Miguel Mármol: 1905-1993: Union Activist Biography - Raised In Poverty, Learned Shoemaking And Politics, Joined The Workers' Movement, Survived His Execution
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Miguel Mármol: 1905-1993: Union activist.
A shoemaker by trade and a revolutionary by avocation, Miguel Mármol devoted his life to organizing the peasants and workers of El Salvador and Guatemala. He was a founding member of El Salvador's Communist Party (CP) and the Young Communist League. The Salvadoran National Guard called him the "Red Phantom," because he repeatedly avoided capture and disappeared, only to return again, most notably after surviving his own execution.
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Mármol was born on July 4, 1905, in the San Salvador suburb of Ilopango. His grandmother, a native Indian, had evicted her unmarried daughter, Santos Mármol, at the first sign of her pregnancy. Mármol's mother refused to reveal his father's identity and he was left in the care of his half-sisters while Santos Mármol carried bales of tobacco on her back to …
Santos Mármol was determined that her son learn a trade rather than become a farm laborer. Unable to afford the teacher's training school, he apprenticed as a shoemaker. First in small shops in Ilopango, and then at the largest factory in San Salvador, Mármol received a simultaneous education in shoemaking and politics. Soon he was making specialty shoes and living in the fact…
Mármol threw himself into the organized workers' movement. He read voraciously and studied at the People's University and at schools run by the Communist International. Dividing his time between San Salvador and San Martín, Mármol organized meetings and distributed The Hammer, a newspaper published by the Regional Federation of Workers of El Salvador. Márm…
As the worldwide economic depression hit poverty-stricken El Salvador, coffee and sugar prices plummeted and peasants were thrown out of work. Popular unrest reached new heights, with mass demonstrations and strikes. The government retaliated, the jails filled with political prisoners, and a military coup placed General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in power. In January of 1932 the …
Mármol, whose wife had left him, remained enmeshed in the internal conflicts of the weak and fragmented CP until the early 1940s. He eventually established his own shop, specializing in cheap sandals, and he became president of the National Alliance of Shoemakers. His opposition to the Nazis and fascists helped him develop relationships with the American and British ambassadors to El Salvad…
In 1966 Mármol traveled to Moscow for the Soviet Communist Party Congress. In May he attended the Czech Communist Party Congress in Prague, where he met the Salvadoran communist poet Roque Dalton. Dalton interviewed Mármol daily and nightly for several weeks. The result was a testimonio, Dalton's transcription of Mármol's dictation. This remarkable first-person a…
Mármol died of pneumonia on June 25, 1993, at the age of 88. Hundreds of people turned out for his funeral. Although he had fathered a number of children with different women, at the time of his interviews with Dalton, his only surviving children were a daughter, Hilda Alicia (called Angelita), and two boys, Miguelito, age two, and another born in the summer of 1966 while Mármol was …
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