Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro made an impassioned defense of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) at its inauguration November 28, rebutting recent criticism by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that the humongous literary showcase is a “conservative” event that targets his liberal government.
Calling the president’s comments “ridiculous,” Alfaro described the world’s second-largest book fair “a sounding board that cannot be silenced.”
Noting how “truth and lies can be confused” in “these unfortunate times,” the governor said events such as the FIL are essential “as we are forced to fight for the defense of ideas and reason.”
Neither did FIL President Rául Padilla López, who has been singled out for particular criticism by Lopez Obrador, mince his words.
“Literature allows us to distinguish between totalitarian ideologies and forms of thought that liberate us,” Padilla said. “Literature connects us and makes us abandon closed categories of right and wrong, of left and right … Literature is, in itself, an act of emancipation.”
This year’s FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, worth $US150,000, went to the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge, whose work is representative of a recent style of Portuguese writing, the so-called “Post Revolution Generation.”