This paper proposes a critical approach to the novel Hablar con los perros (2011) by Wilmer Urrelo Zárate focused on the relationship that the text raises between the Chaco War, the city space and the problem of historical memory as a field of dispute. From the crossing of the mythic-symbolic and historical, and a complex web of voices, times and narrative sequences, the narrative highlights the effects that the war has produced in society, and confronts the heroic vision supported by the official memory, whose reverse is the concealment of an atrocious experience.