el salvador in the 1980s was embroiled
in a brutal civil war a war which
resulted in the vicious torture of
countless prisoners hi I’m Rebecca
Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and
today we’re speaking with author Jol’s
blunt whose novel breaking Lorca
documents the emotional toll this
torture takes on both detainee and
soldier alike first of all can use a
brief synopsis of breaking Lorca
breaking loka tells the story of a young
soldier in 1980s El Salvador who is
basically dragooned into working for a
clandestine a death squad torture squad
who take captured detainees and
brutalize them ostensibly for instance
for information victor is a very
cowardly soldier by his own estimation
and by the estimation of many other
people and he’s terrified by the
situation he’s in along the way one of
the prisoners they detained as he is a
young woman and she is so brave and
contrasted Victor’s cowardice that he’s
tremendously moved by her and horrified
by the brutality that he’s basically
forced to take part in and then the the
book skips forward a couple of years a
totally different setting to 1980s New
York where they have both managed to
leave the war and
in the second half of the book Victor
tries some extent to make up for his
horrible horrible history and whether or
not he succeeds as I guess up to the
reader good job and where did the
inspiration for this novel derive I read
in the New York Times about an institute
in Minneapolis that was devoted to
providing therapy for victims of torture
and I thought wow that must be how does
such people survive and how what would
recovery from something like that be
that look like what was the research
like for something like this because the
torture scenes are so vivid I read
everything all the books I could on El
Salvador there weren’t many there about
eight at the time and I read as many
books as I could about Central American
politics at the time and particularly
American foreign policy as it was down
there and more specifically about
torture the crimes against humanity that
were committed down there and how that
came to be and develop my story out of
all that research now is this a
historically accurate depiction of el
celular at the time yes absolutely I
don’t um I mean horrible as the stuff is
that I tell in the in the book I left
out the very worst of it because it
truly nobody would be able to to read it
would you say that this story translates
to different times in different
locations the paradigm remains the same
people get tortured usually it’s usually
not in prisons it’s usually in jails
particularly when nobody knows that
they’re being held or where they’re
being held in other words it’s exactly
like a place like Guantanamo or the
CIA’s black sites as soon as you set up
things like the jail in the book or a
place like Guantanamo or black sites
know that that people are going to be
tortured that’s that’s what such places
are for and it’s not about getting
information
it’s about brutalizing a population to
terrorize thank you very much thank you
in a brutal civil war a war which
resulted in the vicious torture of
countless prisoners hi I’m Rebecca
Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and
today we’re speaking with author Jol’s
blunt whose novel breaking Lorca
documents the emotional toll this
torture takes on both detainee and
soldier alike first of all can use a
brief synopsis of breaking Lorca
breaking loka tells the story of a young
soldier in 1980s El Salvador who is
basically dragooned into working for a
clandestine a death squad torture squad
who take captured detainees and
brutalize them ostensibly for instance
for information victor is a very
cowardly soldier by his own estimation
and by the estimation of many other
people and he’s terrified by the
situation he’s in along the way one of
the prisoners they detained as he is a
young woman and she is so brave and
contrasted Victor’s cowardice that he’s
tremendously moved by her and horrified
by the brutality that he’s basically
forced to take part in and then the the
book skips forward a couple of years a
totally different setting to 1980s New
York where they have both managed to
leave the war and
in the second half of the book Victor
tries some extent to make up for his
horrible horrible history and whether or
not he succeeds as I guess up to the
reader good job and where did the
inspiration for this novel derive I read
in the New York Times about an institute
in Minneapolis that was devoted to
providing therapy for victims of torture
and I thought wow that must be how does
such people survive and how what would
recovery from something like that be
that look like what was the research
like for something like this because the
torture scenes are so vivid I read
everything all the books I could on El
Salvador there weren’t many there about
eight at the time and I read as many
books as I could about Central American
politics at the time and particularly
American foreign policy as it was down
there and more specifically about
torture the crimes against humanity that
were committed down there and how that
came to be and develop my story out of
all that research now is this a
historically accurate depiction of el
celular at the time yes absolutely I
don’t um I mean horrible as the stuff is
that I tell in the in the book I left
out the very worst of it because it
truly nobody would be able to to read it
would you say that this story translates
to different times in different
locations the paradigm remains the same
people get tortured usually it’s usually
not in prisons it’s usually in jails
particularly when nobody knows that
they’re being held or where they’re
being held in other words it’s exactly
like a place like Guantanamo or the
CIA’s black sites as soon as you set up
things like the jail in the book or a
place like Guantanamo or black sites
know that that people are going to be
tortured that’s that’s what such places
are for and it’s not about getting
information
it’s about brutalizing a population to
terrorize thank you very much thank you
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