Joaquín Villalobos

Birthplace

San Salvador, El Salvador

Biography

Joaquín Villalobos (born 1951 in San Salvador) is a former Salvadoran guerrilla leader and politician. He is alleged to have been involved in the murder of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. Villalobos was one of the main leaders of the People's Revolutionary Army, or Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, a group that emerged in El Salvador in the early 1970s as a loose federation of cells with roots in various Marxist and left-wing Catholic groups. The ERP was one of the five organizations that joined together in 1980 to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front during the Salvadoran Civil War, in which left-wing guerrillas fought El Salvador’s military-dominated and US-backed right-wing government. An economics student and left-wing activist, Villalobos joined the ERP in 1971, at the age of 19.