Conclusion
Operación Bolívar, written by Edgar Clement, allows us to reinterpret and rethink the imaginary of angels and nahuals in light of the violent and abrupt changes in the sociopolitical system in Mexico at the end of the 1990s. The way these entities are described in the pages of the graphic novel masks a transnational present where the entry of neoliberalism, North American interventionism, and the flourishing presence of drug trafficking are giving a harsh twist to the reality of millions of Mexicans. If in the past, the nahual and the angel served as a bridge between the earthly and the beyond, if the presence of both satisfied a spiritual need for connection with the divine both in pre-Columbian communities and in colonial society; now, within a world saturated by the free market, brutal capitalism, and profit, it only obeys and fulfils the needs of transnational and global consumer networks that exploit the work of the nahuals and monetize the bodies of the angels. Because, as Édgar Clément shows in his work, society and culture have been forged on the hands of the nahuals and the bones of the angels.
We should, then, think about what other supernatural beings from Mexican folklore have suffered the same fate, what other entities from the Mesoamerican pantheon are re-emerging in the era of neoliberalism to reveal the vicissitudes of contemporary Mexico. Perhaps Clément himself in Los perros salvajes (2011) expands the universe begun in Operación Bolívar to express part of the malaise of hyperviolence in the country. And the fact is that, in the face of the rubble and deaths left by the war against drug trafficking that began during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006–12), one could now reinterpret the battle between nahuals and angels as a devaluation of human life due to a world whose primary deity is consumption and profit. Emptied of meaning, how many of these other supernatural beings have been exploited and commodified without regard for the ethical or moral weight that they carry? How many more deaths will pile up due to neoliberalism throughout the country? The angel and the nahual, as part of the cultural imaginary, must therefore confront the pile of rubble left over from a history of struggles and ideological confrontations throughout the evolution of Mexican society, only to meet again in a transnational context where they can resist and fight.