What better sum of the traveling and crossing of boundaries of ideologies and political upheavals in Latin America than Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet? The hypotheses for understanding the Latin American 1960s are many and simplicity is out of the spectrum of possibilities, so let’s propose an idea or two.
In early 1960s a left-wing guerrilla was founded in Uruguay under the name of Tuparamos or Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Movement). Latin America was under siege by the most violent military dictatorships in its history: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in Dominican Republic, the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Juan Domingo Perón (followed by the Revolución Libertadora or Liberating Revolution) in Argentina and Alfredo Stroesssner Matiauda in Paraguay, just to name a few, all of which would directly contribute to the literary genre called Novela del dictador or Dictator novel.
The Tupamaros was an urban guerrilla that robbed banks and distributed the goods among the poor in Montevideo but soon was repressed by the Uruguayan government as many of its members identified themselves very closely with the Cuban Revolution and its leader Fidel Castro.
The two possible countries for suspicious people seeking exile in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America were either Venezuela (perhaps the richest country at the time in South America due to its oil production) or Mexico, which then lived its own version of a dictatorship under PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and repressed any objection to its political hegemony. However, it inexplicably embraced a great number of left-wing intellectuals like Luis Cernuda and Gabriel García Márquez, among others.
But Venezuela’s president, Rómulo Betancourt was emphatic in blocking any Cuban intervention in his country and publicly said: «Tell Fidel Castro, that when Venezuela needed liberators, she did not import them, she birthed them». So Mexico became the best option for dissidents to escape repression and possible torture in his or her country.
Roberto Bolaño’s protagonist, Auxilio Lacouture, arrives in Mexico City in 1967 (though she does not clearly remember the exact year), just around the time when members of Tupamaro where heavily persecuted in Uruguay. Could she had been a member or at least sympathized with the guerrilla movement? The possibilities are high as she empathizes with the student movement in Mexico. When referring to the massacre in Tlatelolco she affirmatively says: «¡Ese nombre que quede en nuestra memoria para siempre!» («Let that name remain in our memory forever!») (28).
Hidden in the restrooms of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Auxilio Lacouture witnesses the army entering the campus by force on September 18th 1968, violating the Mexican Constitution, an act the she inextricably associates with the massacre that would take place a few days later on October 2nd in Tlatelolco. This memory becomes a leitmotif throughout the novel and plays a central role in the intersections of time and spaces seen in the novel.
In remembering the events, she overlaps different years and events saying that «El año 68 se convirtió en el año 64 y en el año 60 y en el año 56. Y también se convirtió en el año 70 y en el año 73 y en el año 75 y 76» («The year 68 became the year 64 and the year 60 and the year 56. And it also became the year 1970 and the year 73 and the year 75 and 76»).
In Latin American history 1964 was the year that the Tupamaros gained notoriety as a guerrilla and political movement in Uruguay. It was also the time in which the American Daniel Mitrione introduced systematic torture under the guidance of U.S. State Department in Uruguay); 1956 was the year that Colombian dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinillas killed an unknown number of people at the Plaza de Toros; 1970 was also the year that Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera raided the Central University of Venezuela to remove Venezuelan guerrilla leaders who became enthusiastic with Castro’s ideals, so not only does Auxilio Lacouture witnesses the repressions that took place in previous years but also becomes a kind of prophet of later massacres that would take place in Latin America
1973 in the year that Pinochet overthrew the socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile (and here we must not forget that although Auxilio Lacouture is from Uruguay her creator, that is, Roberto Bolaño is from Chile and that hidden in the restrooms of the university she foresees that horror that will take place at the National Stadium of Santiago where Pinochet gathered thousands of people and killed many, including the famous songwriter Víctor Jara). More so, Auxilio Lacouture foresees the brutal dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, which started as a coup de’état that deposed Isabel Martínez de Perón, in which, according to human rights groups 30,000 people «disappeared», including the son and pregnant daughter-in-law of world renowned poet Juan Gelman, who sought political asylum in Mexico.
In the eyes of Auxilio Lacouture the restrooms of the National Autonomous University of Mexico became the transnational epicenter of clashing ideologies that were crossing boundaries in a continent then divided between the extreme right and the extreme left.