Ramon Amaya Amador

Amaya was born in Olanchito in the department of Yoro. After working on the banana plantations along the Northern Caribbean coast of Honduras hepublished his first work in 1939. He became a journalist in 1941 for El Atlántico (The Atlantic), a La Ceiba newspaper. In October 1943 he founded a weeklymagazine in Olanchito called Alerta (Alert). A leading Honduran communist fleeing from political persecution, he moved to Guatemala in 1944, where he workedthere on the Nuestro Diario (Our Daily) newspaper, and was very supportive of the left-wing government of Jacobo Arbenz. In his 10 years in Guatemala he alsoworked for the Diario de Centro América (Central American Daily), El Popular Progresista (The Popular Progressive) and Medioía (Midday). When Arbenzregime fell in June 1954 Amador sought refuge in the Argentine embassy before being granted asylum in that country. He worked there for Sarmiento, a populareducative newspaper. He also married the Argentinian Regina Arminda Funes. In May 1957 he returned to Honduras with her. He began working for El Cronista(The Chronicle), and found the magazine Vistazo (View) in Tegucigalpa. He left Honduras with his family, including 2 small children, to move to Prague inCzechoslovakia where he worked on a magazine called Problems of Peace and Socialism until he died at 50 years of age in a plane crash in 1966 inBratislava, Czechoslovakia. In September 1977 his remains were returned to Tegucigalpa, but it was not until 1991 that his books were published in Honduras.