In my study, White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America (1993), I argued that one of the most important components of the fiction written by Latin American and Spanish women in the second half of the twentieth century was that characterized by ‘sexual politics’ (see particularly Chapter 4). In retrospect it is now clear that the two most influential writers who focussed on sexual politics were Marta Traba and Luisa Valenzuela, whose paradigmatic works, Conversación al sur (Mothers and Shadows; 1981) and Cambio de armas (Other Weapons; 1982) deserve a special highlight. These two works offered powerful visions of how sex and politics could inform each other, and they treated uncomfortable themes such as femicide, delirium, paranoia and sexual torture. These are themes, as we shall see, that are highly relevant for the novel examined in this chapter, Laura Restrepo's Delirio (Delirium; 2004). This novel offers a powerful twenty-first-century statement about the inter-relation between delirium and political oppression, and between sexual and economic torture. So we can certainly trace some continuity with those twentieth-century canonic works that articulated sexual politics in Latin America as viewed from a female perspective. But we should note the presence of a certain discontinuity. For this Colombian literary text is, in some crucial ways, different from the creative writing produced in other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. Its ideological expression is more disorientating, and this is because the problems it articulates are more urgent.

Unlike countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, Colombia has not yet had or completed a truth commission, that is to say it has not embarked on a process that is equivalent to those truth commissions carried out in the four above-mentioned countries. Argentina was the first country in Latin America to set up its own truth commission; the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas was set up on 15 December 1983, completed its investigation on 20 September 1984, and pointed to extensive human rights violations (i.e. that around 30,000 people had been disappeared), which led to a number of prosecutions of civil and military individuals in Argentina. Then in Chile the Rettig Report, officially called The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, in 1991 documented the human rights abuses that had occurred in Chile during Pinochet's dictatorship, and it too led to prosecu-tions.