Texto: Héctor Silva Ávalos
It may just be a dystopian science fiction show that, unlike nearly all others, takes place in Buenos Aires and is in Spanish. That alone makes it different. It’s not the same to see aliens falling on Manhattan or London again as it is to witness the invasion of the elegant but also very familiar avenues of the Argentine capital. Besides, is there anything better than hearing Soda Stéreo and Sui Géneris on the soundtrack?
But this is about much more than that. The Eternaut is a Latin American horror story in which hope slips in at times, almost like it does in our daily lives. The series is based on a comic strip by Argentine Héctor Germán Oesterheld, who disappeared along with his four daughters, one of them pregnant, and two sons-in-law during Argentina’s last civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983), published in instalments between 1957 and 1959 in the magazine Hora Cero Semanal. It is still considered one of the masterpieces of Latin American visual narrative.
The merit of the show, directed by Bruno Stagnaro, is that it places it in the present day and lets the powerful story flow, without forcing it, in all possible emotional directions. Any Latin American can see themselves in the references, the characters and their experiences, beyond the killer snow or the aliens.
In an interview with El País, Martín Oestherheld, the author’s grandson, said that The Eternaut “spoke of what was happening in Argentina at that time (the late 1950s)… But it reaches other variations because it speaks of dictatorships, and that trauma affected even our own family two decades later. Or how the protagonists want to find their loved ones, and that transports us to the disappeared…”
All the pain, the visual elements of that tragedy, not in the form of tortured bodies but in the story of parents searching for their daughter who disappeared in the deadly snow that lashes Buenos Aires, exists in The Eternaut. The unease. The helplessness. The anger. But also the hope of finding them. It’s all there in the gestures of Ricardo Darín and Carla Paterson, the actors who bring to life the couple searching for their missing loved ones. This story transcends the boundaries of Buenos Aires’ neighbourhoods and the screen to speak to us, here and now, about the new disappeared and the new ‘brutos’ who make them disappear.
Far from that snowy Buenos Aires, and for years now, murderous snow has also been falling on the Central American north where I was born. In El Salvador and Guatemala, after long dictatorships as cruel as those in Argentina and Chile, and after internal wars that left some 300,000 dead and some 55,000 disappeared, political brutality has taken on new forms. Today it has many faces, including those of Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president who rules by decree, calls himself the ‘cool dictator’ and dominates social media, and Consuelo Porras, a Guatemalan chief prosecutor who has made lawfare a new tool in the counterinsurgency toolbox, which advocates annihilating the adversary by any means necessary.
In El Salvador, my country, Bukele disappears people in his mega-prisons, which he promotes as the centrepiece of a brutal security policy and where some 110,000 people now survive – representing the highest incarceration rate in the Western world. But in El Salvador, no one knows exactly who is there. Most of the prisoners have not been tried, and Bukele prefers not to go into details. Nor does he want to be questioned, something he punishes with harassment and attacks to such an extent that nearly all critical voices have been forced into exile.
Meanwhile, outside the prisons, mothers search for their missing loved ones, just as they did 70 years ago in The Eternaut. Gladis Villatoro, a Salvadoran mother, sums it up in a single sentence: “Since they captured him, I haven’t heard anything about my son. My grandson asks me when his father is coming back, and I tell him soon, but he says, “Grandma, you’re a liar, my dad is never coming back.” Gladis has not seen her son, William Díaz, since the Bukele regime arrested him on 3 December 2022.
