"El tercer país" de Karina Sainz Borgo: mujeres tránsfugas en la frontera
Karina Sainz Borgo’s El Tercer País: Fugitive Women at the Border

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the figurations of the female defector in the novel El Tercer País (2021) by Venezuelan Karina Sainz Borgo. To this end, fictional relationships and mechanisms are established, fed to a great extent by the contemporary phenomenon of the “Venezuelan diaspora”. Right in the center of this forced displacement is Angustias Romero, who flees towards an impossible border, namely a “third country”, between the borders of two imagined and contradictory regions. A hostile region from where she is expelled due to “the plague of oblivion” and another incongruous one that makes it difficult for them to remain in a transitory asylum interrupted by violence. However, Angustias will find in Visitación Salazar a help and a model of political dissidence with the establishment and defense of her necropolis. These conscious and modern outcasts (Arendt 2009), these turncoats complete their novel action based on the metaphor of that illegal cemetery, which is inhabited by all those who while fleeing could not reach the place of hope, as Rulfo’s character would say. In that space ruled by heteropatriarchal criminality, the degraded situation of that defector, with her double status of pariah, i.e. being a woman and politically excluded, would turn her, in the best-case scenario, into a subject impelled by solidarity– into an anarchist survivor who cries out for the dignity and the minimum rights of his own life.

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