Guillermo Saccomanno: "The violence in Latin America is so extreme it's hard to imagine."

In a Latin America increasingly affected by violence , the Argentine writer Guillermo Saccomanno confesses that the fiction of his novel Arderá el viento (2025) is not difficult for him to believe, because he observes it daily in a reality that "surpasses everything that can be imagined."

"The reality of Latin America is so violent and extreme that it breaks your heart. You can try to imagine the horror, but you won't succeed ," Saccomanno explains in an interview.

The winner of the 2025 Alfaguara Novel Prize didn't have to hunt for inspiration for his book far from home, because in his town, where he has lived for almost a lifetime, he found many of the stories he tells.

"Although they are much more tense and fictionalized," he comments.

In a tourist village on the Argentine Atlantic, Saccomanno narrates the arrival of the Esterházys, a European couple watched by the public, which will unleash a series of fatal events fueled by corruption, violence, envy, and sex.

Just as Gabriel García Márquez recreated Colombia from Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or the Mexican Juan Rulfo represented Mexico with La Comala in Pedro Páramo (1955), Saccomanno also built his village.

" The story of the town is a metaphor for reality , a resource that, if you take it to a broader and grander level, you'll find the world has no escape. (The novel) has something of Mexico in it, despite being Argentine and, therefore, Latin American," he reflects.

Those realities that we find outside of her story, according to Saccomanno, are "horrors" like those that occur on the El Paso border, between the United States and Mexico , a region where 196 migrants died in 2024, according to figures from the County Medical Examiner's Office.

After the severe crisis that has hit Saccomanno's "deteriorating" Argentina, the author believes that Mexico and his homeland are more "related and united" than ever due to the severe poverty they face.

" I believe in class struggle , in class differences, because that's what explains the great injustice in the world," he adds.

Regarding this way of governing society and its "punishing system" – which can also be observed in other works such as Cámara Gesell (2012) – the 76-year-old author warns that evil is not an ailment that affects the poorest, but rather "it is everywhere."

"It's the desire to have a better car, another wife, more money, for your children to be blond. That's what's damaging the world," he says.

In this "suicidal" society, in which we are moving "happily toward the abyss," one might expect a veteran writer like Saccomanno to be absorbed in his writing and recognition. However, the Argentine is eager to finish this tour and return to his hometown.

"They treat you like a Nobel Prize-winning celebrity, but that's not the case. Right now, I miss returning to my town . When I write about my village, I feel at home," he explains.

Although he believes that since the Latin American boom, which ended in the 1970s, "there hasn't been a bigger literary phenomenon," he still believes that literature "can be a shot in the dark."

Reflecting on what's coming next, Saccomanno wonders how he will continue to expose in his novels those who want to have it all and answers: "By narrating the crime that surely lies behind it."