Fernando Vallejo's Heretic Reason and the Right to Happiness

The article examines the critique of Christianity in the work of Fernando Vallejo through the study of the author's heretic rationality and its manifestation in the depiction of mass media in the novel Our Lady of the Assassins (1994, trans. 2001). In light of the narrative El desbarrancadero (The Precipice, 2001) and the essay La puta de babilonia (The Whore of Babylon, 2007), one may appreciate how the media in the novel take over the role of social control that the religious icon gained internationally, under the papacy of Leo XIII, and in Colombia under the concordat between the State and the Holy See. Upon analyzing the way in which the essay describes this papacy, the article assesses its relevance for Colombian history within a global context and identifies the political-theological problem of the right to happiness as the substratum that motivates Vallejo's reflection about the relation between the international narcotics trade and the absence of constitutive civil and religious power at the local level.