PANAM CITY.- He literary festival Central America Accountwhich brings together writers from Latin America and Spain in Panama, such as Leonardo Padura (Cuba), Juan Villoro (Mexico) or Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), began with a call to defend freedom of the press.
“I want to pay tribute to the Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora… a journalist unjustly imprisoned in his country for carrying out his unavoidable role of investigating corruption, one of the worst evils of our political systems and our social life,” said Ramírez, Forced into exile in Spain by the government of Daniel Ortega.
“and so many other Central American journalists, persecuted, exiled, have their media confiscated because they decided to fully exercise their profession, the profession of free speech, which is a profession with consequences, as is that of a novelist, when one goes to the in the effort to search for the truth,” he added.
Zamora, founder of a newspaper critical of the Guatemalan government, was arrested in 2022, despite the fact that an appeals chamber annulled a six-year prison sentence in 2023 for alleged money laundering.
On May 15, a court granted him house arrest, but Zamora remains in prison for another case against him.
Inauguration of the festival
Ramírez, 81, made these statements during a speech at the National Theater, in Panama City, at the opening gala of Centroamrica Cuenta.
A subsequent dialogue between the famous Panamanian salsero Rubn Blades and Padura, author of The man who loved the dogs (2009), formally began this literary meeting.
“It is not only a festival for writers, but it is also for thinkers, musicians, filmmakers,” added the director of the festival, Nicaraguan Claudia Neira.
Ramírez founded Centroamrica Cuenta in 2013 in Nicaragua, but after the protests against Ortega in 2018, supported by the writer, it is held twice a year, once in Madrid and the other in a Central American or Caribbean country.
Authoritarismos
Ramírez was vice president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, which in 1979 overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza.
However, the 2017 Cervantes Prize, author of Divine punishment, Margarita, the sea is beautiful y Goodbye guys He was stripped of his nationality and forced into exile after supporting protests against the government that left more than 300 dead in 2018.
In this edition of Centroamrica Cuenta there will also be a table to debate authoritarianism.
“It is a bit what the authoritarianism of governments in Latin America and Central America propose, we have a plurality of voices that allow us to have different approaches,” said Neira.
Central American literature focused in the 20th century on topics related to the military dictatorships and civil wars that devastated the region, the large banana and mining enclaves, and the situation of poverty that punished the population.
New literature
“Today the big issues are massive migrations to the United States, drug trafficking, the reign of drugs, drug barons, populist dictatorships, corruption, demagogy,” said Ramírez. “Women, who were practically absent from literature in the 20th century, today are great protagonists… this is a completely new phenomenon,” she adds.
Gioconda Belli, like Ramírez forced into exile in Spain and stripped of her nationality, will present her book All the poetry (1974-2020).
“There is a whole new generation of writers who, without a doubt, are telling a series of different and wonderful worlds that will allow Central American literature to have a long life,” said Neira.
Participants will also debate the impact of Artificial Intelligence on literature.
“Artificial Intelligence right now in literature is being seen as a very dangerous phenomenon, although it is not possible that it can improve or try to improve what I write,” Padura told AFP.
FUENTE: AFP
