Roque Dalton

Roque Dalton García (1935–1975) was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, and revolutionary, generally regarded as the central literary voice of mid-twentieth-century El Salvador. He was born in San Salvador, the illegitimate son of an American father from the Dalton brothers' frontier family in the United States and a Salvadoran nurse, and educated at a Jesuit secondary school in the capital.

He briefly studied law in Santiago, Chile, and at the University of El Salvador, where he became active in Marxist student politics and joined the Salvadoran Communist Party. He spent much of his adult life in exile after repeated arrests, living and writing in Mexico, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, and visited North Vietnam during the war there.

Dalton's literary output is varied and politically charged. His best-known books include the testimonial novel Miguel Mármol (1972), based on the life of a survivor of the 1932 matanza in El Salvador, the poetry collections Taberna y otros lugares (1969), which won the Casa de las Américas prize, and Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito (1974), and the posthumous experimental novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo.

In the early 1970s he returned clandestinely to El Salvador and joined the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP). On 10 May 1975, four days before his fortieth birthday, he was killed in San Salvador by members of his own organization following an internal political dispute, a killing later condemned by other Salvadoran left-wing groups.

Roque is a Spanish and Portuguese masculine given name derived from the medieval Latin Rocchus through the cult of Saint Roch of Montpellier; he carried the masculine form.