The president of my country
for the moment is called Colonel Fidel Sánchez Hernández
but General Somoza, president of Nicaragua,
is also the president of my country.
And General Stroessner, president of Paraguay,
is also kind of the president of my country, though not
as much as the president of Honduras is, I mean
General López Arellano, and more so than the president of Haiti,
Monsieur Duvalier.
And the president of the United States is more president of my country
than is the president of my country,
he who, as I mentioned, for the moment,
is called Colonel Fidel Sánchez Hernández.
Roque Dalton, A Salvadoran Revolutionary poet, wrote against Latin-American dictatorships and U.S. Neocolonialism, a relationship which, cost the El Salvadorans the lives of some 200,000 of its citizens.
In the summer of 1965, he returned to El Salvador to continue his political work. Two months after his arrival, he was arrested, tortured, and again sentenced to execution; however, he escaped after an earthquake damaged his cell wall. He returned to Cuba, and a few months later, the Communist Party sent him to Prague as a correspondent for The International Review: Problems of Peace and Socialism.In 1969 his book Taberna y otros lugares (“Tavern and Other Places”), reflecting his long stay in Prague, won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize. In 1975, a military faction of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) accused him of trying to divide their organization and condemned him to death. Dalton was executed on May 10, 1975, four days before his fortieth birthday.
