflict period. The title, El asesino melancólico, implores that the text be read as crime 
fiction because it reveals that a crime – a murder – occurs. The narrative inaction, for its 
part, emphasizes the absence of the detective, the investigative processes, evidence 
collection, and judicial procedures, among other traditional elements of the genre. The 
political potential, therefore, of El asesino melancólico resides in the psychological 
profiles of both victim and perpetrator and the confluence of these identities, suggesting 
that, in the post-conflict period, no one has been left unaffected or untouched by the 
violence. Considering that the location has been left unidentified, the psychological and 
150 
 
emotional turmoil experienced by both Rolanda Hester and Blake Sorrow extend beyond 
specific geographic or temporal boundaries and symbolize, perhaps, that the effects of a 
conflict also extend beyond the immediate boundaries of its context. 
 Both Rolanda and Blake are individuals in crisis; however, as Rolanda tries to 
persuade Blake to murder her, the relations of power between the two become more clear. 
Following their initial encounter, Rolanda arrived at the parking lot where Blake worked 
for the subsequent 23 days, Blake treated her as any other customer and “[ellos] jugaron 
aquel ajedrez durante varios días” (33). The persistence with which she approached him 
forced Blake to reconcile the emptiness and lack of intimacy of his life. In addition to her 
nagging presence at his work, Rolanda penetrated his solitary bubble and disrupted his 
daily routine through letters in which she delivered to him at work. In the first letter, she 
shares some of her most intimate secrets:  
Siempre dejo dos o tres tragos de café en mi taza matutina. Nunca he entrado al 
mar. Le tengo pánico al agua. No me gustan las muchedumbres. Le tengo miedo a 
los extraños. Soy estéril. No puedo tener hijos. Me gustan las cerezas y granadas. 
Son mis frutas favoritas. Soy ambidiestra. Esta frase la escribí con la izquierda y 
esta otra la escribo con la derecha. ¿Nota alguna diferencia? […] No bebo. Fumo 
poco. Sólo cuando salimos a fiestas mi marido y yo. Mi marido. Se llama Robert 
y me traiciona con Amalia Long. Y yo pensaba que éramos felices. No sé qué más 
decirle. No sé con quien hablar. (35) 
In this first letter, Rolanda indirectly establishes intimate connections with Blake. He 
does not want to have children, she cannot have children. He does not like talking to 
people, she does not like crowds. Rolanda also draws Blake into the conversation by 
151 
 
asking him if he notices a difference in her handwriting. On the surface, the letters appear 
to be a friendly gesture, to establish a meaningful connection with Blake. However, the 
function of these letters is more complex. Specifically, they serve as Rolanda’s tool of 
coercion, which can be either direct or indirect. According to Mark Colvin, interpersonal 
coercion includes the use of threat of force or intimidation and impersonal coercion refers 
to the pressure arising from structural and social arrangements (5). Even though these 
letters are not intimidating or threatening, they are coercive due to Rolanda’s intent to 
manipulate Blake’s feelings and make him sympathetic for her emotional state. 
Ultimately, Rolanda’s intent is clear to the reader and reveals the power dynamics which 
exist between the two.  
As Foucault points out in Power/Knowledge, the mechanics of power refers “to 
the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and 
inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and 
everyday lives” (39). These letters not only contain intimate details about Rolanda, but 
also become a new routine for Blake. Upon receiving the first letter, Blake expresses his 
frustration with having taken the letter home: 
Leer la carta le descompuso el apetito. Sólo era un papel pero el contenido era una 
intrusión en su privacidad. Debió haberla leído en el parqueo y tirarla de 
inmediato. […] No entendía para qué le contaba aquellas cosas. Las cerezas. El 
agua. El café. Entendía lo de la amante. La traición. Por eso quería morir. Quería 
que alguien lo hiciera por ella. Porque ella no tenía el valor para hacerlo por su 
cuenta. Ni siquiera se atrevía a decirlo en palabras, a escribirlo. (37) 
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The intrusion of privacy created by this piece of paper mirrors that of a criminal breaking 
into one’s property; or rather, the letters assume the role of a criminal accomplice in the 
relationship between Rolanda and Blake because they are the discursive space which 
simultaneously transform Blake’s mental and existential state. While not immediately 
clear, Rolanda also piqued Blake’s curiosity and appetite, as he later craves the food she 
mentions. According to Perkowska, “Los significantes de gusto – probar, paladear, sentir, 
deleitarse – se unen a los significantes de imaginación y afecto – recordar, evocar, 
visualizar, imaginar, desear, entusiasmarse, rogar – alterando la textura del lenguaje con 
el que la narración le expone al lector la experiencia de Blake Sorrow” (228).  
Ultimately, as these letters awaken a desire in Blake, they also awake the 
narrative and transform the reader’s experience. Blake’s new routine consists in inviting 
these letters into his most private space:  
Leía las cartas acostado sobre su cama. Siempre sobre la cama. Esperaba hasta 
llegar a su cuarto, quitarse la chaqueta, los zapatos, abrir la ventana para que 
circulara un poco el aire, acostarse sobre la almohada, abrir con toda calma los 
sobres con un abrecartas metálico que había robado de la oficina donde hizo 
contabilidad, sacaba el papel amarillo rayado en que ella escribía, lo desdoblaba, 
lo miraba, encendía la lámpara de la mesa de noche y entonces, sólo entonces, 
comenzaba a leer. (44) 
Even though Blake is still physically alone, in a bed that he has not shared with a woman, 
the care and attention he gives to each step mirrors that of foreplay in an amorous 
relationship. As he deliberately removes each article of clothing and opens the window, 
he invites Rolanda into his most intimate space. Specifically, this intimate relationship 
153 
 
between Rolanda and Blake vis-à-vis these letters is predicated not upon getting to know 
one another, but rather upon her intention to have Blake hill her. As Perkowska 
emphasizes that their attachment “reside en el hecho de que el encuentro de Blake Sorrow 
y Rolanda Hester es, en realidad, un desencuentro y, en este sentido, una suerte de error 
de reconocimiento de la posibilidad de una intimidad alternativa que se les presenta” 
(229). Following the breakdown of her marriage, Rolanda’s letters transform and become 
part of Blake’s bedroom, the space which typically symbolizes marriage, family, and 
romantic intimacy.8  
 This intimacy, however, is founded upon a set of assumptions Rolanda has made 
about Blake’s character and the anonymity they maintain. As previously mentioned, 
Rolanda selects and surveils Blake at the parking lot where he works and manipulates 
him by fabricating an emotional link between the two. Within this relationship, Rolanda 
assumes the role as perpetrator who actively and consciously victimizes Blake, who, at 
first, rejects the notion that he could murder her: “‘Tendré cara de pocos amigos pero no 
soy un asesino, señora’” (37). With this statement, Blake implicitly acknowledges how 
his demeanor informed Rolanda’s decision to select him for this task. After receiving the 
first letter, Rolanda and Blake explicitly discuss the task in the parking garage:  
 -¿No tiene nada qué decirme? 
-¿Qué quiere que le diga? […] Mire señora, déjeme en paz. Busque a otro. Yo no 
puedo. ¿Estamos?  
                                                          
8 Perkowska also notes how the literary criticism of Escudos’ body of work addresses the 
tensions between public and private space, the narration of erotic and subjective desires, 
gender stereotypes and the patriarchal ideology, and the anguish and anxiety of the 
human condition, just to name a few (224). 
154 
 
 […] 
 -Le consiguiré una pistola. 
 -No está escuchándome señora. Le dije que no. Búsquese a otro.  
 -Será fácil para usted, como matar un animal.  
-No sé cómo matar un animal. No me crié en una granja, señora. […] En todo 
caso, yo no sabría cómo matar a una persona. No sabría a qué profundidad hundir 
un cuchillo, con qué fuerza debería golpear a alguien, cuánto es suficiente veneno, 
cuántas balas, desde qué distancia debo disparar, a qué parte del cuerpo, eso si 
acierto porque estoy seguro de que el ruido me haría cerrar los ojos y erraría el 
tiro, o todos los tiros… (38-9) 
In this exchange, Blake’s conviction wavers as he reveals his aversion to the task stems 
from his lack of knowledge of how exactly to kill someone, rather than a moral or ethical 
aversion. Similar to how the letters pique his appetite and inspire cravings of the flavors 
she mentions, his curiosity is also awakened as he begins to imagine potential ways of 
murdering her and Blake “pensó en los detalles que necesitaría saber para planificar el 
crimen perfecto” (52).  
As Blake’s mindset shifts, so too does the narrative form. Span across two pages, 
the narrative takes the form of two parallel, yet conflicting, columns, separated by a black 
vertical line and each beginning on the left and finishing on the right side of the text:  
Pensó que estaba buscando la manera de planear el asesinato perfecto. Que no era 
un matón cualquiera de la calle. Que quizás la mataría y luego se iría de la ciudad 
con el dinero que ella le daría antes. […] Entonces cayó en la cuenta de que no le 
había dicho su nombre. No conocía el nombre del hombre que iba a matarla. Y él 
155 
 
no sabía el nombre de la primera persona a la que iba a matar en su vida. Eso le 
pareció trágico. (52-3) 
Presented in third person omniscient, the narrator reveals how Blake has begun thinking 
like a criminal. If he were to commit this crime, it would need to be precise, distinguished 
from common street crime, and that he would need to flee the city. The narrator also 
reveals that he would flee with money that Rolanda has given him. Therefore, the 
narrative is broken not only in form, but also in content, as the reader is unaware that one 
of the envelopes that Rolanda gives Blake contains “fajos y fajos de billetes” (65). The 
narrator, however, does not mention the currency maintaining the anonymity of the 
location. Additionally, the narrator discloses that Blake and Rolanda did not know each 
other’s names. The anonymity of the city and the characters emphasizes the intimate and 
fluid relationship that links perpetrator and victim. In contrast to the details that Rolanda 
shares simultaneously with the reader and Blake through her letters, Blake Sorrow “no 
pensaba en su pasado. Nada bueno había en los recuerdos de su vida. Nada que le 
interesara revevir. Había aprendido bien a escabullirse de aquellos fantasmas” (68). Blake 
withholds information and details about his life, in the present, from both the reader and 
Rolanda. Moreover, Blake actively distances himself from a past, which as the narrator 
insinuates, was troublesome and haunting. On a personal level, Rolanda’s presence, 
therefore, symbolizes the materialization of the ghosts from Blake’s past. This 
materialization extends beyond the personal and symbolizes the shared legacies of 
violence plaguing not just post-conflict Central American regions, but rather 
contemporary societies across borders.   
156 
 
This narrative break emphasizes the moment in which Blake, who until this point 
has been victimized, harassed, and manipulated by Rolanda, begins the mental and 
emotional transformation to criminal perpetrator. Markedly absent, however, is Rolanda’s 
role as criminal protagonist in this dynamic relationship. The inversion of roles 
culminates on an unidentified beach, three hours away from the city, in which “fueron en 
su automóvil. Rolanda Hester manejaba. En su bolso llevaba un revólver cargado” (71). 
During their final conversation, Blake clearly asserts his decision:  
Mire señora, acabemos con esto de una vez: yo no voy a matarla, no soy un 
asesino. No me interesa matarla. Gracias por el dinero, pero voy a devolvérselo. 
Se lo llevaré mañana al parqueo. […] Ella lo miró paralizada. Lentamente se quitó 
los anteojos oscuros. -No, no, no, no… Lo dijo sin interrupción, sin alterar el 
volumen, viéndole a los ojos fijamente. (80) 
Rolanda assumes the position of superiority and of power by removing her glasses and 
forcing Blake to confront his victim, who, carrying a loaded revolver, had no intention of 
returning from the beach. Blake continued to reaffirm his position and insisted on driving 
her away from the beach, citing the rain and poor driving conditions, “aunque en realidad 
lo que no quería es que ella manejara en ese estado de ánimo que adivinaba en sus ojos y 
que se asemejaba a una explosión, por lo cual debería manejar él, para controlar la 
situación y evitar que tuvieran un accidente […] (80). Blake’s fear of an “accident” 
foreshadows the moment in which Rolanda has her wish fulfilled. However, a brief 
scuffle on the beach, where Blake attempted to wrestle a gun away from Rolanda, 
concluded with the following brief exchange: “Vámonos señora, sea sensata/Le dije que 
me quiero morir y eso es lo que pienso hacer, carajo/Pues no la pienso ayudar. Las 
157 
 
últimas dos frases son dichas a gritos. El hombre y la mujer forcejean. Gruñen. […] Se 
escucha un trueno y luego otro sonido similar pero distinto. Más corto, más seco, más 
rápido” (82). As the scene unfolds, the reader is left asking who pulled the trigger? Was it 
suicide or murder, or in this case, is there a difference?  
Suicide is a crucial component of working through melancholia. According to 
Freud, “if the love for the object – a love which cannot be given up though the object 
itself is given up – takes refuse in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into 
operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving 
sadistic satisfaction from its suffering” (25). For Rolanda, she has lost both her marriage 
and identity as the dutiful wife, her previously defining role. Rolanda’s anger at her ex-
husband is mapped onto her relationship with Blake Sorrow. Freud further states that “no 
neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which [s]he has not turned back upon [her]/himself 
from murderous impulses against others” (251). Blake is the substitutive object not in 
place of her ex-husband but of Rolanda’s desire to commit suicide. Rolanda’s enjoyment 
and entertainment of self-harming thoughts and harming Blake through her manipulative 
actions can be interpreted as a post-war social condition, one in which individuals are 
conditioned for and desensitized to self-harm and harming others. According to Cortez, 
“el suicidio, como una forma extrema de escapar la normatividad social, se convierte en 
el máximo acto del cinismo, en el acto culminante de la irreverencia contra la sociedad y 
contra uno mismo. Es decir, […] llena al individuo de pasiones que no lo llevan a 
experimentar alegría, sino muy por el contrario, que lo llenan de dolor” (38). However, in 
El asesino melancólico, the ambiguity around Rolanda’s murder fulfills both a narrative 
and political function. In crime fiction, suicide disrupts the judicial process, whereby 
158 
 
inhibiting that a perpetrator be brought to justice and impeding the detective from 
fulfilling his role within the law-making machine. Suicide represents a potential act of 
liberation for the post-war society vis-à-vis Rolanda’s liberation from her failed marriage 
and allows her to become perpetrator of a crime without repercussions; or rather, in 
writing her own death, suicide offers to Rolanda the possibility for regaining control of 
her life and choosing how to conclude her narrative, a privilege not afforded to victims of 
the armed conflicts.  
 While Rolanda Hester symbolizes the victimization of the individual subject in 
the post-conflict period, and subsequently the murder victim within the text, Blake 
Sorrow is transformed from Rolanda’s victim of entrapment and psychological and 
emotional manipulation to that of her murderer. Having abandoned the unidentified city 
and gone into hiding, for Blake “lo que se reprochaba era no haber tenido el valor de 
tomar la pistola y darle el tiro que ella tanto quería. La muerte limpia que ella deseaba. 
Rápida, indolora, sin complicaciones. Una muerte perfecta” (86). It was neither a perfect 
death for Rolanda nor a perfect crime for Blake; however, it was a perfect crime for 
Rolanda. Feeling emotional unrest at not having fulfilled Rolanda’s wishes illustrates 
how he was willing to perform this job for her, which symbolizes the tasks carried out 
through the Central American armed conflicts by civilians who were manipulated, 
victimized, and forced into participating on behalf of the state, for example soldiers who 
were forcibly conscripted. His transformation was complete as “la acusación que alegaba 
que Blake Sorrow había matado a Rolanda Hester luego de extorsionarla. El dinero 
encontrado en su apartamento servía como evidencia. Blake Sorrow no entendía la 
palabra ‘extorsión’” (90). In stark contrast to generic conventions which focus and 
159 
 
elaborate on each detail of a criminal investigation, Escudos dedicates one paragraph in 
which the process is explained: “Morir hubiera sido un alivio frente al castigo que había 
sido soportar los interrogatorios, las acusaciones, los testimonios, los alegatos, las 
miradas del jurado, la cárcel, los guardias, la interminable cantidad de gente a la que tenía 
que ver siempre, a cada momento, a cada minuto” (92). Blake was sentenced to thirty 
years in prison for the perceived murder and extortion of Rolanda Hester. Absence from 
the judicial proceedings, however, is Rolanda Hester’s perfect crime; that is, the letters 
did not just establish an emotional bond between the two and the money was not just an 
incentive, but rather, Rolanda planted evidence and built the case against Blake without 
his knowledge. The explicit lack of attention to Rolanda as perpetrator problematizes the 
process of judicial accountability and impunity which reverberated through post-war 
investigations in Central America. The lack of geographic specificity in the text extends 
this critique beyond the borders of Central America and amplifies the critique of judicial 
accountability and impunity as neoliberal institutions.  
 To conclude, Escudos’ El asesino melancólico can be read along two levels. First, 
the emphasis on the individual emotional and psychological deterioration reveals how no 
sector of society is immune from the war’s violence and trauma. As Villalta points out, 
“el final de la guerra llevó a El Salvador los vicios de la post-guerra. […] Los problemas 
de pareja, el suicidio, la soledad, la pobreza extrema, el miedo a la vida, la desesperanza, 
la angustia caminando mano a mano con las historias de guerra a las que aludimos con 
anterioridad” (99-100). Therefore, these social problems resulting from the period of 
armed conflict materialize in Rolanda Hester and Blake Sorrow. Rolanda Hester’s 
struggle symbolizes the processural nature of recovering from the wounds – both physical 
160 
 
and psychological – left by the war. Second, referring to El Salvador, the blurring of 
boundaries between victim and perpetrator can be read as representative of governmental 
and military accountability and impunity following the signing of the Peace Accords. 
Similar to how the forcible conscription of civilians to the Salvadoran military converts 
them into victims of their society, Blake was emotionally manipulated and extorted by 
Rolanda, illustrating how both victim and perpetrator represent collateral damage of the 
post-war society at large. However, Escudos’ critique extends beyond the temporal and 
spatial borders the Central American armed conflicts and problematizes the judicial 
institution itself.  
The absence of a detective figure and an investigation in the narrative points to 
the ineffectiveness and innate corruption of judicial institutions across neoliberal 
societies. The conviction of Blake answers the narrator’s most pointed question: “¿Le 
dolerá al asesino tanto como el muerto?” (39). In this case, Rolanda, the true perpetrator, 
has peace and will never be brought to justice, and Blake, the true victim, is incarcerated 
and serves as the image of false justice. As Perkowska emphasizes, “Blake Sorrow 
pagará la muerte que no quiso causar de dos formas: con un despertar agudo de su 
intimidad […] y la pérdida posterior de ‘sus silencios, de su privacidad, de sus recuerdos, 
de su intimidad’ en los juzgados y en la cárcel” (224). Blake Sorrow suffers through the 
awakening and destruction of his solitary life and pays with loss of his freedom. As the 
novel concludes, Blake Sorrow states out loud, “‘La prisión no es un buen lugar para 
envejecer’. Pero nadie lo escuchó” (95). In their study on transnational detective fiction, 
Nels Pearson and Marc Singer argue that these transnational detective stories are “united 
by their common adaptation of the conventions of detective fiction to the cultural work of 
161 
 
understanding ‘transformations of the institutions of knowledge production’ at the local 
level” (10). Pearson and Singer suggest that these texts represent the interplay of mobility 
and stability, and identity and justice along borders or margins (10). The same is true of 
Escudos’ text. Ultimately, in Escudos’ El asesino melancólico, the ambiguity of the 
suicide, the anonymity of the characters and setting, and the absence of the judicial 
procedures establishes a break within the corpus of post-conflict Central American crime 
fiction and points to the future of contemporary Central American narrative.  
 
  
162 
 
Conclusion 
The current corpus of post-conflict Central American crime fiction provides a 
discursive map for identifying how post-war violence transgresses spatial, temporal, and 
psychological boundaries. These texts illustrate how post-conflict subjective violence 
results directly from state-sanctioned systemic violence, individual and collective 
legacies of violence, and the victimization of perpetrators of war crimes. In this 
dissertation, my comparative analysis of texts responding to and emerging from different 
armed conflicts and their aftermaths examines how conditions of victimization and 
criminality extend across the Central American isthmus and the diaspora. For displaced 
and fragmented victims, liminal criminality provides a vehicle for seeking and obtaining 
justice – both symbolic and legitimate – against perpetrators of political and military 
violence against their families, communities, and home countries. Specifically, liminal 
criminality differs from criminality as it directly results from victimization and legacies 
of violence of the armed conflicts across Central America. I argue that liminal criminality 
is the only viable means of obtaining justice in a post-conflict society that is wrought 
with invisibilizing the victim’s experience and with impunity to protect the national and 
international political and military institutions responsible.  
 The individual and collective legacies of violence are reflections of the world in 
which we, the characters and the readers, live and are conditions to which violence and 
liminal criminality responds. As this corpus illustrates, victimization occurs across all 
sectors of society, both during the period of the armed conflicts and in the transition to 
the post-conflict period. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Héctor 
Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier shed light on the victimization of former soldiers, which 
163 
 
are individuals who are frequently defined by the crimes they committed during the war. 
By highlighting their indoctrination and weaponization, Castellanos Moya and Tobar 
contest the official discourse that places blame solely on the soldiers and highlight the 
national and international institutions responsible for providing military training, 
psychological programming, and financial assistance, among other things. Daniel Quirós’ 
Verano rojo and Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Minos illustrate how legacies of violence 
span generations and transgress geographic borders. Narrated through the perspective of 
liminally criminal detectives, Quirós and McPeek Villatoro underscore how the legal 
system is broken and trustworthy as their liminally criminal detectives access justice by 
breaking the law. 
Obtaining justice in a broken system is just one function of liminal criminality. As 
I have argued throughout this dissertation, violence is a transformative and powerful tool. 
On the one hand, protagonists have been employed to complete specific detection and 
policing jobs. In Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Tobar’s The Tattooed 
Soldier, ex-soldiers Robocop and Guillermo Longoria are forcibly conscripted into the 
military to carry out the military’s violent campaign. In Jactina Escudos’ El asesino 
melancólico, Blake Sorrow is manipulated and extorted to carry out the murder of 
Rolanda Hester. These three individuals pay for the crimes of others – namely, the U.S.-
backed military forces and societies and individuals seeking reprieve from emotionally 
and psychologically broken lives – and their subsequent liminal criminality is a 
consequence of their victimization.  
On the other, liminal criminality as a transformative and powerful tool for victims 
of political and military violence. In Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier and McPeek 
164 
 
Villatoro’s Minos, Antonio Bernal and Romilia Chacón, respectively, are driven by 
familial legacies of violence and personally seek revenge against the perpetrators. In 
Quirós’ Verano rojo, Don Chepe’s employment as an unsanctioned detective highlights 
how the law-making and law-preserving institution is guilty of breaking the law to 
protect its interests; or rather, Don Chepe is employed to investigate historical state 
crimes and represents the individuals who are used by the system to protect its interests.  
In El asesino melancólico, Rolanda Hester’s request for Sorrow to murder her symbolizes 
how post-war violence has penetrated the most intimate psychological and social spaces 
and forms the foundation upon which relationships are formed. This corpus of post- 
conflict Central America crime fiction illustrates how violence transforms individuals and 
whole societies. The internalization and naturalization of post-war violence emphasizes 
how liminal criminality is an equalizing power and returns agency to previously 
victimized individuals. Ultimately, the resulting liminal criminality, for its part, stresses 
how post-war violence is recycled and how it disarticulates the construct of a truly post- 
conflict society.  
 
 
  
165 
 
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