The family of murdered poet Roque Dalton awaits justice.

Fifty years have passed since Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton (1935-1975), one of his country's most renowned poets, was murdered by fellow insurgents . His family is demanding that his remains be located and justice be done for the crime , which they describe as a crime against humanity .

Dalton was murdered on May 10, 1975, by his comrades in the insurgent People's Revolutionary Army ( ERP ), one of the five groups that formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla group in 1980, and his remains remain undiscovered.

"There's still no justice for the case of my father and Armando Arteaga, who were murdered together. My father, the intellectual, and Armando Arteaga, a worker and military leader of the guerrilla," Juan José Dalton, one of the writer's sons, told EFE.

Dalton's youngest son emphasized that " justice has to do with locating the remains of these two individuals, both my father and Armando Arteaga, who was known as 'Pancho.'"

In May 2010, the Dalton brothers, Juan José and Jorge, filed a complaint with the Attorney General's Office against former guerrillas Joaquín Villalobos, who has been a security advisor to various Latin American governments, and Jorge Meléndez, former director of Civil Protection between 2009 and 2019, for the murder of their father.

The family of the poet , winner of Cuba's Casa de las Américas Prize in 1969, accuses these individuals of "arbitrary detention, physical and psychological torture, extrajudicial execution, and disappearance of the body."

However, Judge Romeo Giammattei, of the Ninth Court of Peace, who was convicted in 2022 on corruption charges, dismissed the case, a ruling that was ratified by the Third Criminal Court of San Salvador.

"Without a doubt, the murders of Roque Dalton and Armando Arteaga were crimes against humanity , and those are imprescriptible. They cannot be pardoned, and there must be justice ," said Juan José.

Amnesty and impunity

In El Salvador, until 2016, war crimes committed during the civil war, which officially began in 1980, were frozen by a 1993 amnesty law, but its annulment by a ruling by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice allowed several cases to be reopened.

That same court, whose composition has varied over the years, is handling an appeal filed by the family and admitted on July 10, 2018, against the court and chamber that heard the case, as well as against the Prosecutor's Office.

"We as a family decided to take this to court , (...) and we had to ask for an injunction against impunity ," said Dalton's son, also a narrator and essayist.

Juan José, who has been a journalist for various international media outlets and founded and directs the digital outlet ContraPunto, lamented that " impunity is the root of all evils in this country."

He explained: "The communication we have is that the judges, since the courtroom has changed, have been going through three courtrooms since we filed the appeal, continuing to study it. It's a very complex case."

No progress

Juan José said that with the FMLN's rise to power in 2009, after becoming a party at the end of the civil war, led by journalist Mauricio Funes, and in 2014 by former guerrilla Salvador Sánchez Cerén, they hoped to begin "a process of vindication of memory and the search for justice " for Dalton.

"Neither government did anything about it. On the contrary, both governments hired one of Dalton's alleged killers (Meléndez) and protected the main killer, Joaquín Villalobos," he emphasized.

"The investigations we have conducted privately with our lawyers show that Joaquín Villalobos was the one who murdered my father," he added, lamenting that "the governments here protected him."

In an interview that Villalobos, known during the Salvadoran war (1980-1992) as 'Comandante Atilio', gave to Juan José and that was published by the Mexican media Excélsior in May 1993, he acknowledged that Dalton's murder was his "biggest mistake."

Dalton, according to Villalobos, was " shot " on charges of "insubordination and desertion " and of being an "enemy agent" of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"I'm almost twice as old as my father was when he was murdered , and we still haven't found justice ," laments the poet 's son.

"My mother is 92 years old, and we're getting older and older, and we haven't gotten justice , but my children are there too. My children will demand justice when we're gone," added Juan José.

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