Quote by Manlio Argueta

“The road to Hell is paved with evildoers, they'd tell us. And the evildoers were those who had bad thoughts. We always wanted to be good. We believed that to be good was to bow one's head, not to protest, not to demand anything, not to get angry. No one had clarified these things for us. On the contrary, we were always being offered a celestial paradise. The reward for being good. To respect one's neighbor was really to respect the landowner. And to respect the landowner was to conform to his whimsey. If there were no beans to eat after working on the plantation, it was because the landowner couldn't manage, the landowner was suffering losses. If there were no hammocks to sleep in, it was because the harvest had not left the landowner enough time to provide them. And there we were without food, waiting for the afternoon or the evening to go home to eat, a whole day without eating; or we'd go to sleep under the pepetos trees in the coffee fields. We used to confuse goodness with resignation.”

Quote by Manlio Argueta