It was during a Christmas visit to Guatemala in 2024 when the writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa saw photos of prisoners crowded in the cages of CECOT, the mega-prison built by the regime of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. This, along with a book he was carrying those days, sparked an idea.
“I was reading Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener. An old copy that I had barely glanced at in the almost forty years I’ve had it on my bookshelf. I have written several fictions set in prisons (Hueders published a collection titled Invented Prisons in Chile). I imagined a mega-prison where, as has been the case in prisons worldwide and throughout history, experiments free of ethical controls were carried out.”
Thus, Rodrigo Rey Rosa (67), perhaps the great Guatemalan literary name of recent decades, shaped the novel Animal colonial(Alfaguara). It is a novel imagining a fictional Central American country, Nueva Verapaz, governed by a president with authoritarian traits who has built a mega-prison—known by the Caribbean nickname El Infiernón—to end gang violence. And not only that: a new system aimed at reforming prisoners is tested in the penitentiary complex. Under the influence of Dr. Rossignol, the Interceph is carried out, a system seeking the interconnection of brains, turning them into a single thinking organism.
Meanwhile, a private detective devises a plan to breach that fortress and free Esteban, a young film student unjustly imprisoned just for working on a documentary about the maras. He is denied defense, reading of charges, visitation rights, and is locked up with other gang members. Like him, there are several cases of innocent people suffering abuse by the state machinery.
The truth is that in the work of the winner of the 2004 Miguel Ángel Asturias National Literature Prize and the 2015 José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize, prisons and deprivation of liberty have been themes, but now he added readings on new information transmission systems. “I had to read more than I would have imagined about wireless communication technology and such. Something similar happened when writing Prison of Trees, but in that case, I had to read about neuropsychology. I think I learned something,” he tells Culto.
With El Infiernón, it’s impossible not to think of Bukele and the CECOT mega-prison. At what exact moment did Bukele’s mega-prison stop being just news and become narrative material for you?
As I said, a photograph. And of course, then I started reading several reports and watched documentaries available online. The verifiable data wasn’t much—I don’t know if that has changed—but this, the lack of exact data and the official secrecy around this place, were stimuli for curiosity and imagination. A story by Salvadoran writer Michelle Recinos, Barbers on Strike, from her book Liver Substance, also helped me imagine the setting. It doesn’t talk about the prison itself but about the effect of mass arrests and the disappearance of innocent young people during the state of exception in El Salvador.
What really interested you about that phenomenon: the prison, the popularity of an authoritarian model, the fear in societies?
The possibilities of illicit experimentation on humans. It’s the theme of Prison of Trees, the predecessor of this novel, written in 1989. In Guatemala, there was the case of Dr. John Cutler, a doctor from the U.S. Public Health Service, who between 1946 and 1948 deliberately infected many prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other venereal diseases to test the effectiveness of penicillin, without the victims’ consent and at the invitation of Guatemalan officials. The case was not known until 2010.
Esteban is arrested for trying to film a documentary about the maras. What does the figure of the witness or documentarian represent to you in a system that punishes observation?
In Guatemala, such an arrest wouldn’t be unusual, although I don’t know of recent cases of filmmakers detained for practicing their profession. But there are cases of journalists detained for documenting uncomfortable facts for people in power.
Does Esteban’s case echo the complaints against Bukele’s prison for holding a significant number of innocents?
It’s clear. But the detention of innocents happens in all dictatorships. Animal colonial does not want to allude to any one in particular but to all of them.
Dr. Rossignol is an ambivalent character: he seems well-intentioned and at the same time monstrous. How did you build that moral ambiguity?
I had a human model in mind, a Central American doctor whose graduation thesis was a series of experiments on dogs kept alive by an external heart. He became director of Harvard’s Children’s Hospital. But Dr. Rossignol’s ambiguity is also a reflection of medical science, which can be morally ambiguous, “well-intentioned and at the same time monstrous,” right?
Regarding the Interceph experiment, what caught your attention about the idea of an authoritarian state controlling people’s minds?
It’s the dream of every authoritarian state. They all achieve it, to some extent.
To what extent is Interceph a metaphor for what we are already doing by pouring our lives into digital platforms?
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I stay away from digital platforms, but I suppose there is some truth in what you say.
Do you think we are handing over our autonomy to technology or AI?
Yes, to a large extent. It’s no exaggeration to say we already depend on technology. A global internet blackout would have catastrophic consequences. And look, while I was editing this novel, El Salvador announced that a Google artificial intelligence will manage its public health system: a clinical record per citizen, in the hands of a foreign AI company. Material for experimentation.
Do you think this is a novel about control of bodies and punishment? A bit like in A Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange by Kubrick is about conditioning a violent individual to make him docile, the state entering a criminal’s mind to reform him. In Animal colonial, the angle is different: what interests the state is not the reform of the criminal but the use of prisoners’ bodies and minds as scientific raw material. The state wants to control and eventually connect them for its own purposes. In Kubrick, or Burgess, the theme is suppressed free will; in this novel, the question would be whether free will existed for the detainees or if they were predestined for crime.
The president is called The Strong Lady. What interested you in exploring by putting a woman at the head of such an authoritarian and technocratic project?
It’s not something I analyzed when putting her on stage. But for this, I also had a human model: a presidential candidate in Guatemala who announced, as part of her propaganda, the construction of a prison even bigger than CECOT.
Nueva Verapaz is an invented country but very recognizable. Why did you prefer geographical fiction instead of setting the novel directly in El Salvador or Guatemala?
For convenience. That way I felt freer when writing. Anyway, political borders, especially in Mesoamerica and other colonized territories, seem to me a form of fiction.
The novel shows a system presented as the definitive solution to the problem of violence. Do you fear this mega-prison model will become the norm in Latin America (and beyond)?
It’s already a trend. Ecuador, Brazil, and Honduras have advanced in similar mass incarceration models. It seems to me an unnecessarily cruel system, a return to a form of enslavement of large sectors of the population.
There is a long Latin American tradition of novels about dictatorships, prisons, and authoritarian states. Do you feel you are consciously dialoguing with that tradition or was the novel born more from a contemporary concern?
The concern is contemporary, but as you point out, we share a long tradition, not only literary but also political and social, regarding dictatorships and prisons. Still, I don’t feel I was dialoguing with any particular book or author. I tend toward solipsism.
On another note, Roberto Bolaño always praised you and spoke very well of you. How do you remember him?
Fondly. We had few personal encounters. We had lunch two or three times in Barcelona, once at his house in Blanes. We maintained a friendship mostly by phone; he was a great conversationalist. I felt treated by him like an older brother who cared about my well-being. On one occasion, I had just returned from India after a several-month stay and fell ill in Barcelona with a kind of very strong flu. Upon learning this, Roberto asked a friend to bring a sack full of oranges for juice to the apartment where I was staying because he wanted to make sure I consumed enough vitamin C.
How much did Roberto Bolaño influence your writing?
The ability to receive influences decreases with age. I read Bolaño quite late. On the other hand, if criticism exerts influence, his—meaning his reviews of my books, written before we met—was a very beneficial influence that encouraged me to keep striving.
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