"Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America," by Enrique Krauz

Jeff Glor talks to Enrique Krauze about, "Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Enrique Krauze: Redeemers is the product of more than thirty years of intellectual activity. Through most of the 20th Century and especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, a commitment to revolution was much more popular in Latin America than support for democracy. I worked -for 23 years - as Assistant Editor of the journal Vuelta directed by Octavio Paz. The journal stood for democracy, criticizing both right-wing dictatorships and left-wing guerrillas. After Paz died in 1998, I started a new journal, called Letras Libres, to continue this tradition of commitment to democracy by publishing and writing essays intended to analyze, understand and criticize the continuing passion for revolution in Latin America. I've tried to do this somewhat like Isaiah Berlin in his Russian Thinkers or Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station: focusing on the lives and ideas of writers, artists and revolutionaries.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

EK: The composition of the book suddenly became autobiographical, because I discovered more about the past of Octavio Paz himself who became, in a sense, the pivotal personage in the book. He had been a Marxist, had gone to Spain in the Spanish Civil War, wrote fiery revolutionary poems, and then gradually lost his devotion to Marxism and came to believe in liberal democracy. In considerable part, the book reflects our intellectual friendship and our shared critical passion.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

EK: I like what I'm doing at present besides my writing. I edit a literary and critical journal and direct a company that produces historical documentaries (shown nationally on A History Hour that has run for many years on Mexican television). But if I had to choose a different occupation, I think I would like to be an archaeologist.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

EK: A Dutch historian who teaches at Princeton and whose work I find fascinating, named Jonathan Israel. I don't know him personally but I've read various books by him and I'm now immersed in his great history of the Jewish diaspora in America during the 16th and 17th centuries: "Diaspora within a Diaspora." I'm also reading a very beautiful, very personal and original book on 20th Century Cuba: "The Sugar King of Havana" by John Paul Rathbone.

JG: What's next for you?

EK: I want to closely explore the history of a crypto-Jewish (marrano) family of Portuguese origin in early 17th-century Mexico. I've done a lot of research on them in the archives of the Holy Inquisition. And I'd like to link it, literally, with some of the history of my own family, Jewish immigrants from Poland, who have lived since the '30s of the 20th Century in the same places as those remote personages. My grandparents - through the chance of emigration - were saved from the ovens of Auschwitz but those others, in 1649, died in the flames of the Inquisition.

For more on "Redeemers," visit the Harper Collins website.