“A master of the chronicle, Guerriero uses words like a rigid wind: she penetrates, inquires, into lives without detours, adjectives, or literature. She uses words like life. All we have left is wonder.”

“Los suicidas del fin del mundo by journalist and writer Leila Guerriero falls within the genre of documentary literature. The work is a crónica (in fact, its subtitle is “Chronicle of a Patagonian Town”) that was originally published in 2005. It recounts the events that took place in Las Heras, a town in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz within the Patagonia region. The town sprang up from nothing with the arrival of the railroad in 1909 and grew with the boom in oil activity starting in the 1950s. Over time, that prosperous, artificially created space experienced its decline due to the privatization of the oil company, but it was yet to deteriorate further—in the late 1990s, the town was shaken by the staggered suicides of twelve young people, tragic events that the inhabitants didn’t know how to interpret. In the book, Leila Guerriero displays her skills as a storyteller. With an objective, somewhat melancholic, and barely audible voice, Leila Guerriero portrays a superstitious and disillusioned society where forging community bonds is difficult. Las Heras is a rootless town where young people lack a future; a decaying place inhabited by uncultured individuals, often traumatized since childhood; by drunken men who assault women and by women who have children in their teens; by families where the fathers abandon the home; by individuals who sexually assault children; by ignorant, brutish, and clumsy people… Los suicidas del fin del mundo thus depicts a tragic and violent world that is still very much alive today.”