Echeverria’s Slaughterhouse is a text that’s very hard to read through and not feel anything. It’s a text that’s made to evoke emotion in the reader, mostly due to all the grotesque images that we’re given but also all the hate and intolerance that you can feel flowing through the church’s depiction as well as the Federation.

The part that struck me most wasn’t the preamble nor the description of the slaughtering of the steer and bull, it was the killing of the “Unitarian”. Echeverria portrays the butchers/executioners as, I would say, victims of demagoguery. They hate Unitarians because the Restorer ordered it and that’s the only argument they give when they are confronting the sole Unitarian. The sentence that stood out to me the most was “The free men are made to wear one by force.” because it pretty much describes every “free” country in the world. In the US, for example, you’re an adult when you’re 18 but you’re not free to drink a beer, that would be a crime; if you’re caught doing it, the policeman will never give you an explanation as to why it’s wrong, he’ll just say that “it’s the law”.

When Echeverria talked about Lent in the beginning I could really identify to it because in El Salvador, even if I am not a religious person, I have been denied meat at a restaurant because it was that time of year. People really want to impose their views on others and that’s what I don’t like about the way the Catholic Church operates in Latin America. I never try to tell people not to believe in God, I have never been told by a Muslim or a Jew that my religion is wrong but yet in Latin America there’s lots of catholic people who will insist on converting you because it’s what they have been told all their life is the right thing to do. The Restorer in this text is the typical example of someone who controls society based on fear, like George W. Bush. I don’t like these kinds of people.