Elisabeth Wild

Elisabeth Wild’s rich biography spans the long twentieth century, beginning in Vienna, in a Jewish wine merchants’ family that managed to flee Nazism for Argentina. There she would make a living in textile design, marrying textile industrialist August Wild. It is where their daughter Vivian would be born. Due to a political climate determined by Juan Perón’s right-wing policies, the family moved to Basel in 1962. There Wild would run an antique shop. In 1996, she returned to Latin America with Vivian (Suter) to live in Panajachel, on Lake Atitlán. Here, despite the tranquil beauty of common living and working on the edge of a tropical forest, mother and daughter have faced natural disasters and witnessed human cruelty: hurricanes and mudslides damage their estate, and local narcos remain a threat to villagers and gringos alike. A.S.