“Delcy Rodríguez is part of a torture mechanism”

The Venezuelan writer Karina Sainz Borgo has just published this Thursday, February 12, her new novel, ‘Nazarena’ (Alfaguara), a work set in Venezuela, whose president in charge, Delcy Rodríguez, has stated that “it is part of a mechanism of torture, crime and corruption.”

“I believe that Delcy Rodríguez is equally attributable to Nicolás Maduro. She has been chosen as a transition mechanism by an actor like Trump, and I also do not know to what extent Trump has a relationship with politics on the ground, even though it is said that Marco Rubio is the person who knows. Delcy clearly seems to me to be another axis of corruption and mistreatment and torture. Both he and his brother, like Diosdado Cabello, are all part of a rotten structure,” the writer said in an interview with Europa Press.

In this sense, the writer and journalist has stated that she does not know “what kind of transition can be made” and has regretted not having “seen anyone talking about elections.” Likewise, he has criticized that the amnesty law for Venezuelan political prisoners “is a law taken with tweezers.”

Living in Spain for 20 years, Sainz has claimed to approach her fourth novel – the first she publishes with Alfaguara after having worked with Lumen – as a “decisive” step in her career. After ‘The Spanish Woman’s Daughter’, ‘The Third Country’ and ‘The Island of Doctor Schubert’, the author has explained that ‘Nazarena’ may be “the most Spanish” of all her novels, the result of her “rootedness” and her “dialogue with the literary tradition in Spanish.”

The novel, also set between the Caribbean, Italy and Spain between the 19th and early 20th centuries, describes a family and places domestic conflict as the narrative axis. “The family is the first laboratory of what happens in a society,” maintains the writer, who has assured that she conceives the family nucleus as a space crossed by power relations, “poisoned” inheritances and disputes over belonging. Narrated by women, its author has assured that ‘Nazarena’ is constructed as an “intimate” political story.

On the other hand, Sainz has recognized the influence of the tradition of Thomas Mann’s family saga and works such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, while at the same time he has assumed the “inevitable presence” of Federico García Lorca in the exploration of “lawlessness, alienation and extreme violence within the house.” In this sense, he has assured that although there are “traces of magical realism” in the novels, most of the things that happen in the novel can be contrasted.

EXPORTS UCLÉS BUT DOES NOT AGREE WITH HIS POSITION

Sainz has defended the value of narrative mechanisms based on the chaining of stories, a characteristic that he claims to appreciate in the work of David Uclés, whom he considers “heir of an oral tradition” and of whom he has highlighted “his freshness and the uniqueness of having told the Civil War from a new point of view”, although he has stated that “he is going to have to pay the price for the exceptional, for the strange, for the strange” and has lamented that “packaging a character comes much faster than talking of the novel.”

In this sense, Sainz has referred to Uclés’ decision to withdraw from the cycle organized by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and titled ‘We all lost the war’. “David made that decision and it is a personal decision. I don’t miss the opportunity to make myself understood in general, perhaps because I am Venezuelan and it is difficult to explain where I come from, but I think it is also a matter of disposition,” the author stated.

“Letras en Sevilla allows two people who are at opposite ends of the spectrum to sit down and talk. If it had not been for Letras en Sevilla, I would not have been able to sit down and talk with Juan Carlos Monedero, who for me may not be a more conflictive person in the world to sit down with than with Juan Carlos Monedero, but it is an agreement and a space for conversation,” Sainz stressed.

He has also spoken out about the extraordinary regularization of migrants in Spain, a measure that he considers urgent, although he questions the reasons behind it. “We welcome any mechanism that allows correct regularization and coexistence,” he said, while wondering if “speed responds to electoral criteria” and recalled that “in other crises” he did not perceive “the same institutional urgency.”

In parallel to the publication of ‘Nazarena’, Sainz celebrates the journey of the film adaptation of ‘La hija de la español’, premiered at the Venice Festival and is currently being screened in theaters in Latin America. The film, produced by Edgar Ramírez and directed by Mariana Rondón and Marité Ugás, seems “much more political” than the book and “an explicit denunciation of the Bolivarian regime”, as well as a “tribute” to the victims.