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Because of one priest’s corruption (and another priest’s refusal to absolve the corrupt priest), the dead of an entire town are stuck in purgatory. Pedro Páramo is a story, among other things, about bureaucracy, about rules, about murmuring ghosts who get stuck in purgatory because of the corrupt behavior of authoritative bodies. Ethical corruption or perhaps divine corruption which in this case leads to bureaucratic corruption. One wonders about the value of these distinctions.

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