The Central America Cuenta literary festival, scheduled to take place next May in Guatemala with the presence of Spanish singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, will promote freedoms and reject dictatorships, stated the event’s director, Nicaraguan Claudia Neira. “A region with more dictatorships, fewer freedoms, and more human rights violations is a region that lives only in a straitjacket and solely generates mass exoduses,” Neira saind.
“We believe it is crucial that, precisely because of what is happening in Nicaragua, this serves as a mirror for what other countries and the region must avoid,” she added. On November 22, Nicaragua’s Congress approved a constitutional reform granting President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, as “co-president,” absolute control over the state’s powers.
“Central Americans cannot distance themselves from the situation,” Neira considered, while asserting that “these are neither definitive nor permanent times.” Serrat will participate in the inaugural talk because “he is not just a singer; he is an intellectual, a thinker, a democrat,” she commented.
The festival was founded in 2013 by Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, who is exiled in Spain and was stripped of his nationality by Ortega’s government. The works of Ramírez, the 2017 Cervantes Prize winner, and Gioconda Belli, a Nicaraguan writer also exiled in Spain, “always” return to “this land” because there is hope that in the future, there will be “consolidated democracies” in the region, Neira pointed out.
“The ability to keep dreaming and imagining is what will allow us, when we can return, to continue creating from our countries,” she added. The event also aims to promote Central America as “a literary destination, moving away from being known solely for natural disasters, civil wars, and dictatorships,” Neira remarked.
The festival will include workshops, book presentations, concerts, and talks on democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression. The 2025 edition will take place between May 19 and 24 and will be dedicated to the late Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature. This will be the second time it is held in Guatemala, with the first being in 2022.
