Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, novelist, historian and essayist. Almost as famous for his radical political activism as for his challenging, genre-bending literary works, Dalton is for many people the quintessential Latin American revolutionary poet.
He was a central figure among the Salvadoran literary group known as the Committed Generation that emerged in the 1950s. This group of writers grew up under the repressive regime of the fascist General Maximiliano Martínez, whose twelve-year dictatorship was infamously inaugurated with the brutal suppression of a peasant uprising that resulted in the massacre of between 10,000 and 40,000 peasants. Profoundly anti-democratic, the Martínez government banned all political opposition, censored the media and implemented an oppressive
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Citation: Knight, James. "Roque Dalton García". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 January 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12873, accessed 21 November 2024.]
