300 de Rafael Cuevas Molina: caleidoscopio de la violencia y la memoria

Abstract

n the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Central American literary production has been using memory as an excuse or pretext in a valuable cultural production that not only incorporates it into the usual places, but also offers it as a tool to reconstruct and understand the past. Rafael Cuevas Molina’s 300 accentuates the fragmentation that arises from violence by looking through a kaleidoscope at events that marked the country of Guatemala during the 36-year internal armed conflict. With this in mind, this article attempts to distinguish the different social groups that are portrayed in this work in an effort to understand that their voices constitute an exercise in memory and recovery of a violent history. The novel is constructed in a way that fictionally incorporates the Military Logbook or Death Squad Dossier through a strategy that allows the author to combine various social actors in a scene written from the perspective of the State’s violence. The work emphasizes intertextuality and heteroglossia to create a complex universe which the reader must resolve and which, consequently, will unveil how terror, violence, silence and forgetfulness all interfere in the biases depicted.