Dalton García, Roque (1935–1975)

Roque Dalton García (b. 14 May 1935; d. 10 May 1975), Salvadoran Marxist writer and activist. Born and educated in San Salvador, Dalton went to Chile to study law and there began his career as a poet, essayist, novelist, and biographer. Returning to El Salvador with strong leftist political leanings, he became part of the literary group known as the Committed Generation. His leftist views forced him into exile in 1961. After several years in Cuba, Dalton traveled extensively in Europe and became closely associated with the ideas of Che Guevara and Régis Debray in defense of the Cuban Revolution. After returning clandestinely to El Salvador, where he was the effective founder of the leftist Armed Forces of National Resistance (Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Nacio-nal), he was executed by members of the rival Revolutionary Army of the People (Ejército Revo-lucionario del Pueblo), from which his FARN had broken away, in San Salvador. In addition to his many poems and novels, Dalton wrote a biography, Miguel Mármol: Los sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador (1972).

See alsoEl Salvador .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roque Dalton, El Salvador (1963).

James Dunkerley, The Long War: Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador (1982).

Luis Gallegos Valdés, Panorama de la literatura salvadoreña del período precolombino a 1980 (1987), esp. pp. 342-355, and 429-431.

John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (1990), esp. pp. 115-141.

Additional Bibliography

Alvarenga, Luis. El ciervo perseguido: vida y obra de Roque Dalton. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 2002.

Iffland, James. Ensayos sobre la poesía revolucionaria de Centroamérica. San Jose: EDUCA, 1994.

Lara Martínez, Rafael. La tormenta entre las manos: ensayos polémicos sobre literatura salvadoreña. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 2000.

Lara Martínez, Rafael, and Dennis L. Seager, editors. Otros Roques: la poetica multiple de Roque Dalton. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999.

                                  Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.