Charras: A True Novel of the Assassination that Roiled the Yucatan

by Hernán Lara Zavala

Charras is the true story of Efraín “El Charras” Calderón 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 Hernán 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 the governor of the Yucatán, 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.

240 pages, Paperback

Published June 17, 2025

About the author

Hernán Lara Zavala was a Mexican novelist, literary critic and academic at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
He was educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of East Anglia (MA, 1981). He was awarded the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature in 1995. In 2010 he was awarded the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language prize.

Reviews

[sarah]

translation which i think slightly erodes the emotional impact, i hope to read in spanish soon. very very sad for obvious reasons