Montero Quintero, Hector Hugo (2017-12). Violencia en la Familia y Violencia Transnacional en las Novelas Los Ejercitos de Evelio Rosero e Insensatez de Horacio Castellanos Moya. Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
In my dissertation, I study two books that deal with political violence in Latin America and how violence in the political and public spheres reflects itself in the more private space of the home and the nuclear family. The focus of my work is Evelio Rosero's, Los ejercitos and Horacio Castellanos Moya's, Insensatez. The Colombian writer Evelio Rosero's, Los ejercitos show the armed conflict between the military government, guerrilla armies, and those who have been displaced from their homes and towns by the armed clashes between the military and the guerrillas. Insensatez, by the Salvadorian writer, Horacio Castellanos Moya, on the other hand, centers on the assassination of more than three hundred thousand indigenous people over ten years of military regime. On the one hand, I am conducting research on the violence endemic in Colombia. I am looking at relatively recent history--that includes the bipartisan violence between Colombia's main political parties, liberales and conservadores--that spans from the 1940's through the middle of the 1960's. Some studies assert that this conflict ends in 1974 with the creation of the Frente Nacional, also known as the Benidorm Pact, through which the leaders of both political parties reached an agreement to rotate power. My work also covers seventy years of armed conflict (1946-2016) between the Colombian government, paramilitary groups, and guerrilla groups. Thus, I expand the study of pervasive violence in Colombia and differ from traditional studies which tend to cover only the armed conflict with guerrilla groups, consequently only addressing half a century of Colombian history. On the other hand, I will also be looking at how Horacio Castellanos Moya examines the mass assassinations, particularly of indigenous people, allegedly by governmental military forces during the confrontations that took place between 1960 and 1996. Evelio Rosero's, Los ejercitos and Horacio Castellanos Moya's, Insensatez demonstrate the way in which violence has become a factor of formation and deformation of the nation in societies where violence has unhinged and ruptured the nuclear family as a social construct.
