The Post-Leninist Detective by Bruno Bosteels

But you, stubborn purist, you had not excessively varied the original idea, even though perhaps with time passing you had nuanced it; you had softened it. Perhaps you were committing the sin of sectarianism. - Paco Ignacio Taibo II, De cuerpo entero

In Taibo's writing, politics becomes above all a question of lived subjectivity. Whence the importance of those moods and affective states that a traditional analysis might consider secondary, or simply incidental, to the noir neo-detective novel. Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, one-eyed detective in the land of the blind, is defined above all by his stubbornness, his inability to let go, his all-out engagement and fidelity to the principles of justice and equality. In this sense, he is no different from the figure of Ernesto "Che" Guevara that emerges from Taibo's biography, based on the notion of entrega total, or total commitment. Politics must then be understood in their interiority-not from the objective or sociological point of view of power, but from within the political capacity of new subjects and movements whose sequences have marked the history of the city and country of Mexico. Among these, the novels directly or indirectly touch upon the ghosts of Zapata and Villa; the anarchist struggles of the 1920s; the (Lázaro) Cárdenas years at mid-century; the peasant rebellion led by Rubén Jaramillo; the railworkers' strike of 1959; the student-popular movement of 1968; the Corpus Christi massacre of June 10, 1971; the years of ideological cooptation under President Luis Echeverría; the re-emergence of syndicalist and armed guerrilla struggles in the 1970s; the astounding popular response to the earthquake in 1985; the new student movement of the CEU in 1987; the promise of a left-wing alternative under (Cuauhtémoc) Cárdenas; the stolen 1988 election that brought Carlos Salinas de Gortari to the presidency; and the rise to power of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, at least in the Federal District-to which we might add, most recently, the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which beyond the Belascoarán series led to Taibo's collaboration with Subcomandante Marcos on the novel Muertos incómodos (The Uncomfortable Dead). These sequences are more than simply the backdrop of Taibo's stories. They are, in fact, all that really matters-but only if we understand that it is not until history becomes a story, or perhaps even a myth, that the true subjective potential of these political struggles becomes effectively visible. "De-mythifying is not the only option, re-mythifying is the other," Taibo writes. With reference to the myths of 1968 in particular, he adds: "Three hypotheses: 1) A myth is not necessarily a lie. 2) Generally speaking myth is the rumored truth of those who are screwed, while the winners have the national television channel at their disposal. 3) Myths do not always rescue the most beautiful parts of the story to be told, sometimes they pick up on the corniest or the silliest ones. "26 For Taibo, the writing of detective fiction thus seems to involve above all a fidelity to political events which, without such an intervention that gives them the mobilizing force of popular myth, risk vanishing or merely becoming one more of the many ghosts that roam around the streets of Mexico City.