EscucharSAN SALVADOR - The former Salvadoran guerrilla forces are to celebrate today the 66th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Agustín Farabundo Martí, who lead a peasant revolt in 1932 and whose name was used by the rebels who fought the government from 1980 to 1992.
A spokesman for the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN in Spanish), now a political party, said that ``Black Martí'', as the revolutionary leader was known, will be honored in a special ceremony to be held at the town of Teotepeque, in the central department of La Libertad, where he was born.
Farabundo Martí was shot at the General Cemetery of San Salvador early morning on February 1, 1932, after a military tribunal found him guilty of insurrection and sentenced him to death just a few hours after he was arrested.
Martí was the leader of the first communist uprising in Latin America and he aimed at toppling dictator Gen. Maximiliano Hernández-Martínez, who is remembered as a pitiless ruler who ordered cutting off the hands or fingers of people accused of robbery.
According to the FMLN, the day he was arrested, January 31, 1932, Martí had attended an interview with two young journalism students from the National University who worked for Gazeta, the newspaper printed at the higher-learning institution.
The students, identified as Mario Zapata and Alfonso Luna, denied belonging to the Communist Party of El Salvador, which Martí had founded, but authorities sentenced them to capital punishment just the same.
According to the source, just before dying and in front of the firing squad, the students reiterated that they were not communists, even though they later shouted to Martí to accept them in their party because they preferred ``to die as militants''; the rebel leader shouted back: ``You are accepted!''
Today's commemoration activity will consist in a motorcade which is to leave from the FMLN headquarters in the city of Nueva San Salvador, located in the outskirts of San Salvador, and which is to travel to Teotepeque, where the house where Farabundo Martí was born still stands.
The FMLN fought against the government of El Salvador for 12 years, from 1980 to 1992, and was legalized as a political party on November 14, 1992, after its disarmament and demobilization.
