Hace algunas semanas, Nathaniel Popper escribió un artículo sobre el libro The Art of Political Murder (el arte del asesinato político) de Francisco Goldman. El artículo, que analiza el impacto de la publicación del libro mencionado en las pasadas elecciones presidenciales, tiene un pequeño pasaje sobre SOPHOS, que les comparto:
Guatemala City has essentially one political bookstore, Café Sophos, an oasis of gentility in the city’s flashy business sector. The owners, a mother and son, say that there was not a day during the summer that someone did not come into the store to ask if they had the book. [Guatemala Ciudad tiene esencialmente una librería política, Café Sophos, un oasis de refinamiento en el llamativo sector de negocios de la ciudad. Los propietarios, una madre e hijo, dicen que no hubo un día durante el verano en que no entrara una persona a la tienda preguntando si tenían el libro.]
[sigue, aunque ya no traduzco:] Café Sophos placed an order for 100 copies, and when the book was released in the middle of September, it was the month’s second-bestselling book. In October, the last month of the election campaign, it climbed to the top spot–the first time an English-language book had occupied that position. Marilyn Pennington, the Guatemalan-born co-owner of the store, said that she had read ¿Quién mató al obispo? when it appeared in 2003. It had impressed her at the time–and given the difficulty of pinning down the truth in Guatemala, she was ready to accept Rico and de la Grange’s theory of a cover-up. «People sort of accept not knowing in this country,» Pennington said while organizing a stack of English-language magazines. «It’s the price you pay for being alive.»
When Goldman’s book was published, Pennington read one of the first copies out of the box, and she had the same response as many of her customers. «The funny thing is that everyone thought that earlier one was a great book. And then this Goldman book appeared and people started really asking, saying, Hmm,» she said. «This new one was really a human-filled book. The other one–it seemed like they had a thesis and they got the information to back it up.»
Recomiendo, por supuesto, la lectura integral del artículo e invito, más allá de esto, a leer el libro que lo origina, cuya traducción saldrá en pocos meses, así como de ¿Quién mató al obispo? de de la Grange y Rico y otro libro sobre el tema, menos conocido pero no menos interesante: Ovejas negras en el altar de sacrificios.