Charras

Charras is the true story of Efra?n "El Charras" Calder?n Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government's successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hern?n Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras's death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucat?n, Charras's bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping--the chilling "you" whose point-of-view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.