By Enrique Krauze, Mexican historian and writer
“The only way to make a magazine is for writers to love or hate something with passion. The other is an anthology ”, Jorge Luis Borges once told me. I did not forget its definition. When Octavio Paz died in April 1998 and with him the Vuelta magazine that he had directed since 1976, his friends continued to passionately love literature and freedom. The decision was to found a magazine that aspired to be worthy of Vuelta’s legacy. We baptized it with the name of a small foundation that we had created some time ago and whose name was coined, a poet always, by Paz himself: it would be called “Free Letters” and it would be born with something new then: an internet site. The first issue appeared in January 1999. Two years later, we began to work on the foundation of Letras Libres in Spain: a cultural bridge between Spain and Latin America.
Over twenty years, both magazines and the site www.letraslibres.com they have survived in a world very different from that predicted by the innocent optimism with which the twentieth century ended. In addition to the fanaticisms of religious, ethnic, national, social, ideological, academic and even gender identity that would be insinuated with increasing irrationality in our open societies, a new multiform fanaticism appeared on the horizon: populism. Shrewd and perverse mutation of fascist and communist totalitarianisms, this new form of domination reveres the charismatic leader, monopolizes public discourse, seizes the truth, dictates history, demonizes the other, encourages polarization, ignites class hatred or races, invents or fabricates external enemies, despises institutions, laws, and freedoms, and ultimately, using democracy against itself, seeks to annihilate it.
We have dedicated several issues to thinking about these issues of global interest without neglecting the particular problems of our nations. In these twenty years, Letras Libres España has published hundreds of authors. We have analyzed the vicissitudes of liberal thought, moments of crisis and expansion of democracy, the rise of identity movements and the resurgence of nationalisms, the management of the past and its complications, the relationship between literature and politics in the world of speech Hispanic, the feminist movement and the public voice of women, the transformation of the public sphere through social networks, polarization and hate politics, the crisis of journalism. The magazine has participated in the Spanish and European debates. We have dealt with the increase in inequality, the mechanisms and strategies of populism, the link between Spain and Latin America, the relationship between politics and climate change. But we have also addressed romantic relationships in the 21st century; we have published series of autobiographies of authors who recounted their summers of childhood, adolescence and youth; we have dedicated numbers to translation, newspapers or science fiction. Book reviews are important and extensive because we believe in the pleasure and insight that comes from talking seriously about the written word. Film criticism has also had its place. It is a place for debate and also for meeting and confronting other visions, a task that requires a joyous effort of curiosity and attention.
In the Orwellian world in which we live, where the borders of truth and lies seem to be erased, where democracy is on the prowl, we continue to believe that the intellectual and moral antidote continues to be in Borges’s definition. Letras Libres is not an anthology. Authors and readers on both sides of the Atlantic passionately love literature and freedom.
Mexican historian and writer
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