Manlio argueta un dia en la vida

What we must always insist on is the rights of the poor. And to respect the landowner was to conform to his whimsy. If there were no beans to eat after working on the plantation, it was because the landowner couldn't manage, the landowner was suffering losses. If there were no hammocks to sleep in, it was because the harvest had not left the landowner enough time to provide them.

And there we were without food, waiting for the afternoon or the evening to go home to eat, a whole day without eating; or we'd go to sleep under the pepetos trees in the coffee fields. The torture they put us through: anxiety and restlessness. Who had made the rich so evil? The whole night we talked like this, both of us wrapped up in the same Guatemalan blanket.

Mike Prewitt. Started off very good but got very confusing near the end. This novel was pretty brutal and graphic so it might not be for everyone. Again I would never be interested in this but I had to read it for class. Jim Fonseca. Following elections inin which the government refused to seat elected members of the Communist Party, Salvadoran peasants organized a popular insurrection to demand better living and working conditions.

Most of these peasants were part of the indigenous population. To avoid further persecution and murder by government troops, the indigenous people began to hide all outward signs of their identity. La Matanza and the military rule which followed set the political tone of the next several decades in El Salvador, as military dictators followed one another into the s.

The characters we hear from are all women. Only when they are sick do they cry. Parasites eat them from the inside, and the children defend themselves by sleeping. Lucky that they have not been awakened. God is great. When death comes, it alerts you before; it does not come all of a sudden. It always makes a loud noise as if it were riding a horse galloping on a path of stone, its hooves clattering on the stones, miserable death.

Manlio argueta un dia en la vida: La historia entera ocurre

It makes fun of us because it knows we cannot restrain its runaway horses. It looks for us and finds us always poor. There are problems in life. A child is sick, the beans have burned. A son wounded or dead. We are always losing in this game.

Manlio argueta un dia en la vida: One Day of Life

The main characters are peasants with pigs, chickens, eggs and corn. Men are frequently absent for days on distant coffee and pineapple plantations. Kids drop out of elementary school to start working, many at age 7. She particularly thinks of her oldest son who was killed by the civil guards. People are active in demonstrations trying to form agricultural cooperatives.

The demonstrations are broken up by police and the guards always with violence and killings. The men start sleeping out in the hills but then the guards start arriving to beat and mistreat the women so that the men will come home so that they can be arrested. The guards torture and behead people. In one scene an entire village is burned to the ground.

In another scene the police and guards massacre a busload of mostly kids who had gone to a demonstration in San Salvador, the capital. The story is based on real events.

Manlio argueta un dia en la vida: One Day of Life is

In addition to politics and rebellion, a lot of the story follows the evolution of the Catholic Church and the arrival or transformation of priests who are activists. Over time the priests become activists and try to help peasants in THIS life as well as the next one. The guards turn on the priests. The paragraphs that follow contain additional historical information compiled and somewhat edited by me from Wikipedia.

Human rights violations, particularly the kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected FMLN sympathizers by state security forces and paramilitary death squads — were pervasive. Elections were rigged so that right-wing leaders won. On 28 Februarya crowd of political demonstrators gathered in downtown San Salvador to protest the electoral fraud. Security forces arrived on the scene and opened fire, resulting in a massacre as they indiscriminately killed demonstrators and bystanders alike.

Estimates of the number of civilians killed range between and 1, One month later the Archbishop was assassinated while celebrating Mass. At his funeral a week later, government-sponsored snipers in the National Palace and on the periphery of the Gerardo Barrios Plaza were responsible for the shooting of 42 mourners. The National Guard and the newly reorganized paramilitary ORDEN, with the cooperation of the Military of Honduras, carried out a massacre at the Sumpul River on 14 Mayin which an estimated civilians were killed, mostly women and children.

Escaping villagers were prevented from crossing the river by the Honduran armed forces, and then killed by Salvadoran troops who shot them in the river in cold blood. On 2 Decembermembers of the Salvadoran National Guard were suspected of raping and murdering four American Catholic nuns. This incident received a lot of attention in the US press and an investigation by the military junta was demanded.

White said that he could find no evidence the junta was "conducting a serious investigation". White was dismissed from the foreign service by the Reagan administration after he had refused to participate in a coverup of the Salvadoran military's responsibility for the murders at the behest of Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The field commander said they were under orders to kill everyone, including the children, who he asserted would just grow up to become guerrillas if they let them live.

Although guerrilla activity has largely ended, urban and rural gang violence related to drug lords has replaced it and El Salvador remains a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. There are El Salvadorans who have crossed through Mexico with great hardship and are standing along the Rio Grande right now waiting to get across.

The author, b. Only a few are available in English. One Day of Life appears to be his best-known work in both English and Spanish. Like so many Latin American authors, his writings got him in trouble with the right-wing dictators and military men, so he lived in exile in Costa Rica from to Top photo from archive. I was not expecting to like this as much as I did.

One Day of Life is not the sort of political piece I was expecting, but that's not to say it isn't deeply political. Argueta tells his story almost exclusively from the point of view of poor, largely uneducated women, touching on a lot of issues of racial discrimination poor Indians versus manlio argueta un dia ens la vidaas well as the way in which war uniquely hurts women rape and violence featuring not insignificantly.

The politics are constantly present, but the ideologies take second stage to the more human side-effects of violent, militant authorities. It tells a powerful tale. The writing shifts tone according to the POV which weaves around one primary narrativegoing from a simple sort of poetry to a rougher style. Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.

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Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. References [ edit ]. Western Michigan University. Archived from the original on July 15, Retrieved December 12, One Day of Life. Vintage International. ISBN External links [ edit ]. Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Articles containing Spanish-language text.