Wozu Dichter, when something is rotten in the state? ‘The aesthetic principle of stylisation [makes] an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning… This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art that tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice’: Adorno, natch. The two books reviewed here attempt a kind of reckoning with their respective states, Colombia and Mexico.

Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush concerns a massacre (16–22 February 2000) perpetrated by the AUC, a far-right paramilitary terrorist group formed by landowners in opposition to the Marxist guerillas of the Colombian civil war. (The AUC is thought to have killed nearly 100,000 Colombians over the course of its history.) The victims in this case were the villagers of El Salado, some 200 of them. The Marine Corps battalion responsible for the area was mysteriously withdrawn. The AUC, like other terrorist groups, were narcotraficantes and the massacre was conducted with maximum cruelty: chainsaws were used, those not yet killed were forced to witness the killings, there was rape and torture. The incident was investigated, there are reports: what can poetry add?

Hernández-Pachón answers this question in interview: ‘there are things that poetry can do better: working with ellipses, for instance, and evoking what can’t be named’. Her book justifies this faith. It is tripartite: in the first two parts, we hear of Pablo and of Ester (a couple) – fictional archetypes, one of whom survives; their life in an isolated house is given a novelistic particularity. The third part is given ...