Book Reviews

Lindo-Fuentes, Hector, Ching, Erik, and Lara-Martínez, Rafael A (2007) Remem

bering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the
Politics of Historical Memory, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque,
NM), xviii + 411 pp. $29.00 pbk.

In January 1932, several thousand poor peasants in western El Salvador rose up in

rebellion. Armed primarily with machetes, the rebels attacked about a dozen munici-
palities and launched assaults on army garrisons in three departmental capitals. They
succeeded in occupying several towns, where they burned and looted private homes,
government buildings and businesses. Within a few days, the Salvadoran government
regained control, and, in the two weeks that followed, army troops and local paramili-
tary killed between ten and 30,000 people. Historical collective memories of the events
of 1932 have served as political fodder for various groups on the political Left and
Right in El Salvador in recent history.
For this book, Lindo-Fuentes, Ching and Lara-Martínez examine the contested his-
torical memories of the 1932 uprising and massacre among Salvadorans, the factors
that influenced the memories and the ways in which different groups used these memo-
ries to legitimise their policies or actions in subsequent years. To develop their analysis,
the authors draw on narratives of journalists and other eyewitnesses, as well as docu-
ments from Salvadoran government archives and papers of the Salvadoran Communist
Party, many of which were unavailable to scholars until the end of the Cold War and
El Salvador’s Civil War. Additionally, the authors gained first-ever access to the hand-
written notes of Roque Dalton for his book Miguel Mármol (1972), a testimonial
detailing the events of 1932 as told by a Salvadoran Communist Party leader who
survived the massacre. The authors make it clear that their objective is not explaining

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American Studies
594 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 4
 Book Reviews

what really happened in 1932, but rather investigating the factors that led different
groups in El Salvador to accept particular versions of what happened in 1932.
Lindo-Fuentes, Ching and Lara-Martínez contend that, within the documentary
evidence, two distinct narratives existed to interpret the uprising and the government
response: communism and ethnicity. The ‘communist causality’ version of events in
1932 emphasised the role of the Salvadoran Communist Party in organising and lead-
ing the uprising, whereas the ethnicity narrative viewed the events in terms of local
social and economic conditions and referred to the rebels as ‘Indians’. Over time,
however, national and international events encouraged actors on both the Left and the
Right to interpret the events of 1932 through the prism of ‘communist causality.’ This
was especially true in the years leading up to the civil war.
On the political Right, ethnicity and ‘communist causality’ narratives existed simul-
taneously until the 1960s. In the 1940s and 1950s, the authors indicate, right-wing
explanations of the massacre were rooted in ‘discriminatory ideas about race and class’
(p. 219), as well as communist causality. Following the success of the Cuban Revolu-
tion in 1959, however, communist-causality came to dominate right-wing narratives
of the 1932 uprising and massacre. The Right recalled the uprising as communist
because this allowed them to ‘portray their forefathers as the historic defenders of the
nation, who fought back the barbaric threat of communism’ (pp. 7, 8) and legitimised
the government’s stance against popular protest in the 1960s and 1970s and the use
of death squads against so-called ‘communist’ insurgents.
On the political Left, the lessons of the 1932 uprising were a subject of significant
debate prior to the reunification of the Left in 1980. As this was a case of unsuccessful
uprising, there was significant internal debate among activists on the Left over why the
uprising failed. On the one hand were leftist intellectuals and activists who interpreted
the failure of the uprising as proof that either the Communist Party was not involved
in the uprising or that the material conditions were not ripe for armed revolution; thus,
the uprising was destined to fail. On the other hand were leftists who defended the
decision of the Party to engage in armed rebellion in 1932, and explained the failure
of the uprising in terms of minor tactical errors. It was not until the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the various leftist factions united under the banner of the Far-
abundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), that the Left coalesced around a
memory of 1932 rooted in ‘communist causality’. As the FMLN headed into armed
civil conflict in the 1980s, the authors contend, those on the political Left ‘portrayed
their conflict with the right … as a reenactment of 1932, in which poor masses in the
countryside followed the vanguard into battle’ (pp. 255, 256).
Lindo-Fuentes, Ching, and Lara-Martínez present a provocative analysis of histori-
cal memories of 1932 in El Salvador and provide solid archival data to support their
arguments. Additionally, the authors’ detailed analysis of Roque Dalton’s Miguel
Marmol likely will renew scholarly debates begun in the 1990s about testimonial literature
as a site of contested historical memories. The book does not break new ground in the
study of collective memory. Nonetheless, among Salvadorans, the research has already
stimulated new discussions of and thinking about the 1932 uprising and massacre,
which may help El Salvador’s political groupings understand better the diverse per-
spectives of one another. A nearly 100-page appendix, containing primary documents

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 4 595
 Book Reviews

not previously available in English, including some of Roque Dalton’s notes from his
1968 interview with Miguel Marmol, complements the book. Scholars who have a
particular interest in Salvadoran history or enjoy using primary documents to supple-
ment their course readings will find the appendix of great value. Although the impact
of the book on the scholarly community ultimately may be limited, its potential impact
on Salvadoran politics is enough to recommend this book.

Patricia L. Hipsher
Oklahoma State University

Reference
Dalton, R. (1987) (Trans. K. Rose and R. Schaaf) Miguel Marmol, Curbstone Press:
Willimantic.

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American Studies
596 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 4