An Interview with Author Giles Blunt

Rebecca Brayton: El Salvador in the 1980s was embroiled in a brutal Civil War, a war which resulted in the vicious torture of countless prisoners. Hi, I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com, and today we’re speaking with author, Giles Blunt whose novel, Breaking Lorca documents the emotional toll this torture takes on both detainee and soldier alike. First off all, can you give us a brief synopsis of Breaking Lorca. Giles Blunt: Breaking Lorca tells this story of a young soldier in 1980’s El Salvador who is basically dragooned into working for a clandestine death squad - torture squad who take -- captured detainees and brutalized them extensively for information. Victor is a very cowardly soldier by his own estimation and by the estimation of many other people and he is terrified by the situation he is in. Along the way, one of the prisoners that they detained is a young woman and she is so brave in contrast to Victor’s cowardice that he is tremendously moved by her and horrified by the brutality that he’s basically forced to take part in and the book skips forward a couple of years with a totally different setting to 1980s New York where they have both managed to flee the war and in the second half of the book, Victor tries to some extent to make up for his horrible, horrible history and whether or not he succeeds is I guess up to the reader to judge. Rebecca Brayton: And where did the inspiration for this novel derive? Giles Blunt: I read in the New York Times about an institute in Minneapolis that was devoted to providing therapy for victims of torture and I thought, “Wow, that must be…” how do such people survive and then how -- what would recovery from something like that be, what would that look like? Rebecca Brayton: What was the research like for something like this because the torture scenes are so vivid? Giles Blunt: I read everything -- all the books I could on El Salvador. There weren’t many. There are about eight at the time and I read as many as I could about Central American politics at the time and particularly, American foreign policy as it was down there and more specifically about torture, the crimes against humanity that were committed down there and how that came to be and developed my story out of all of that research. Rebecca Brayton: Now is this a historically accurate depiction of El Salvador at the time? Giles Blunt: Yes, absolutely. I don't -- I mean, horrible as this stuff is that I tell in the book, I left out the very worst of it because truly, nobody would be able to read it. Rebecca Brayton: Would you say that the story translates to different times and different locations? Giles Blunt: The paradigm remains the same. People get tortured. Usually, not in prisons; it’s usually in jails particularly when nobody knows that they're being held or where they're being held. In other words, it’s exactly like a place like Guantanamo or the CIA’s black sites. As soon as you set up things like the jail in the book for a place like Guantanamo or black sites, you know that people are going to be tortured. That’s what such places are for and it’s not about getting information, it’s about brutalizing a population to terrorize them. Rebecca Brayton: Thank you very much. Giles Blunt: Thank you.