Speaking truth to power.

• Author: Hernandez Alende, Andres
• Position: Abril rojo - Rese

A scrupulous and solitary state attorney who loves poetry is the protagonist of the latest Alfaguara Prize-winning novel from Santiago Roncagliolo, who sets his hero up to live through the rough-and-tumble years of Peru's Alberto Fujimori while facing off with Shining Path guerillas, all during the presidential elections of 2000.

Roncagliolo combines gumshoe noir and horror with the style of a modern thriller, adding in a socio-political backstory in order to create a revealing and sobering portrait of Peru under Fujimori, a no-holds-barred critique of the country at the time. A work of fiction, this exciting and fast-moving story is nevertheless based in part on actual events.

The attorney, Felix Chacaltana, takes on the task of investigating a series of brutal murders committed during Holy Week in the year 2000. Despite the official line of the Fujimori government, that the Shining Path has been defeated and disbanded, he strongly suspects that the guerrillas are involved.

To move his investigation ahead, the lawyer must first deal with the questionable methods of Peru's military and police, and at times must he himself employ them. Normally a strict follower of the law, he soon finds his own self hard to recognize, having turning into someone capable of flouting the rules and going to almost any lengths to complete his mission. Tailing the killers, he takes a long hard look inside a country steeped in an "orgy of corruption," where most of the population struggles by in poverty, living day to day with no idea of what tomorrow might bring, while the government uses any and all means at its disposal to stay in power.

It's in this way that Abril Rojo is really a horror story, the story of the crimes committed by the Shining Path during the course of its long battle with the Peruvian authorities, relying as it did on the failures of officialdom to move the country forward and improve the situation of the dispossessed, on the desperation of those in the margins of society...