Argueta One Day Of Life Analysis

A crucial part of warfare is finding soldiers to fight for a cause. Sometimes, people naturally fit in with a cause, while other times they require convincing. The Salvadoran peasant conflict is an issue that required the help of fellow peasants—for both sides of the conflict. For the government to suppress the conflict they had to systematically employ their citizens to go against their own people. In order to fully understand the conflict, Manlio Argueta’s novel One Day of Life follows the the peasant uprising through several different perspectives. Argueta’s One Day of Life sheds light onto the authorities mentality towards the conflict, towards their own people, and the ways the government trained them to think this way. To start, the authorities fighting for the government were peasant people themselves, therefore, their training required intense mental manipulation to convince them that their cause was just. The government deliberately gave their authorities more luxuries than they were accustomed to, helping to create a distance between their previous lifestyle to their new life. In the chapter titled “The Authorities,” Argueta details the new lifestyle they were introduced to during their training. The chapter is told through the perspective of someone who came from a peasant background, and is now working with the
The training is crucial to understand, because their training is what allowed them to kill their own people with ease. With help from the United States, the Salvadoran government systematically killed off a huge portion of the peasant population. The discussion surrounding the warfare tactic of mental manipulation is rarely discussed, and this novel rips the issue right open. By understanding how people can begin to hate their own kind, one can begin to work against their mental