In New Book, Slain Poet Again Speaks to His Countrymen

SAN SALVADOR — More than two decades after his death, Roque Dalton, one of El Salvador’s best-known poets and revolutionaries, is once again calling his countrymen’s attention to the violence and poverty that caused a 12-year civil war--and which still exist.

“The Testimony,” a collection of poems and essays that Dalton wrote from exile in the early 1960s, has been published for the first time here by the Central America University Press as part of a long-term project to make all of his work available in his own country.

“If you wish, I will be the witness,” Dalton wrote in the introductory poem to a book that tells of injustices, beginning with the arrival of El Salvador’s 16th-century conqueror, Pedro de Alvarado.

The publication has become a reminder of the reasons behind the war and a rebuke to postwar Salvadoran society, according to its publisher. “In the deepest sense, the situation that Roque Dalton wrote about has not changed,” said Rodolfo Cardenal, vice rector in charge of university publications.

During his lifetime, much of Dalton’s poetic testimony was banned in El Salvador because of its leftist content. He was frequently arrested. This particular collection was written in the years immediately following one of Dalton’s legendary narrow escapes: The government that had condemned him to death fell in a coup days before his scheduled execution.

The execution he did not escape--a sentence imposed by his own comrades on May 10, 1975, four days before his 40th birthday--still hangs heavily over the Salvadoran left. He was accused, remarkably, of being a spy for both the Cubans and the CIA. The accusations were based on concocted evidence, former guerrillas have since admitted.

In retrospect, Dalton’s bohemian lifestyle and lack of discipline irritated other Salvadoran revolutionaries. “El Salvador is a very serious country,” Dalton noted in a short essay, “Pretending.”

Joaquin Villalobos, a member of the “tribunal” that sentenced Dalton and now chairman of a minor left-wing party, has said that killing him “was a tremendous error.”

Dalton’s body was tossed in a notorious trash dump where right-wing death squads later discarded thousands of victims. In an eerie foreshadowing, Dalton wrote in the poem “The Face-Down Prince”: “Three days later, they found me dead, surrounded by dead birds of prey.”

Actually, the disposal of the poet’s body was kept secret for 19 years.

“It is a very important point of reference for the extremes that violence can reach, that political differences can only be resolved by murder,” Cardenal said.

Dalton was killed because dissent and critical analyses were not tolerated, family members have said. Observers note that is an important reminder to the Salvadoran left.

By showing tolerance, leftist parties were able to form alliances in the last elections, allowing them to win the mayoralty of this capital and create a substantial bloc in the National Assembly, analysts said.

Alliances--and tolerance--have proved critical to the left’s political success. Still, the biggest test of the left’s ability to sustain alliances is coming up as politicians already begin to jockey for position in next year’s presidential election.

More disturbing, Cardenal said, is that even with the left sharing political power, many of the problems that Dalton wrote about and that guerrillas took up arms in 1980 to combat still exist, five years after the war ended.

“The problem of poverty is worse now than it was before the war,” he said. “Violence, machismo, the repression of women have gotten worse.”

“In my country, there is not enough crime,” Dalton wrote in a brief, mocking essay titled “A Plan,” which outlines a supposed project to increase crime in El Salvador.

Since then, El Salvador has surpassed Colombia in recording the highest homicide rate in the Americas, according to a World Bank study. Last year, 140 of every 100,000 Salvadorans were murdered--a rate matched only by South Africa. “His work still has resonance because he captured the reality of El Salvador,” Cardenal said. “That is what makes a poet great.”