Browse Items (18 total)

López Vallecillos and the novelist Manlio Argueta founded La Pájara Pinta in January 1966 as a literary newspaper, but it soon took a more political bent as El Salvador's society grew more polarized in the face of state repression of unions and…

This is the document issued by Nicaragua's Central Migration Office to López Vallecillos in 1961 certifying that he had been granted asylum. López Vallecillos had been expelled from El Salvador after an arrest for supposed political crimes, during a…

Sergio Ramírez Mercado is one of Latin America's most important novelists. Born in 1942, he served as vice president in the first Sandinista government in his native Nicaragua in the 1980s, an experience he described in his memoir Adios muchachos…

Salvador Cayetano Carpio (1918-1983) was a veteran union organizer and leader of the Salvadoran Communist Party who, in 1970, left the party to create an anti-government guerrilla group that became known as the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL). The…

Roberto Armijo (1937-1997) was one of the Generación Comprometida (Committed Generation) poets who, starting in the late 1950s, sought to renew El Salvador's modes of literary expression and raise its political consciousness. Like most of the…

In this letter, López Vallecillos describes the wave of jingoism that has gripped El Salvador during its short war with Honduras in 1969. The war was provoked by Honduras's decision to expel thousands of Salvadorans who were living there, many of…

In this letter to the Salvadoran novelist and poet Claribel Alegría, addressed to her on Mallorca in Spain, López Vallecillos praises the recently published novel she wrote with her husband Darwin Flakoll, Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco). The…

Cea, one of the poets of La Pájara Pinta, is visiting Chile and offers a vivid description of life under the Salvador Allende government in this letter written a few months before the Pinochet coup.

Jorge Arias Gómez (1923-2002) was a leader of the Salvadoran Communist Party, a prominent law professor at the University of El Salvador and a friend of many poets and writers. In this letter, he complains to López Vallecillos about "ultra-leftists"…

Fabio Castillo, former rector of El Salvador's national university, has been driven into exile in Nicaragua after the university was invaded and occupied by the army on order of the military government in 1972. The military believed the campus was a…