Biography classically relies upon the "Great Person" approach to history -- an account of a figure who dominated and shaped a nation's history. Enrique Alvarez was not such a figure. He rose to occasional prominence as a cabinet official and, for a very few months, as head of the collective leadership of a civilian left/center-left coalition that groped for a negotiated "solution" to El Salvador's 1980 scene of massive political violence. He and four others in this leadership circle were brutally assassinated in November of 1980 by one of El Salvador's thriving death squads. He is, in biographer John Lamperti's estimate, little remembered beyond family and political associates.

By contrast, the now dominant historical genre of social history examines how the lives of common people changed and were changed by an era, and John Lamperti's highly readable biography is a fine example.

Enrique Alvarez was a Salvadoran aristocrat, one of the "fourteen families." The fascination of the narrative is how the son of one of El Salvador's small number of very rich families turned into a "traitor to his class." Lamperti reveals this story with a minute analysis, through the evolution of Alvarez, of how the blockage of rather mild reforms in a context of extreme poverty and inequality led to a leftist revolutionary war. Tortured and gunned down at the age of 50, Alvarez did not live to see that war.

Lamperti has meticulously researched this story, tapping family histories, and numerous archival resources, and interviewing some five dozen people.

Alvarez' forebears migrated from Colombia in the 1870s, just as coffee was becoming the "golden grain." Several brothers who followed aggressively pursued the coffee boom and soon prospered to become one of El Salvador's "fourteen families [6]." Two generations later, Enrique was sent to prep school and college in the US and afterwards made the grand European tour. In El Salvador, he was a young socialite, handsome and famed in this rich circle for his courtly parties and wonderful dancing.

But he cared for the laborers on family plantations in ways that went beyond the noblesse oblige of a few kindly members of his class who might be the godfather of peasant newborns or help a family with health problems. Enrique wanted both education and higher wages for the peasants -- ideas that were anathema to the Salvadoran aristocracy. He made lasting friendships outside his class. He was also a talented and innovative farmer (a family trait).

In middle age he accepted an invitation to serve as Minister of Agriculture in a government headed by the military, which had controlled the Salvadoran government since the time of Enrique's birth. At this point, El Salvador was entering a crucible that would end, a decade later, in revolutionary war. Expansion of lands put into export crops displaced small peasants who became farm laborers or migrated to Honduras or to the capital city where job growth was insufficient to meet the new demand. A slim political opening for civilian political parties in the 1960s was closed by obvious electoral fraud during numerous elections in the 1970s, with zero concern manifested in Washington.

Enrique's efforts to push for mild forms of land redistribution were frustrated by foot-dragging among some "reform" elements in the military, so he dropped out of government and developed one of his farms into a cooperative, eventually (and still) run by the peasant owners.

Following the Sandinistas' July 1979 overthrow of Somoza [7] in Nicaragua, an October coup by reform military elements in El Salvador ousted a hard-line president and brought in a civilian cabinet that announced dramatic reforms. Enrique served as Minister of Agriculture and mapped out a dramatic agrarian reform.

A year later Enrique was dead, one of thousands assassinated that year. In harrowing chapters Lamperti portrays the reassertion of control by military hardliners, the resignation of the Alvarez cabinet amidst vastly increased human rights abuses by the military and death squads, the new provision of US military aid by the Carter administration despite the protests of the soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Romero, and the entry of Alvarez into the leadership of the civilian left.

The full-scale war that the assassination of Alvarez foretold ground on for twelve years, at the cost of 80,000 lives (the majority of them non-combatants). Salvadoran society was shredded by deaths and displacement with virtually every Salvadoran knowing someone dear who had died. This death toll is, in proportion to the population of the country, fifty times that of US casualties in Vietnam.

The peace treaty signed January 16, 1992 created meaningful military and police reform and opened space for democratic participation, but did not bring about dramatic economic reform. Giving a gracious speech for the government was rightist President Alfredo Cristiani [8], a rich coffee grower who had married into the "fourteen families." Speaking for the FMLN, Shafik Handal extended "an open hand, that had been a closed fist" to former enemies and called for a participatory democracy. He paid homage to those who had fallen in the struggle. Among the few he had time to name was Enrique Alvarez.