He knows who done it

Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Jose Daniel Fierro is one of the best fictional characters in Mexican letters. In La vida misma (Planeta, 1987) successful crime fiction writer and leftist intellectual Fierro is roped into the job as a police chief (recruited by a municipio libre trying to break free of corrupt party control, and where the previous police chief has just been assassinated). Knowing only about crime from writing about it, with the help of the people, he solves the murder… the typical crime involving   gringos, greed and political corruption … that you’d find in life itself, and not just the pages of  “Life Itself“.

Writing murder mysteries in Mexico is a bizarre enough activity as it is — given that our crime news is often weirder than anything in fiction — but Taibo, at the Semana Negra crime fiction festival in Gijon (Asturias, Spain) — has taken his fictional Chief Fierro one step further… daring to unmask the culprit in a major Mexican crime… in the person of his own leftist intellectual crime writer persona:

At a press conference in the northern Spanish city of Gijon, Eduardo Monteverde, Jorge Moch, Francisco Hagenbeck and Paco Ignacio Taibo expressed their concern for the spiraling violence and asked [Mexican President Felipe] Calderon to stop the war against drug gangs and seek an alternative to the conflict.

Taibo, the director of Semana Negra, said that Calderon “sold his soul to the devil” in accepting the conditions imposed by the United States to launch a “war against the drug traffickers” in exchange for “acknowledging his legitimacy and forgetting the electoral fraud.”

Calderon – who was elected in 2006 by the slimmest of margins in balloting his leftist opponent says was marred by fraud – has made the battle against his country’s ruthless drug cartels a cornerstone of his administration.

This “original sin,” Taibo said, has unleashed enormous violence among the drug cartels in which “anything goes” because it’s a case of “drug traffickers against drug traffickers, drug traffickers against the police, and police against other police,” while in their midst thousands are killed.

One hopes he doesn’t end up like Chief Fierro did in “Life Itself”, though there is redemption of sorts (and the loving arms of a very tall  gringa) as a reward for the Fierro’s dedication to truth, justice and the Mexican way in Leonardo’s Bicycle.