Stories of night and dawn: Latin American women today

Latin America: surrounded by blue, intemperate and at times macabre oceans; enclosure of enormous mountain ranges, volcanos, glaciers, rivers, jungles; land of poets who have come from tiny little villages to reveal the secrets of their far-off regions and to sing of them to other men. Let us recall the rural school teacher, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda, both from Chile, and Gabriel García Márquez, of Colombia, who taught us that yellow butterflies are magical and that a woman hanging out sheets in the garden can indeed ascent to heaven.It is worth noting that all three of these writers were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recent decades: Mistral in 1945; Neruda in 1971; and García Márquez in 1982. Latin America's other winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Miguel Angel Asturias, of Guatemala, in 1967. All these splendid writers were from an area said to be Third World, said to be underdeveloped, or in the new parlance, ‘developing’.And then we have the other Latin America: a land of absences; of sudden deaths that never occur by accident; a continent of the ones who have disappeared; of the Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo, the women who, for years now, gather every Thursday in the deserted Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires to weep, to scream and to beseech heaven and earth for news of their missing loved ones.Where is this Latin America? What is it really like?