"Back in San Salvador... aware that the police were looking for him again, Dalton broke the rules of life underground and, as he put it... ‘exercised my right to go out and drink a beer’. The police found him on a bar stool and ‘disappeared’ him... Dalton... was interrogated by a CIA agent. The military planned to kill him, the American told him, but he had come to offer him a way out. ‘It won’t be just any life...but a life with all the possibilities... where we have every resource available, in France, in Chile, in England. You should live like a writer, like a scholar, not like a criminal. Why die now, like a fool?’ Dalton wasn’t swayed, and after several nights the American tried a final ruse. The CIA, he promised, would use its operatives in the Salvadoran Communist Party to spread the word that Dalton had co-operated. ‘We’ll tell them that before dying you tried to save your skin... You won’t go down in history as a hero but as a traitor.’ Dalton was shaken, but he didn’t talk..."
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Roque Dalton
Roque Antonio Dalton García (San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 – Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975), born Roque Antonio García, better known as Roque Dalton, was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, communist activist, and intellectual.
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