Translation Rights TQE / The suicides at the End of the World

Between 1997 and 1999, a suicidal wave moved the small village of Las Heras, in the Argentinean province of Santa Cruz, in the Patagonia. Most of the people who committed suicide were about 25 years old and belonged to poor families. The journalist Leila Guerriero travelled to this isolated place to interrogate the relatives and friends of the suicides. She walked the same deserted streets and visited every corner of the village. She interviewed the neighbors and asked anyone who might be able to offer an answer or a theory that could explain the drama. The result is this startling account that reconstructs the tragic circumstances of the events, while giving a picture of daily life in a community distant from any big city.

Las Heras, with its high level of unemployment due to the oscillation of the oil industry and without a future to offer its young people, is wrapped in an unsolved enigma: The suicides, as a fatal fate, keep occurring.

Los suicidas del fin del mundo is a chilling chronicle that is read with the fascination of a novel but with the horror of a reality marked by prejudice and the indifference of those who do not want to get involved.

Leila Guerriero was born in 1967 in Junin, Buenos Aires (Argentina), and she started her journalistic career in the magazine Página/30 in 1991. She has been an editor for the Revista of the newspaper La Nación since 1996. She has also collaborated with different Latin American and Spanish media, including Rolling Stone (Argentina), Letras Libres, El País (Montevideo), El Universal (Mexico) and Argentinean cultural publications, such as V de Vian or Barrio Jalouin. She has also participated in the book Mujeres argentinas. Los suicidas del fin del mundo, published by Tusquets Editores Argentina in September 2005, has received much praise from readers and critics alike throughout Latin America.