Tell Mother I'm in Paradise: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador

by Ana Margarita Gasteazoro, Judy Blankenship (Editor), Andrew Wilson (Editor), Erik Ching (Introduction)

Overview

The life and times of Ana Margarita Gasteazoro: political activist, clandestine operative, and prisoner of conscience
 
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro (1950-1993) was a Salvadoran opposition activist and renowned Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise:Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador recounts her extraordinary life story. From a privileged Catholic upbringing, with time spent studying and working abroad, Ana Margarita first became a member of the legal political opposition in the late 1970s and later a clandestine operative at work against the brutal military junta.

Gasteazoro recounts her early rebellion against the strictures of conservative upper-class Salvadoran society. She spoke perfect English and discovered a talent for organizing in administrative jobs abroad and at home. As the civil war progressed, she quickly became a valued figure in the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a social democratic party, often representing it at international meetings. Against the backdrop of massive social oppression and the “disappearances” of thousands of opposition members, Gasteazoro began a double life as an operative in a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Multitalented and energetic, she organized safe houses for fellow activists, transported weapons and equipment, wrote scripts for an underground radio station, and produced an award-winning documentary film. But the toll on her family life and personal relationships was heavy.

Ana Margarita was disappeared in May 1981 by the infamous National Guard and endured a nightmare 11 days of interrogations, beatings, and abuse. Through international pressure and the connections of her family, her arrest was finally made public, and she was transferred to the women’s prison at Ilopango. There, she and other activists continued the political struggle through the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COPPES). During her two years in prison, tested by hunger strikes, violence, and factional divisions, she became one of Amnesty International’s best-known prisoners of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise is a gripping story of a self-aware activist and a vital young woman’s struggle to find her own way within a deeply conservative society.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817321215
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ana Margarita Gasteazoro (1950-1993) was a Salvadoran political activist and prisoner of conscience.
 
Judy Blankenship is a writer and photojournalist. Among her books are Our House in the Clouds: Building a Second Life in the Andes of Ecuador and Cañar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador.
 
Andrew Wilson is a writer, editor, and translator. He is author of Translators on Translating: Inside the Invisible Art and coauthor of A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch.
 

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Preface Judy Blankenship xi

Introduction Erik Ching xvii

Abbreviations xxix

Prologue 1

Part I A Nice Girl like Me

1 My Family and Other Contradictions 7

2 Wanderings of a Salvadoran Black Sheep 20

3 Jamaica 27

Part II A Nice Country like El Salvador

4 Getting Involved 35

5 International Work 46

6 Repression Grows 61

7 Civil War 69

8 Double Life 83

9 Making a Movie 91

10 Domestic Notes from the Underground 100

11 The Not-So-Final Offensive 111

12 Woman in a Man's World 119

13 Disappeared: "Nobody Knows, Nobody Cares" 126

14 "I've Brought You My Dog Princess" 137

Part III A Nice Prison like Ilopango

15 First Day in Prison 151

16 Organizing Inside 158

17 Relations with the Outside 175

18 The Struggle Inside 183

19 The Commons and the Authorities 189

20 Keeping Busy 195

21 Discipline 205

22 A Strike, a Murder, and a Suicide 218

23 Freedom 225

Epilogue Judy Blankenship Andrew Wilson 235

Acknowledgments 237

Notes 239

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

Deeply self-reflective and powerfully narrated, [Gasteazoro’s] memoir Tell Mother I’m in Paradise offers a complex portrait of a woman who transgressed multiple social worlds. Gasteazoro intimately describes how ordinary Salvadorans survived state terror and organized revolution. The memoir is a gem of a source that will capture the attention and hearts of multiple audiences.”
—NACLA

“Wrenching…. Remarkable stories…. [A] multilayered, affecting first-person narrative of a young woman’s radicalization during a turbulent time of repression by El Salvador’s government and military.… A harrowing firsthand look at the Salvadoran civil war and its enormous human toll.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“As a journalist visiting El Salvador during its brutal civil war, I met Ana Margarita Gasteazoro in the women’s prison of Ilopango. I was struck by her passion for justice, her honesty, and her compassion for what the people of her country have suffered. The same qualities shine through in this book. Judy Blankenship and Andrew Wilson have done a great service in making this remarkable woman’s story available to readers. I hope they will be as inspired and moved by it as I am.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
 

“Tell Mother I’m in Paradise is a beautifully told story of a woman searching for fulfillment who finds her purpose in a cause greater than herself. This is a powerful—and rare—feminist account of political agitation, revolution, imprisonment, and family told without apology or second-guessing. Ana Margarita Gasteazoro’s confidence, courage, and glamour are rendered with such warmth and intimacy that the reader feels they’ve connected with a long-lost friend.”
—Eileen Markey, author of A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura

“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.”
—Jacobin 

 

From the Publisher

2022-01-21
A wrenching oral history/memoir of a Salvadoran political activist and revolutionary.

For a few years before her death from cancer in 1993, Gasteazoro recounted her remarkable stories to her friend Blankenship, who worked with Wilson to create this multilayered, affecting first-person narrative of a young woman’s radicalization during a turbulent time of repression by El Salvador’s government and military. The country’s civil war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, resulted in 75,000 deaths. Sadly, Gasteazoro would not live to experience her country’s first democratic elections, for which she had fought. Born into a well-connected, Catholic, upper-middle-class Salvadoran family, Gasteazoro, a highly intelligent, savvy young woman with a fierce spirit and strong conscience, was essentially deprived of a university education like her brothers because her parents figured she would just get married anyway. However, as Blankenship writes, “she never married, and she never forgot the injustice of her father’s decision.” In 1977, as she and her friends were becoming increasingly aware of the intensifying political agitation and nurturing their burgeoning activism, they were horrified by the assassination of Padre Rutilio Grande, “the first important religious leader to be murdered” during that tumultuous period. As the author shows, the primary conflict was caused by a government that “accused the reform initiative of being communist inspired and ignored the fact that it mostly affected public lands.” Gasteazoro joined one of the opposition parties, and by 1979, demonstrations by activist organizations and strikes by the trade unions were met with murderous violence by the authorities. Many of her friends were “disappeared,” and Gasteazoro led a dangerous underground life until she was eventually arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for two years in the notorious Ilopango Prison for Women. Here, the details are horrific and visceral. Tragically, Gasteazoro died before she could run for political office in the 1993 elections, but Blankenship and Wilson are commended for bringing her story to light.

A harrowing firsthand look at the Salvadoran civil war and its enormous human toll.

Kirkus Reviews