Ana Margarita Gasteazoro Was a Proud Salvadoran Class Traitor
The wealthy young Salvadoran Ana Margarita Gasteazoro decided to give up her privileges for struggle against a far-right dictatorship — leading to her jailing and torture. That dictatorship is gone today, but El Salvador’s undemocratic crackdowns are not.
FMLN rebels hold a meeting with townspeople in the northern Amazon area of El Salvador on January 1, 1986. (Cindy Karp / Getty Images)
Tell Mother I’m in Paradise was a long time coming. The product of interviews conducted from exile in Costa Rica between 1987 and 1992, the publication of Salvadoran political prisoner Ana Margarita Gasteazoro’s extraordinary life story was tabled following her untimely death from breast cancer in 1993. Three decades later, interviewers and editors Judy Blankenship and Andrew Wilson secured the family’s permission to share her story with the world. It was worth the wait.
Gasteazoro’s riveting account tells the story of an unlikely revolutionary who turned against her class to join the national liberation movement that fought the US-backed military dictatorship to a draw after twelve years of civil war. Her narrative is at once harrowing and disarming, insightful and inspiring. Published as an authoritarian government in El Salvador has revived the practices of political persecution and extrajudicial detention, the book is a timely reminder of the strategies deployed by a previous generation of radicals against repression.
From Reform to Revolution
As historian Erik Ching notes in his introduction, the book doesn’t quite conform to the typical Latin American militant genre of testimonio. This is because Gasteazoro is hardly a subaltern representative of a disadvantaged class. Even so, the protagonist’s revolutionary commitments appear to render her narrative suspect to the publisher, such that Ching is recruited to confirm its veracity. This endorsement feels unnecessary, insulting even, but he assumes the task gracefully enough and provides key historical context for the civil war.
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