Leila Guerriero’s tragic chronicle of 1990s Patagonia suicides republished
Anagrama republishes Guerriero’s contemporary classic; Two decades on, 'Los suicidas del fin del mundo' returns in a new edition that renews its stark portrait of despair of an oil town undone by economic upheaval.
More than 20 years after it was first published, Los suicidas del fin del mundo (“The Suicides of the End of the World”) has returned to bookshops in a new edition that confirms its status as a contemporary classic.
Originally released in September 2005, the book by Leila Guerriero (born in Junín, 1967) is now widely regarded as an essential Argentine crónica – narrative journalism written with literary ambition and depth.
Guerriero and publishers Anagrama have revised and updated the text for this reissue, incorporating fresh research and allowing it to speak directly to the present day. Argentina’s south is once again grappling with economic strain and social tension that echo the backdrop to the original tragedy.
The book began with a series of deaths that shook the small oil town of Las Heras, in northern Santa Cruz Province. Between 1997 and 1999, at least 12 young people – and 22 residents in total – took their own lives in the windswept, isolated community.
There were no official lists or statistics documenting the tragedy. Only handwritten notes kept by a local gravedigger, and the fragmented memory of a stunned town, bore witness to what had happened.
Guerriero travelled there in 2002 in search of answers. She drove along dirt and paved roads, knocked on doors and interviewed mothers, siblings, partners, friends, teachers, hairdressers and sex workers.
For months she listened to conflicting accounts: rumours of cults, superstitions linked to indigenous burial grounds, theories of social contagion. Yet she also grasped the weight of a harsh economic transformation that had reshaped the town and eroded hopes for the future.
Las Heras had grown alongside the railways and the state oil industry. The Los Perales field helped turn Santa Cruz into one of Argentina’s principal oil basins.
But the privatisation of YPF beginning in 1991, under then-president Carlos Menem, triggered mass lay-offs and a brutal reconfiguration of local life. YPF’s workforce shrank from around 50,000 employees nationwide to roughly 5,000 over the decade.
By 1995, unemployment in Las Heras had climbed to 20 percent and thousands left. Promised prosperity gave way to scarcity and fragmentation.
Against that backdrop, the deaths of so many young people took on a collective dimension. The book offers no neat conclusions.
“The data speaks but never explains,” Guerriero wrote. Instead, she constructs an almost choral narrative in which the voices of the bereaved – “those left alone, in broken pieces” – trace a human map marked by loss, silence and the limits of understanding.
With restrained, precise prose far removed from sensationalism, Guerriero turns the landscape itself into a character: the relentless wind, the dust, the endless night. The setting becomes both backdrop and metaphor for a community cut adrift.
The work cemented Guerriero’s place among the leading voices of Spanish-language narrative journalism. With Los suicidas del fin del mundo, she forged the method that would define her later books: rigorous reporting, literary structure and a commitment to complexity over easy explanation.
A contributor to outlets including La Nación, Rolling Stone and Granta, she is now the author of books such as Plano americano, Zona de obras, Opus Gelber, La dificultad del fantasma and La llamada.
This new edition from Anagrama not only restores a seminal text but repositions it in a present that, again, highlights the fragility of regional economies dependent on extractive industries. Oil-producing Patagonia – long marked by labour conflict and cyclical downturns – emerges as a mirror of a country caught in recurring structural strain.
Two decades on, Los suicidas del fin del mundo remains an unsettling reminder that behind statistics and headlines lie human stories that resist simple answers. Guerriero does not solve the enigma of Las Heras; she preserves it. And in listening, documenting and refusing to simplify, she transformed reportage into enduring literature.