Tyrant Memory – a political novel about El Salvador

From the title of the book, I expected something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The General in his Labyrinth” in which Bolívar's life is brought out through the narrative of his memories. No.. the memory in Moya’s novel is that of Haydée Aragon, a simple and innocent housewife who has no political, literary or intellectual interests. She is just another victim of  the tyrannical rule of a military dictator of El Salvador. She starts recording her memory as a diary just to pass time and make use of the 'beautiful notebook' she had impulsively bought during a shopping in Brussels. 

Haydée spends her time mostly in Fiesta, Canasta and Siesta, typical of her upper class. She goes for coffee, cakes and gossip with other matrons like Doña Teresita, Doña Angelita and Doña Rosita. She laughs and cries with the dialogues of characters in the radio soap operas. She is a pious soul who would not miss a single mass at the local church. She is a valuable client at the neighbourhood beauty salon. She goes for extra make ups before visiting her husband in jail in order to make him feel good. Since she has live-in maid and cook, there is virtually no work at home, except trying out some exotic recipes. The family chauffeur drives her around. Wherever she goes, she is recognized and respected because of the prestige of her family. 

The quiet and predictable routine of Haydée goes for a toss when her husband Pericles Aragaon is detained by the country’s tyrant for subversive writings. Her visits to him in the jail awaken her to the political realities. She gets to meet the families of other political detainees some of whom are tortured and executed. Her husband has been spared since he had earlier served as secretary of the tyrant and later as his ambassador to Belgium. But when the dictator starts becoming more intolerable, Pericles resigns his post and returns to the country to become a left wing journalist writing against the dictatorship.

Haydee’s elder son Clemen is a broadcast journalist in a radio station. He is in the forefront cheerleading a coup against the dictator. But when the coup fails, his name enters the execution list and he is on the run. Her second son in high school is also drawn into student agitations against the government. Her daughter is in Costa Rica married to a communist leader.

Haydee’s father is a coffee baron. He and his oligarchic friends get fed up with the oppression of the dictator and his greedy tax increases and turn against him. Her father-in-law is a colonel and governor of a province and is loyal to the president. 

Her daughter-in-law takes to alcohol and a colonel as lover when her husband is in hiding. The colonel is in charge of tracking down the antigovernment activists.

Many of Haydee’s relatives and friends become victims of the dictatorship. Some are in jail, some in hiding and others are executed.  On the other hand, there are a few who support the dictator and even become informers. The society is polarized and people lose trust in each other. The antigovernment relatives do not attend social events which have the presence of pro-government guests.

Surrounded by these happenings around her, Haydee is naturally and inevitably driven to politics. She joins the protest movements and distributes copies of political manifesto which she hides inside her bra and stockings. She helps with the distribution of money to those on strikes protesting against the tyranny.

  

The general who is the dictator of the country is called as Warlock (El Brujo) because of his eccentric beliefs in occult, reincarnation, vegetarianism and theosophy. According to him "it is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever." The character is based on the real life story of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez who was the dictator of El Salvador in the period 1935-44. 

Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of the novel, was born in Honduras but brought up in El Salvador. His mother was Honduran and father Salvadorean. He has written several short stories and novels besides journalistic articles covering the civil wars of Central America. Some of his writings became controversial and he had to flee El Salvador. He has been living in exile in US after having lived in Mexico for many years. His exile experience in Mexico is brought out in his other novel  “The dream to return”. I enjoyed reading this one too. 

Moya, the author

The tyranny portrayed in “ Tyrant Memory” is mild and much less tragic in comparison to the shock I felt in another Salvadorean writer Mario Bencastro’s novel “A shot in the Cathedral”. 

In “Tyrant Memory”, the dictator leaves the presidency when the protests and strikes paralyse the country. He goes into exile as in reality in 1944 when President Martinez fled. The lack of US support was a decisive factor in the despot’s exit.

But the dictatorship portrayed in “A shot in the Cathedral” is vicious and brutal. The reason for this is simple. President Reagan supported the Salvadorean dictatorship in the eighties with arms and aid in the name of his anticommunist war. The US redoubled its support to the Salvadorian dictatorship to prevent "another Nicaragua" after the victory of Sandinista revolution in 1979 in Nicaragua. 

The decade of 1980s is known as the Lost Decade in Latin America because of the loss of economic growth caused by the neoliberalistic policies imposed on the region by the Washington DC-Wall Street combine. But the Central American countries lost much more than GDP growth. They lost hundreds of thousands of people in the proxy wars imposed on them from Washington DC.

The small Central American and Caribbean countries get hit by seasonal hurricanes from time to time. But the wind blowing from Washington DC could be more devastating and deadly for them.