Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District: A Review

Introduction: Addressing the Wolf

So Alfonso, you are my wolf, are you not? That is what Manlio Argueta calls you in his book Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District. He wrote this book during the 1970s, during the height of the oppression suffered by the Salvadoran nation, imposed upon us by the military regime of the time — a regime notoriously backed by the United States.

In the 1970s 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 peacefully in their political arrangements, 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 civil war.

El Salvador's Political Landscape in the 1970s

Thus, if one is to tell a fairy tale, logically you might say that the Salvadoran soldiers and military men are the true wolves that prowl around us. However, Manlio 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 1970s. 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 your little Ant; you only gave her a false hope of liberation.

Yes, the 1970s were a terrible time for all who lived in our nation — not just leftists such as yourself or peasants such as myself. 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 the infamous Fourteen Families since the days of its colonization by Spain (Bacevich, 1988, 4). The land was ravaged by Spain and colonized economically by the fingers of the oppressor. Even the language in which the book that brought me to life is written is the language of the Spanish colonizers.

Colonization, Class, and the Fourteen Families

Yet after Spain left, El Salvador was colonized by its own people — by the Fourteen. Just as I tried to escape the oppression of men and the oppression of my own ignorance in the countryside of the 1970s, I was colonized again by you, for all of your leftist sympathies. Even some of the Americans whose government supported the Fourteen Families later stated that, ever since the Spaniards left, these families completely controlled the distribution of land and wealth. American intellectuals decried their government's support, just as Salvadoran intellectuals resisted the families' political influence. But their words could not cure the nation, and your words ultimately only hurt me — they did not prepare me for your ultimate betrayal: your abandonment of your child and of me.

My family was one of the poor, one of those oppressed by these Fourteen Families long before you ever developed 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 of growing up as I did, educated instead in the elite world of the city. In words you may have condemned the authoritarian government of the landed Fourteen Families, for whom my people toiled, but I knew what it was like to be oppressed by them materially, in blood, sweat, and toil. Your oppression, even when you fought in the woods, was always chosen. You chose to leave for the longer path. I did not choose as Red Riding Hood chose a forked path — my choice was already made by the economic circumstances of my birth.

Conclusion: All Men Are Wolves

I, Ant, say that all men are wolves, whether soldiers or civilians. They eat women alive, clean out the basket of crumbs, and then sleep — unaware of the troubles that will come again, unaware of the ax.

Works Cited

Argueta, Manilo. Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District. New York, 1978.

Bacevich, Halums, White, Young. "American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador." Kennedy School of Government, March 1988. Archived from the Center for Defense database at Accessed December 3, 2003.

Duarte, Jose Napoleon, President, The Republic of El Salvador. Personal Interview about El Salvador, San Salvador, El Salvador, 1986. Archived from the Center for Defense database at