Charras is the true story of Efraín “El Charras” Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government’s successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras’s death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his the governor of the Yucatán, Charras’s bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping—the chilling “you” whose point-of-view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974. Originally published in 1990 and translated into English now for the first time, Charras is a gripping portrait of the labor movement in 1970s Mexico. In rare detail, Zavala documents what the governing forces are willing to do to hang onto their power—and what happens when the people rise up and take what is theirs.