Sergio Ramírez: "The love for easy money has no longer allowed to differentiate right or left" – 27/04/2019

"I have never been a race politician, I have never been interested in power. I have participated in the revolution with a real commitment but when the Revolution ceased to be what we had dreamed, I went back to mine, which was still literature. "It was one of the many juicy statements of the writer Sergio Ramírez during the public interview with Matilde Sánchez, editor of Revista Ñ In this way, the Nicaraguan Award Cervantes ( who also has Spanish nationality) participated in the celebration of Spain at the Fair organized by the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires (CCEBA).

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Ramírez also evoked the writers who marked his youth, the intense friendship that he had with Julio Cortázar and how the Latin American boom has set up a new literary canon amid convulsive political epochs. He also stopped at the current complex of Nicaragua. And is it Ramírez He was an active militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. In fact he was vice president by the party that formed the FSLN between 1985 and 1990, during Daniel Ortega's first term, with which he currently has profound differences. "Nicaragua is a repressive state and, for the worse, it is experiencing a very serious deterioration of the economy that is not auspicious," he said.

Sanchez visited the prolific literary work of Ramírez, which has about fifty published titles. "With Mario Vargas Llosaalthough in the opposite sense, he was one of the most important engaged intellectuals of the twentieth century. "Ramirez – as big as Cortázar, with a flawless coat and a blue shirt and an indelible smile on his calm face – argued that Vargas Llosa's literature has a high standard. The city and the dogs as one of the essential novels of the boom, with Rayuela, One hundred years of loneliness and The death of Artemio Cruz "with whom Carlos Fuentes seized Mexican history by the paws".

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"I do not understand the boom that took place since the writers' age or when they published these books, and I do not think it was a market phenomenon, but rather the joyful convergence of a literature driven by delirium at a time that the world has changed, "he explained. It has provided a significant historical context, among other problems, to the process of decolonialization in Africa, to the emergence of leaders such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X in the United States or Ernesto Che Guevara, that Ramírez always finds "similar to Horacio Oliveira's Rayuela"And he considered that The experimental work of Cortázar was not as popular in Nicaragua as the writer, who openly sympathized with the Sandinista Front. "However, this book marked my generation, not because I wanted to change the world, but because I directly proposed to blast it," he said.

He said that he came to Borges after reading Cortázar. "Cortázar is an experiment but Borges is a sacred territory," he said. And he laughed when Sanchez reminded him of how Salman Rushdie showed some indifference to the two Argentine writers but not for Ramírez in his legendary chronicle of the mid-eighties The smile of the jaguar. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in full revolution.

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Ramírez he was studying law in 1962 when Peru Vargas Llosa published "one of the most innovative stories we have seen so far". "The city and the dogs This seems to me to be an essential workout novel that should be read even today. "He added that this story of a few boys in a boarding school, silently overtaken by a military logic" is as political as political. One hundred years of lonelinessAmong the other writers who trained his literary education, he also included Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias.

His strength weakened a bit when Sánchez questioned the fact that the boom did not include women writers, such as Mexican Elena Garro or Rosario Castellanos. "Literature is not a question of gender but of quality"He acknowledged that the quality of Garro y Castellanos is indisputable" but if we allow ourselves to extend the range to the Portuguese language, I think Clarice Lispector is the most important of all ".

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The publisher of NOT He noted that in his latest novel, Nobody cries anymore for me – Edited by Alfaguara in 2017 – the author stresses how corruption permeates the social fabric. "Yes, love for easy money no longer allowed to differentiate right or left because virtually all current or past Presidents of Latin America have legal cases. "The recent suicide of Alan García is an example," he painted, "but the same goes for the former president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, whom the government of Nicaragua has granted asylum policy.

In the political crisis, he added, the drug traffic. "Drug traffickers are different in that they solve problems that governments do not badume: Pablo Escobar, for example, was responsible for equipping schools or donating health supplies". concerned neither their criminal side nor their eccentricities "that when the Medellín cartel leader was killed," the hippopotamuses that he had in his private zoo they escaped and end up in the jungle today. "From which the idea that literature is inexhaustible as well as reality.

He denounced the fact that in Nicaragua, where he lives in spite of the danger of life that he and his family were running, "there are 800 political prisoners and about 40,000 exiles have fled to Costa Rica". "What I want is that Nicaragua finds its way, but unfortunately there is a very tangible risk that a civil war breaks out and we already know how such a thing ends because we have suffered, "he said.

"However, I am still in my country, I have been exiled for 14 years and I do not want to come back, they do not bring me out of Nicaragua, or at least they will have to make great efforts", he concluded .