Ana Santana |
Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- The writer Vic Echegoyen, who will receive the Wilkie Collins Black Novel Award tomorrow in Tenerife for “Sacamantecas”, affirms that she is more concerned about a country that tolerates corruption than about a serial killer, since he it can destroy the lives of several families, but a State harms the entire population.
Vic Echegoyen, descendant of a Spanish-Hungarian family of filmmakers, musicians, painters and writers, including Sándor Márai and Imre Madách, spoke in an interview with EFE about the relationship between individual crimes and state corruption on the occasion of his visit to Tenerife to collect the prize for the best novel of the year within the Tenerife Noir Atlantic Black Genre Festival.
Echegoyen (Madrid, 1969) will also talk with the editor of the work, Miguel Ángel de Rus, about the evil in international institutions and in this regard he comments that “we see corrupt politicians or judges who point to another to exculpate themselves: Fulano and Mengano also they do it”.
In the case of a murder, he explains, many times the neighbors themselves suspect but do not report: “they close their eyes because it is one of ours, or even the dead man had been looking for it for years”, but if you ask a person in front of a microphone ” they will tell you that they would never look the other way or cover up for a suspect.”
Then there are cases in which entire towns knew that there were abuses within a family, even disappearances, and everyone was silent, continues Echegoyen, who cites as the “most classic and bloody example of criminal inconsistency” asking any Austrian about the Anschluss (the referendum of 1938 in which 99% of the population of Austria voted in favor of being annexed by the Nazi Third Reich).
“Each and every one of them will tell you, outraged: “Oh no, my grandparents voted against the Nazis!” But the figures and the facts are what they are… and the complicit and cowardly silence is more common than we want to admit”, adds Echegoyen.
And by definition, the solitary criminal (murderers or pedophiles) is an unpredictable phenomenon, a factor of chaos within a “civilized” environment but, the author says, it is more likely that they act with impunity in societies in which the State is full of “white collar criminals”.
“Where corruption, nepotism, intimidation and incompetence are rampant at the highest levels, this also affects the efficiency, integrity and impartiality of the police and judicial structures that in principle must protect society”, he asserts.
And a State that tacitly tolerates criminals due to corruption or laxity is complicit in its actions: it is a failure along the entire line, a failure of its basic obligation to protect the citizen.
And from looking the other way or even covering up these criminals to committing crimes themselves, gagging the press or laundering millions “there is only one step, because dishonesty and the feeling of impunity are the same, and the temptation is still higher for anyone holding a high office with political immunity.”
In countries with zero tolerance towards the corruption of their politicians, such as the Scandinavians, there are also serial killers “but fewer, and they are caught much earlier because the State supports the police, the judiciary and the press in their investigative work, in instead of tacitly supporting the criminal”, points out the author of “El lirio de fuego”.
“That is why I am much more concerned about what the State can do or not do. A serial killer can destroy the lives of several dozen families, but the complicit, and perhaps even criminal, State in which these killers proliferate harms the entire population”, emphasizes Vic Echegoyen, who is a translator and interpreter at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and in the EU.
Regarding the protagonist of “Sacamantecas”, she says that more than the villain she is simply “the anti-heroine that we all carry inside”, a person with edges, defects, insecurities and complexes, with traumas, dilemmas and scars, and with great contradictions against the ones she fights her whole life, someone whose worst enemy is not the detective, but herself.
“It is easy to admire and want to be like the typical strong, beautiful, cunning, popular, upright protagonist, who succeeds in the most unlikely situations, but are they realistic, and can we identify with them?” questions the also author of ” The voice and the sword.
To his formula, he also adds black humor, which makes the unbearable tolerable, serves to relativize some tragedies and restore perspective, and also consoles, which is why in “Sacamantecas” there is also endearing, absurd or innocent humor “because you never have to lose the ability to laugh at oneself and laugh with others”. EFE