Von Vacano, Arturo

(1938– )

   Bolivian journalist and novelist. Born in La Paz, Von Vacano worked for media outlets in Latin America and in his native Bolivia, where he also published several novels. In 1980, following the so-called cocaine coup of General Luís García Meza, he went into exile. Between 1980 and 1987, he worked as a writer and an editor for United Press International in New York and Washington, D.C. He currently writes a column for Redbolivia.com and continues to publish fiction as well as volumes dealing with Bolivian politics, most recently two laudatory volumes on the presidency of Evo Morales.

   His novel Morder el silencio (1980) was first translated into English in 1987 as Biting Silence. In it, the author presents a novelized version of the detention—by a dictatorial regime—of an unnamed narrator, a writer by trade, who is subjected to psychological torture. The regime, identified only as La Bestia (The Beast), appears to be self-perpetuating—a stand-in for any number of dictatorships in Latin America throughout the 20th century. Indeed, the U.S. translator Gregory Rabassa, in a critical commentary on the novel, has noted “la novela es realmente ‘boliviana’ pero se expande hasta incluir a todo Latinoamérica y, sin duda, cualquier otro país que encaja en la denuncia de la injusticia y la tortura dictatoriales” (the novel is truly ‘Bolivian’ but it expands to include all of Latin America and, undoubtedly, any other country that fits into the denunciation of injustice and torture by dictatorships).