BOOK REVIEW: REMEMBERING A MASSACRE IN EL SALVADOR - The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory

ways of remembrance and their effects in a country's political life 

REMEMBERING A MASSACRE IN EL SALVADOR - The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory by Hector Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara-Martinez. U. of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM; unmpress.com; asutton@unm.edu 800-249-7141. 2007. 411+xviii pages. $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8263-3604-0. appendix, notes, bibliography, index.

   Roque Dalton met Miguel Marmol in Prague in 1966. Marmol had survived a firing squad in 1930 after being arrested along with 18 other Communists suspected of organizing the rebellion of poor peasants in western El Salvador. Over ten thousand peasants were killed by the El Salvadoran military in putting down the uprising. One of the persons killed by the military was Farabundo Marti. A later group of rebel guerillas in El Salvador named itself after him. One of the government death squads during the civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s named itself after the general who was president in 1932 directing the brutal reaction to the rebellion which became known as "Matanza," the massacre.

   The three authors on university faculties investigate the development, use, and effects of political symbols in the historical events of El Salvador. The military which had seized power in El Salvador only two months before the uprising held on to its power for another fifty years. After the journalist and poet Dalton wrote a book on Marmol from a series on interviews, Marmol, along with the executed Marti, became a symbolic focal point for the domestic and the international opposition to the tyrannical military rule in El Salvador. Dalton's 500-page work on Marmol first published in Costa Rico in 1972 was "one of the earliest examples of testimonial literature, a genre of international proportions that emerged primarily out of Latin America during the civil conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s." Parts of Dalton's book based on the Marmol interviews, other writings of Dalton's, and documents from other authors and sources are recorded in the appendix of about 100 pages.

    The work is not basically one of historical fact-finding. For the facts of the Matanza are well-known, and are not disputed by either side of the long-running civil conflict in El Salvador. The authors interest is how each side came to view the 1932 insurrection as it did. Each side developed opposing interpretations; which interpretations were rationales and justifications for its actions during the long conflict. The anti-government forces of the Communists and others found inspiration and encouragement in Marmol's story as written by Dalton. This especially calls for attention since it is not the "official" record. The government forces would as soon have had the rebellion and massacre covered up and forgotten about. But the memory was kept alive by survivors and strengthened years later when Marmol's memoir written by Dalton was published. Though the two met by chance in Prague, as these coauthors show, the resulting memoir along with the memory of the deadly events which had been kept mostly in silence played a key role in eventually ending El Salvador's military dictatorship.