Precarious Secrets : A History of the Latin American Political Thriller

An exploration of the political thriller genre and its context in Latin American politics and entertainment.

For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Peruvian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy.

Fabricio Tocco explores the genre’s unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism. Precarious Secrets traces the evolutions of the Latin American political thriller from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre’s resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region’s turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, Tocco isolates the Latin American political thriller’s particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity—moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Fabricio Tocco is an assistant professor at the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics at the Australian National University and author of the prize winning Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.