Roberto is a reporter in an unnamed Latin American country. He gets a phone call informing him that someone is displeased with his recent articles, and if he doesn't leave the country in 10 days, he will be killed. Roberto's received death threats before, but for some reason, this one strikes him as serious. So he decides to leave. He can join his attractive, wealthy girlfriend in St. Lucia.
But an acquaintance of his in the U.S. embassy passes along information that the military is busy carrying out massacres and atrocities against the people in a certain province, to remove any potential obstacles to extracting the hell out of some minerals. Roberto decides he'll pretend to leave, go to Tulcan instead, get evidence, and then write about the whole thing from St. Lucia.
Epperson breaks the book into specific days, each one starting with the title "{insert number} days until the day Roberto is to die." Starts at 10, works down to the day. The story follows Roberto, and only Roberto. We only see the people in his life - his father and (young) stepmother, his college friends, his work colleagues - when they're in his presence.
Epperson does usually dive into their backstories as well as their present situations, most of which revolve around some horrible act committed by one government of the country or another. His grandmother met his grandfather when she had to leave the country for her own safety. A colleague who was abducted by a rebel leader, and later survived a bombing at the newspaper's office. Roberto's photographer friend Daniel, who pretended to believe in Communism to score points with a girl he liked, and spent two weeks imprisoned and tortured by the military. A soldier who was maimed, and is struggling to find something he can do, as well as dealing with the guilt of the atrocities he took part in.
And most of these people, to varying degrees, have abandoned whatever brought them into trouble initially. The reporter focuses more on fashion and gossip, Daniel now takes photos of celebrities and food. Each of them reached a point, for one reason or another, where they decided it wasn't worth the risk.
I don't know if the point is a shorthand way of explaining why Roberto decides to try and get this story, or highlighting the futility of the attempt. Everyone has been touched by the horrors committed in the country by governments, militias, wealthy landowners, drug cartels. Except perhaps, for Roberto. He's not been arrested and beaten, he's avoided being blown up. Even as the clock ticks towards his death and people all around him die, Roberto remains largely unscathed. So maybe the point was that those people needed someone to tell their stories.
Or maybe the point was it's useless. If all these people have these horrible experiences in their pasts, stretching back decades, if seemingly every piece of ground in the country had some massacre or expression of brutality stain its soil, what good has reporting on any of it actually done? What the military plans is apparently based on something the Sri Lankan government and military did. But people know that happened, the United Nations knows, the famed "international community" knows, and we're told there were no repercussions. No one was prosecuted, no one was made to account. Even if Roberto gets in, gets his story, and escapes to publish it, what good is it going to do?
Epperson dedicated the book to journalists who lost their lives pursuing the truth, so I don't think he was making an "it's pointless" argument, but it sure feels like it. I definitely thought Roberto was an idiot. Well-meaning, but an idiot nonetheless.
The book is tense, Epperson keeping you guessing whether Roberto really will die or not right up to the end. It's less the ticking clock the chapters mark and more because it's hard to tell which direction the threat will come from. There are enough stories in here of people being betrayed by comrades or long-trusted friends, of soldiers dressing up as paramilitary groups to divert suspicion, that it seemed like the danger could come from anywhere. The book does point strongly in one direction, but I kept myself keyed to the possibility that was another misdirection. Roberto is dealing with a lot of people where he only has their word they are who and what they claim to be. And since we're tagging along inside his mind, we don't know any more than he does.
'She's surrounded by religious bric-a-brac. His eye is caught as always by a porcelain figurine of Christ. It's a particularly macabre representation of the crucifixion, blood spilling down Jesus' face from his crown of thorns, his eyes bugging out and his mouth agape as if to say, "Hey, I don't care if I am the son of God, it's no fucking joke being crucified!"'
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