¶ … Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District by Manilo Argueta Reviewed through Ant's perspective

So Alfonso, you are my wolf, are you not? That is what Manilo Argueta calls you in his book entitled Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District. He wrote this book during the 1970's, during the height of the oppression suffered by the El Salvadorian nation, and imposed upon us by the military regime of the time that was notoriously backed by the United States.

In the 1970's the nation was gripped by a terrible civil war. Rightists backed the dictatorship, despite the bloodshed it inflicted upon the nation. The wealthy of El Salvador wished it to stay in power, so they might live secure, if not in their political beds, at least content in the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed. Others, leftists, took to the jungles, to the woods of this Latin American land and attempted to overthrow the government. You were one of those who took to the woods, one of the educated members of the middle class who hoped, someday, to take credit for setting the nation free, even though the nation had to pay the price of internal division in the form of the civil war.

Thus, if one is to tell a fairy tale, logically, you might say that the El Salvadorian soldiers and military men are the true wolves that prowl around us. However, at least Manilo Argueta knows that you were as much a wolf to me as any soldier might seem a wolf to those leftists who suffered from the repressive military regime of El Salvador during the 1970's. I might have sympathized with your cause because I sympathized with and loved you. You might have seen your cause emblazoned in my eyes and embodied in my swelling stomach, full of your child and my love for you. But you still did not truly help...

Of course, there have never really been good times, one might say, for our Latin American nation. El Salvador has been owned and administered by infamous Fourteen Families since the days of its colonialization by Spain. (Bacevich, 1988, 4) The land was raped by Spain, colonized economically by the fingers of the oppressor. Even the language that the book that brought me to life is written in is the language of the Spanish colonizers.
Yet after Spain left, El Salvador was colonized by its own people, by the Fourteen. Just as, as I tried to escape the oppression of men and the oppression of my own ignorance in the countryside of the 1970's, I was colonized again by you, for all of your leftist sympathies. Even some the Americans whose government supported the Fourteen Families later on stated that, ever since the Spaniards left, these families completely owned the distribution of land and wealth. American intellectuals decried their government's support as El Salvadorian intellectuals resisted the families' political influence. But their words could not cure the nation, and your words ultimately only hurt me and did not prepare me for your ultimate betrayal, your leaving of your child and you leaving of me.

My family was one of the poor, one of those oppressed by these four families long before you ever had a consciousness that you lived in an unjust land. I am a peasant by birth, not by design. You, though you play the wolf in my fairy tale, my tragedy, knew nothing of the horrors and impoverishment as you grew up, educated in the elite world of the city. In…