Guido Rodríguez Alcalá

In 2002, Guido Rodríguez Alcalá took farther Paraguayan history with his novel Velasco to put it correctly in its regional environment, in the time just before the independence, and examine the political processes that had happened to reach to it and to speculate with documented facts about what had happened.

He has also written lots of essays: Literatura del Paraguay (1980) and Ideología autoritaria (1987) and also some historic researches: Paraguay y Brasil, documentos sobre las relaciones binacionales, 1844-1864 (2007) about 20 years before the Paraguayan War and Justicia Penal de Gaspar_Rodríguez_de_Francia (1997) among others. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the narrative of the store in his work, because of the exhaustive research and the abundance of quotes and references.

Guido Rodriguez Alcalá (born Asunción, Paraguay, 1946) is a poet, narrator, historian, journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is an assiduous collaborator in different local and international newspapers.

And that truth implies stripping some of the affirmations of the official historiography: that way, Velasco says (page 58) that on May 16, 1811 “there was no tricolor flag ran up like people had said. The flag that was run up was the Spanish one”; and he says, “we swore loyalty to Fernando VII”. Regarding to the Communist Revolution, that some people interpreted like a preamble of the independence, Velasco affirms “it was not a rebellion against the law but against the Jesuits” (page 66).

Guido Rodríguez Alcalá centered his last novel Velasco in one of those men who had marked the history of his country. The Colonel Bernardo de Velasco (was the first governor of the Misiones Province and since 1806 also Paraguay's governor) was the last representative named by Spain: in very unclear circumstances, Velasco was taken down in the night of May 14 and the morning of May 15 in the year 1811; and later included in the temporary government (supposedly independent) that was formed on May 16 of that year.

However, the most used resource is the irony: «not a single French philosopher had taken care of this business, so we don’t have a fiction such as the hatch about the Jesuit system» (page. 84). An irony commonly used by the author is the one against the first Paraguayan dictator: in the margin of this considerations, we need to emphasize that as in his previous work, the text Velasco has many quotes of real documents: Velasco’s peaces of letters (page. 49), notes sent to the authorities (pág. 55), Cabildo’s transactions (page. 62), parts of the report written by Governor Pinedo in 1775(pages. 108-109), rules of the government (page. 188).Some of this are useful for the character to be able to respond to multiple questions that are made in the attempt to understand what has happened. This is just a reflection of the author’s costumes.