Río Muerto – Ricardo Silva Romero

[World Editions; 2025]

Tr. from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcraft

I’d like to begin at the end. Namely, with Ricardo Silva Romero’s afterword in Río Muerto, a novel that takes place during the intense conflict in rural Colombia of the 1990s. Written specifically for the U.S. version of the novel, Silva Romero’s afterword adds historical and political context to the story told in earlier pages, explaining how various forms of political violence and armed conflict have impacted Colombia, especially its most vulnerable and oppressed communities, up to the present day. Providing a real-world example of the threats illustrated in the book, Silva Romero quotes Cristina Bautista, former governor of the Nasa Tacueyó Indigenous reserve, who said in 2019, “If we speak, they kill us, and if we remain silent too.” Soon after, Bautista was murdered by drug traffickers in a massacre on her community. This choice—to speak or remain silent—is the hinge upon which Silva Romero’s Río Muerto turns. For these characters, Bautista’s brave words ring true.

Río Muerto begins with the murder of Salomón Palacios, who was mute all his life, communicating verbally when necessary by writing notes to his wife and two young sons in yellow notebooks. Killed by the local paramilitary group Bloque Fénix, headed by the Commander Triple Ex, Salomón is said to have been a “rat,” though we learn later that the group was really after the family’s land. Salomón’s wife Hipólita and her sons must appeal to the local undertaker to give Salomón a proper burial in the small hours of the morning. Otherwise, his body might join the others dropped unceremoniously in the so-called Río Muerto that runs through their small, isolated town. A few days later, the undertaker, one of few in the town with dignity and solidarity to spare, ends up floating down the river.

The story takes place during a reign of paramilitary terror in Belén del Chamí, a the fictional town—forever absent from the map of Colombia—that has passed through several dynasties of control in the absence of the Colombian state: first the Catholic Church, ousted by Pentecostals, then the guerrilla rebels, and lastly the paramilitaries, who vow to cleanse the town of “COMMON THUGS, RATS, COMMUNISTS, POT SMOKERS, WHORES, GUERRILLEROS, DRUG DEALERS, WITCHES, FILTHY JUNKIES, PETTY THIEVES, RAPISTS OR ANY OTHER BASTARDS.” The shamelessness and vulgarity with which they yield their power, eschewing any veneer of formality to assure their legitimacy, feels almost comical and juvenile, until one realizes that their legitimacy lies in force.

Belén del Chamí represents many Colombian territories that have been fought over, occupied, “cleansed,” and controlled by armed groups, be they guerilla, paramilitary, military, or drug traffickers. The story of Hipólita, Salomón, and Belén del Chamí is supposedly a true story recounted to the author, perhaps a device that supports the novel’s real purpose: to represent millions of Colombians who have survived, or disappeared in, a decades-long armed conflict. The story remains representative today, as peace proves evasive.

While confronting these brutal surroundings, Río Muerto is engaging, almost cinematic. Most of the book spans a single leap day in 1992, following Hipólita and her sons, Maximiliano and Segundo, as she sets off to unleash “the mother of all messes.” Enraged by her husband’s murder and the whole town’s implicit collusion, Hipólita decides that the only dignified response is to get herself and her sons killed, to release them from the town’s living hell and “to make it crystal clear to all their enemies that they wouldn’t be leaving this world deluded like everyone else.” A straight-shooter if there ever was one, Hipólita chooses, with a manic and sparkling clarity, to speak rather than remain silent, no matter the consequences.

What follows is a crusade of righteous candor. First, Hipólita confronts the traitorous neighbors, including Salomón’s former lover: “With respect, I know you served coffee to Salomón’s killers shortly before he arrived.” When the neighbor suggests that Hipólita is actually hurt about the affair, Hipólita answers, “I’m hurt that you’re a bitch, I’m not one to deny that, but now I’m telling you what I saw: you two laughing with those murderers.” In Hipólita’s speech, we hear some of translator Victor Meadowcraft’s talent, generously employing familiar English parallels of Colombian phrases, expletives, and colloquial grammatical usage. Meadowcraft’s translation of dialogue reads boldly in English, effectively carrying over Hipólita’s rage and confidence, making her undeniably likeable despite her death wish.

This immediacy and use of vulgar, straightforward dialogue is balanced by a poetic third person narration that bestows a kind of awe upon the scenes being witnessed. There is the scene at Saturday’s church service before Hipólita gives the local pastor a piece of her mind: “Then the singing washerwomen were called up to sing what they did every time a corpse floated by on the Río Muerto: ‘thanks to life, which has given me so much.’” These passages, too, are translated with energy and emotion, reverberating out toward the reader.

Hipólita moves on to the local police officer, taking her boys into town with her as the older one drives Salomón’s truck. In front of several townspeople, a rifle slung across her shoulder, ready to embrace the backfire of her accusations, she confesses to Officer Sarria: “With respect, I’ve always known you were the enemy.” She is unafraid and even humorous at times as she humiliates the adulterous neighbor, indolent cop, and egomaniacal pastor (“Perhaps the most practical thing would be for her, Hipólita, to simply stick the rifle in his mouth: gulp!”). She does so not quite to expose their corruption and hypocrisy (everyone already knows) but to die with the dignity of having said it aloud.

Meanwhile, Maximiliano and Segundo strategize and despair, respectively, trying to thwart or at least dodge their mother’s death wish. And Salomón, whose ghost looks on, fruitlessly tries to communicate across the veil and speak some sense into Hipólita. He tells the town psychic to pass on his desperate pleas, echoing the words he used to write down for her: “Take note!”

Salomón is not an entirely innocent character. In life, he cheats on his wife with the neighbor (the same one who serves coffee to his executioners) and commits the sin of treating everyone equally, providing transportation and moving services in his truck to anyone who might require them. He draws suspicion from all kinds of shady characters because “he’d made the mistake of being a good man even to the worst sons of bitches.” Salomón’s guilt mirrors that of everyone in the community, like an original sin. Everyone must participate in the web of powers that be, and his family learns the hard way that ignoring them is also participating. Salomón tries to make amends with Hipólita while alive, but he tries even harder in death. Whereas Hipólita “had to teach him to have a will to live” in their earlier relationship, after he dies their roles are reversed. He communicates through the psychic, who only his youngest son, Segundo, pays any attention to. Through strange signs and words he wasn’t able to speak aloud while alive, he urges Hipólita to continue living.

Silva Romero uses Salomón’s continuous presence in the novel to give voice to the murdered and disappeared victims of the armed conflict, whose absence continues to take up a central role in efforts for peace and justice. While Salomón cannot communicate easily, his enduring connection to his family eventually empowers them all to seek a different solution than death. Paradoxically, Salomón gains a voice in death that he didn’t have—perhaps didn’t need—in life.

When Hipólita, Max, and Segundo finally face off with Commander Triple Ex, their epic tragedy falls back to earth, landing in a much grayer area than expected. While there is still no confusion about who the villains and heroes are, Silva Romero avoids fantastical climaxes, opting instead for a collective resignation that feels more honest. Rather than cinematic victory or tragic demise, Salomón’s family ends up as so many from Colombia’s conflict regions do: internally displaced.

As they follow their father’s scent of cigarette smoke through the jungle, along the banks of the Río Muerto, the family ends up hitching a ride on a truck carrying piles of hard plantains, “happy to be leaving, happy to leave.” This image signals a reversal of the famous scene in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which fruit company trains carry the massacred bodies of Macondo’s workers and townspeople, piling them up “in the same way in which they transported bunches of bananas.” Instead of leading them toward death, following the route of extractive economies, this Colombian staple moves our heroes toward relative safety.

Back at the end, back where we started, at Silva Romero’s afterword. An important piece of context is rather recent: in 2016, despite being narrowly rejected in a popular referendum, the Colombian government initiated a peace agreement intended to dismantle guerilla groups and create structures for reintegration of combatants into civil society. The proposal promised victim-centered truth and reconciliation, a political path forward. While the way forward has been rocky, relying on the enthusiasm of sitting presidents and the fracturing of participating groups, Romero notes that at the very least, “the peace agreement gave rise to a culture of therapy: a culture that has started to mourn.”

Collective therapy and catharsis have taken many forms in Colombia since 2016, perhaps most notably through the formation of Colombia’s Truth Commission, which acknowledges the previously marginalized experience of victims of the conflict. But artistic methods have also played a role, such as the use of participatory theater workshops to support healing for victims of sexual violence during the conflict, a part of an “Arts for Reconciliation” initiative by the Institute of Fine Arts in Cali, Colombia. Literature can be a part of this process, Silva Romero says. Originally published in 2021, Río Muerto is a part of that catharsis and healing, writing victims and survivors as protagonists at the center of the story.

The author doesn’t mention the U.S.’s role in the conflict, focusing reasonably on the Colombian experience. What I think is important for U.S. readers to reflect on is that this experience is the sharp edge of a political and economic dynamic that includes us—and not only in the ways we are familiar with, such as the northward flow of drugs in exchange for dollars. On a government level, the U.S. provided the Colombian military with billions of dollars to combat drug trafficking and guerilla insurgency through an aid program called Plan Colombia from 2001 to 2015. Between 2002 and 2008, while receiving U.S. military aid, Colombia’s military is known to have committed thousands of “false positives,” a practice of killing civilians and passing them off as guerilla targets. The U.S. company Chiquita Bananas was recently held liable in a U.S. court for the deaths of victims murdered by the paramilitary groups they financed. Those green plantains upon which Hipólita, Max, and Segundo escaped could have just as easily ended up in U.S. grocery stores; their story, then, gives U.S. readers a glimpse of the cost of our economic and political systems on a hemispheric level.

At the end of Río Muerto, we learn that the person the author supposedly hears this story from, “told just as I have told it,” is the now-adult Segundo. We may be even more surprised to learn that despite his childhood experiences, Segundo voted against approving the peace agreement in the 2016 referendum. He voted “no,” he says, “to vote against all the executioners.” The author shares that he voted to approve the peace agreement for the same reason, illustrating the many conflicting opinions on how to go about achieving peace. Is the conflict itself the “mother of all messes,” or does embracing peace mean making a mess first? Like Silva Romero, I believe that literature is, if not peacemaking in itself, an expression of “tenuous hope,” a dive into the mess.

“The novel you are about to close,” Silva Romero writes, “uses the tools of fiction to turn stomachs.” And Río Muerto can be sickening. But it’s also many other things. It is endearing to watch little Segundo find his voice. It’s heartbreaking to see Maximiliano wield his own power over others. It’s also hopeful: we are rooting for Hipólita all along. “Our literature has been engaged in justice for as long as justice has been on its way,” writes Silva Romero. And perhaps this translation is engaged in justice, too, inviting truth to a far corner of the web in which Hipólita and Salomón found themselves caught.

Liliana Torpey is a writer from Oakland, California. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, focusing on poetry and literary translation. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, NACLA, and Euronews Culture.