A Shot in the Cathedral

Originally published in Mexico in 1990, Bencastro's dramatic, powerful first novel focuses on the military coup d'etat in El Salvador in 1979, and the new ruling junta's brutal repression of the people through massacres of peasants, political assassinations and the kidnapping, torture and execution of tens of thousands of students, workers and ordinary citizens. Its young, idealistic narrator, newspaper reporter and painter Rogelio Villaverde, returns to El Salvador from the U.S. to search for his parents and two brothers, who, he later learns, have fled to Honduras. His girlfriend, Lourdes, a poet and teacher of fiercely proud Mayan ancestry, goes underground to avoid capture by the police. His boss, Dominguez, arrested and beaten by government security forces, is saved at the last minute, only to see the newspaper offices bombed. The plot highlights a real-life figure, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Archbishop Oscar Romero, voice of the oppressed, who was assassinated during a mass in 1980 after protesting the U.S. government's aid to the right-wing regime. Bencastro, a native of El Salvador who has lived in Virginia since 1978, interpolates news bulletins, letters, poems and Romero's homilies into the narrative to create a vivid newsreel of a country disintegrating. (Sept.)