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  • Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory
  • Robert H. Holden
Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory. By Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara-Martínez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 411. Illustrations. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 paper.

Since its publication in 1972, Roque Dalton’s Miguel Mármol has been heavily consulted by historians of El Salvador’s 1932 peasant uprising and the retaliatory massacre (la matanza) by state security forces that followed. In what is now widely considered to be the cardinal event in the country’s modern history, the insurgents may have taken up to 100 lives in three days, while government and allied forces killed at least 10,000 people over the next two weeks. Dalton’s book purports to be a transcript of his interviews with the eponymous rebel who survived the massacre.

Two arguments control Remembering a Massacre. First, that Dalton distorted, fabricated, and suppressed information about the uprising and the massacre, a finding that, if true, casts considerable doubt on the interpretations of the historians who have cited Miguel Marmol as a source. Most telling, perhaps, is the authors’ discovery that Dalton managed to spin more than 500 book pages of a first-person account from 61 sheets of “quite convoluted” handwritten interview notes (p. 146). The second argument is their interpretation of Dalton’s deception. Did he lie? No, for only “knee-jerk conservative opponents of Dalton and his politics” would likely say that (p. 180). Instead, Dalton merely crafted a “narrative reconfiguration” of the 1932 events in order to influence a contemporary debate about revolutionary strategy that divided the tiny class of Salvadoran intellectuals who considered themselves, like Dalton, to be the vanguard of a Marxist revolution. “We are not saying [End Page 139] that Dalton lied, or that he purposefully misconstrued Mármol’s intended meaning, although that remains a possibility” (p. 180).

The authors’ tortured verdict on the veracity of Miguel Mármol epitomizes the two-sided character of this book. On the one hand, Remembering a Massacre contributes momentously to our understanding of the uprising and the massacre by unveiling a key source as agitprop. On the one hand, the single indisputable conclusion of their research is that Dalton cared more about winning a contemporary debate over revolutionary strategy—“fight now or wait?”—than in discovering and conveying the truth about 1932. On the other hand, even as they disclose Dalton’s indifference to historical truth, the authors wind up reproducing his politics-first attitude. Obviously sympathetic to the political left as it reconfigured itself ideologically over time, and uniformly hostile to conservative and anti-communist voices (only they appear to merit such descriptors as “rabid” and “hysterical”), the authors clearly wish to preempt any possibility that their findings about Dalton might be misconstrued as rightwing propaganda. If none but “conservative opponents” could think that Dalton lied, a euphemism must be found, hence “narrative reconfiguration.”

The core theoretical premise of the book is the truism that “present exigencies affect historical interpretation” (p. 10) and the “main goal” is to prove it by telling how 1932 has been remembered and “what factors determined those memories” (p. 12). Convincingly, they show how such key interpretative questions about 1932 as the role of the Communist Party of El Salvador in the uprising, the party’s reach among the rural masses, the relative weight of ethnic identity, and so on, were in turn evaluated by Dalton (and other political activists of both right and left) according to what each thought best for El Salvador in the 1960s and 70s. Along the way, the authors mount two arguments of their own about the causes of the 1932 uprising: first, that the Communist Party had little to do with it, and second, that ethnicity propelled it.

Nevertheless, considering Dalton’s career as a revolutionary, are the authors not pushing an open door? By the time he was 21 in 1957, Dalton had left behind his occasional law studies, established...

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