What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

by Carolyn Forché

It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that, and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption: trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye. “This is the stage of denunciation,” he said, “which precedes the revolutionary moment.” He did not believe in war as a solution. There is no instance, he said, of a country’s having benefited from long warfare. But if the armed struggle begins, it must not fail or the poor will suffer for another two hundred years.