Miguel Marmol devoted his life to organising El Salvador's poor, narrowly escaping capture and death several times for his political activities. He was a leading participant in the failed peasant uprising of January 1932, which became known as La Matanza (The Massacre) after the army killed tens of thousands of people. In 1966 poet Roque Dalton interviewed Marmol in Prague over several weeks, producing this remarkable first-person account of his life and a compelling personal history of El Salvador.