Ultraleftists by Roque Dalton The pipiles who didn't understand the cross and more advanced culture and didn't want to bow down before the Crown of Spain and rose up in the mountains with weapons in their hands against the conquistador. Those who nourished the flame of native rebellion for 300 colonial years and died hunted in the mountains or by the vile garrot or on the gallows and refused to peaceably co-exist with the feudal lord in the bosom of estates and land allotments. Pedro Pablo Castillo and the communards of 1814 who expropriated guns from the San Salvador military authorities and aimed them at the oppressors of the people. On the other hand Matias Delgado and the illustrious landowners of 1821 were not ultraleftists because they won independence by peaceful means although Independence was most of all for themselves and the poor Central Americans remained down below exploited, humiliated, starved, deceived, and dependent Anastasio Aquino was because with huiscoyol lances and cannons of wood he incited the Nonualcos against the central government he didn't seize power because he didn't know he'd won the war after having invented the ambush and legislated like a Marxist on this side of the Lempa River and expropriated everything from the San Vicente rich who'd hidden their gold under the petticoats of Saint Joseph. Don Chico Morazan also was and at the Central American level at that. Gerardo Barrios almost didn't make it had it not occurred to him to lead the troops‬ into Nicaragua and fire lead at Walker's gringo filibusterers From that point there was a long period when Salvadoran revolutionaries quit being ultraleftists and became as decent as the bourgeoisie ultraleftism vanished before bourgeois conservatism's pressures along with bourgeois liberalism and the bourgeois constitution and bourgeois expropriation of the common land the enthronement of the bourgeois God Coffee more omnipotent with respect to the Republic than its symbol of wood and curls called nothing less than Savior of the World. Everything went along very well until that ultraleftist Farabundo Marti appeared leading an ultraleftist Salvadoran Communist Party which had a bunch of militant ultraleftists, including Feliciano Ama Timoteo Lue Chico Sanchez Vicente Tadeo Alfonso Zapata and Mario Luna, among others. They weren't able to be ultraleftists to the end because they didn't have the wherewithal and 30,000 of them were assassinated. In 1944 there was another epidemic of ultraleftism when even the military was infected and rose up on April 2nd against the tyrant Martinez with the ultraleftist assent of all the people. A national ultraleftist strike ended with the assassin regime dedicated to gunning down the April 2nd ultraleftists. One of them was so ultraleftist and uncompromising that even with one eye gone and crushed bones and testicles he told the priest who came to hear his confession that his spirit hadn't failed him, merely his body, Victor Manuel Marin was his name.