The Post-Leninist Detective by Bruno Bosteels

We had to take two small steps back, and two forward, like Lenin in Toluca. We had to remain in the rearguard while the others rode on their horses, to see them from afar disappear in the dust. - Paco Ignacio Taibo II, De cuerpo entero

Toward the end of the 2000 movie Amores perros, written and directed by the Mexican duo Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the character nicknamed el Chivo ("the Goat")-a one-time private university professor who turned first into an urban guerrilla fighter and then into a mercenary killer roaming the streets of Mexico City, where he also devotes himself to picking up stray dogs and caring for them back in his home-gives a speech to his only daughter, whom he never saw grow up. In more senses than one, this is a speech in the void. Even though the ex-guerrillero finds himself sitting on the bed in the middle of his daughter's room, she herself is absent, so that he is forced to leave a message on her answering machine with a stolen cell-phone. Modern technology notwithstanding, the lack of communication seems insuperable, despite the fact that in his speech, with an honesty that borders on pathos, the father makes an enormous effort to overcome the gap that separates him from his only child-a gap that is perhaps less generational than political and ideological. Thus, he explains to her that, at the time when he held her in his arms for the last time, he asked her for forgiveness for what he was about to undertake, but that he felt as though he had more important things to do than to be with her or with her mother. "Quería componer el mundo para luego compartirlo contigo o con ustedes," he tells her ("I wanted to repair the world in order afterwards to be able to share it with you both"). Amores perros, then, is also a story about the loss of this Quixotic or Hamletian dream-the hope of righting wrongs in order to create a universally shared world of justice for all.