MIGUEL MÁRMOL: Los Sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador, by Roque Dalton. The Events of 1932 in El Salvador, by Roque Dalton.

This post will arrive at 1984, then continue back in time until it arrives at 1932. You will see why.

Cover is copied from 1987 English edition by Curbstone Press, 1987. Derechos © 2007 Roque Dalton. Derechos © 2007 Ocean Press y Ocean Sur.

 The story takes place in El Salvador, mostly in 1932.

Roque Dalton was a young poet, a leftist, who lived in a rightist country. Miguel Mármol was a cobbler who had lived and repaired shoes in the same country a generation earlier. Because of his union activities, he was sent before a government firing squad along with many of his fellows. They were all shot, and tumbled into the ditch. But Miguel Mármol, buried at the bottom of the pile of his friends, lived. With a couple of bullet wounds, he waited for dark, crawled out from under his dead and dying compatriots, and lived to tell the story.
     
     He told the story to the Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton. That story follows. It is 400+ pages.
Dalton and Marmol got together in 1966 in Prague and hammered out the details of this book. (FYI, I was there in Summer 1969, when my fellow students and I ran from Soviet tear gas in Wenceslas Square.)
Much more to the story, including photos that will be hard to look at...

 Remember December 1984? Ronald Reagan had just been elected president of the United States in the October election. My story goes back to that time. 

 Four women from the Catholic Church were on their way from the airport in San Salvador to do their work among the Salvadoran poor. Of course I had heard - we all had heard - of their being waylaid before they reached their destination: their vehicle was forced off the road, they were pulled out, raped, and murdered. Their names were Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel. ...{This post will continue as I find more information.} 

(New York Times article by Larry Rohter Apr 3, 1998.

  I chose to include this information for a very specific reason. But even then, you have to know the times, what else was going on at the time. You have to get specific.

     It was early December, 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Jimmy Carter was ending his one term as president. The story came my way by accident, you might say. In January 1985 (the month after the events described here), I was in southern Honduras. A small group of us, previously unknown to one another except by means of the "moccasin telegraph" - a loose but very active national network of American Indians - had been recruited by a Texas oilman named Maco Stewart, to go to southern Honduras (and ultimately to cross the Rio Coco into northern Nicaragua), to see for themselves how the Sandinistas then in power in Nicaragua were treating the Indians (Miskito, Sumo, and I think one other group {Rama?]) along the border.

    (A long version of this story is included in my first memoir, Rattlesnake Dreams.)

     I am not an Indian. I was born in Denver. Actually, I learned during and after what's described  here, from my aunt Ruth Metcalf (then married to another man whose name was, I think, Rex Ely) that I have some Cherokee blood from my dad's side of the family. Ruth sent me a copy of an old photo of Gatsie Helen Widders, my great grandmother. It's just a photocopy, on 8 1/2" X 11" note paper. That's all I have, but it's on the wall of my study here in Chia, Colombia. Gatsie's mother was full blood Cherokee.

     The group of real Indians decided to include me because I was vouched for by Chris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, a doctor who was in Viet Nam as Battalion Surgeon for 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. A man named Michel Joseph, who was from an Indian group from Santa Rosa Rancheria near Fresno, California, had contacted Chris DiMaio and asked him if he knew anyone who would like to accompany the group, and might have enough experience in journalism in difficult situations to justify being included. 

     Chris knew me pretty well, and though I wasn't an Indian (we found out later that I had some Cherokee in me, but we didn't know it at the time), recommended me. Chris's recommendation was good enough for Michael Joseph, so I was included with the four real Indians to make a 5-person group. We met in the Houston airport, I showed them the letter from Michael Joseph, and the 5 of us were on our way to Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

   This piece will come back to where we started - the four churchwomen who were raped and murdered along the road from the airport in San Salvador.