Charras: A True Novel of the Assassination That Roiled the Yucatan

Charras is the true story of Efraín ＂El Charras＂ Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government’s successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras’s death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucatán, Charras’s bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping--the chilling ＂you＂ whose point-of-view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.

Hernán Lara Zavala was born in Mexico City in 1946. He read English Lit. at the University of Mexico and made a Master’s Degree on ＂Studies on the Novel＂ at the University of East Anglia, England. He participated in The International Writing Program at the Univeristy of Iowa in 1987. He has published short stories, novels and literary essays, among them the novel Charras (1989), Península Península, (2008) Iberoamerican Novel Award 2009, and the Spanish Royal Academia Award 2010. Recently he published the novel The Last Carnival 2023. He teaches English Lit. at the National University of México.