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Central America is not known for crime or detective fiction. In a region where the novel itself emerged rather late, there are few, if any, examples of the detective genre to be found prior to the 1990s.1 It is only in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s that there emerges in Central America something resembling detective fiction. Although many of these postwar works do not fit neatly within the generic boundaries of the detective or mystery novel, most of them do allude to and play with the conventions of the genre. Moreover, all of them share a noir sensibility characterized by a pervasive sense of corruption, decay, and disillusionment, in which the social order itself, and particularly the state, is the ultimate source of criminality, rather than of justice.
This new Central American noir forms part of a larger Latin American literary phenomenon I refer to as neoliberal noir. Since about 1990, most of the continent has experienced something of a boom in narratives that use elements of detective or crime fiction to criticize the effects of the neoliberal, free market capitalism imposed on Latin American societies over the past two decades. These works include, to name but a few, the Belascoarán Shayne series of novels by Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Mexico, particularly his recent collaboration with Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, Muertos incómodos (2005); the Heredia novels by Ramón Díaz Eterovic in Chile; and several recent Colombian novels by Jorge Franco, Mario Mendoza, and Santiago Gamboa, among others, several of which fall into the subcategory of narco-noir. Even in Cuba, which remains at least nominally a socialist economy, the Mario Conde series of novels by Leonardo Padura Fuentes criticize the corruption of Cuban society and the erosion of revolutionary values produced by the Cuban state's engagement with transnational capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Central American noir narratives examined here share many of the characteristics of these other Latin American works, but they also display several distinctive features. Although most other works of Latin American neoliberal noir retain some degree of sympathy for the Utopian projects of the revolutionary Left, Central American noir generally expresses a deep disillusionment with the outcome of...