One of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in the Americas tore through El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, claiming more than 75,000 lives and making a million homeless in the small Central American country.

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Horacio Castellanos Moya, El Salvador's leading novelist, lives on the North Side, guest of the Cities of Asylum program. Click photo for larger image.

And while the years of death squads and torture seem part of the past, El Salvador's legacy of violence lingers, reaching as far north as Pittsburgh.

Death threats in 1997 forced Horacio Castellanos Moya, 49, El Salvador's leading novelist, to flee his country. After nine years living in exile in several nations, he has found shelter here.

His host is the Cities of Asylum program, organized by Henry Reese, former co-owner of the Reese Brothers telemarketing firm, and his wife, sculptor Diane Samuels.

Two years ago, the program took in Huang Xiang, a poet persecuted in China. Castellanos Moya officially became the second guest in the two-year program last month.

"The political violence of the civil war has been transformed into the criminal violence that grips El Salvador today," Castellanos Moya said, speaking English fluently in his pleasantly accented voice.

"While I never received what you might call 'official' threats, I knew that with the way things are in my country, they were very real. And, I knew no one would ever be held responsible."

What prompted the threats was his third novel, "El asco," published in the nation's capital in 1997. (The title means "revulsion" in English.)

The novel included the 1980 assassination of Oscar Romero, the outspoken archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by government killers. Romero's death was the spark that set off the fighting between the dictatorship, backed by the Reagan administration, and a coalition of leftists.

"The book was sarcastic, satiric, about the culture and politics of El Salvador," he said. "What I was saying was 'What a country we have.'"

A slight man with a ready smile, Castellanos Moya is hardly a threatening figure, but his quick wit and wry sense of humor are the kinds of effective weapons that writers wield so well.

Anonymous threats then followed, made by groups "close to the ruling party," Castellanos Moya said.

"Politicians hate being laughed at," he added. Castellanos Moya suggests that the offended officials were members of the Republican National Alliance, El Salvador's ruling conservative party. Some of its members were allied with the fearsome death squads.

"El Salvador is still a very dangerous country," said the writer, whose mother and a brother still live there. "The killings are among the highest in all of Latin America."

He cited the nation's entrenched poverty and a government that has taken no clear policy on fighting crime as the sources of violence.

During the war, Castellanos Moya worked as a journalist in Mexico, but he published his first novel, "La diaspora," in 1989.

Returning to his native land after the United Nations' settlement ending the fighting, he edited the weekly newspaper, Primera Plana, in San Salvador in the mid 1990s, drawing the ire of both right and left.

"The newspaper was not aligned with any political group, so we could be critical of both sides. We were the chief critic of the government."

But lack of advertising support caused the paper to close in 1995, giving Castellanos Moya more time to work on his fiction.

His second novel, the 1996 "Baile con serpientes" ("Dances with Snakes"), painted a satiric picture of Latin American culture, but with his third, he targeted his own country and was soon forced to flee.

Five other novels followed in quick succession as he moved around Latin America before accepting a two-year writer's residency in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2004 that was sponsored by the Frankfurt Book Fair.

His later novels are published in Spain, with translations into French and German for a European audience.

With several literary prizes and critical acclaim in Latin America and Europe, Castellanos Moya remains undiscovered in the United States, but that situation is changing. Anchor Books has included the first chapter of "Revulsion" in its anthology "Words Without Borders," to be published next month, and New Directions Press will publish his 2004 novel, "Senselessness," in spring 2008. It will be the first Castellanos Moya novel in English.

"His style is fabulous," said New Directions editor Barbara Epler, "full of both vitriol and pity. The people who know his work were very high on this book."

The book delves into the still little-told story of the genocide of Mayans in Guatemala. Literary critics in Madrid and Paris praised the novel for its powerful theme.

The critical acclaim for Castellanos Moya's novels caught the attention of Douglas Unger, a member of the North America Cities of Asylum's advisory board, Reese said.

He offered the novelist a spot in the Pittsburgh program, including use of a renovated home Reese dubbed The Writer's House.

The novelist is now a North Sider, living on Sampsonia Way near the Mattress Factory, the Poet's House, home of Huang Xiang; and Reese and Samuels.

"Frankfurt was very welcoming, but I didn't speak German," Castellanos Moya said. "I had to use my English with the Germans. Now, I'm finding it very comfortable here because of the easier communications."

Since his arrival in Pittsburgh late last year, the writer's found friends and hangouts in the Mexican War Streets neighborhood and welcoming hands at the University of Pittsburgh, both in the English department and the Center for Latin American Studies.

As a positive sign of his comfort level, Castellanos Moya says he's getting a lot of writing done.

He's now working on a new novel, the first of a planned trilogy set in El Salvador near the end of World War II, when a coup failed to dislodge the dictatorship.

"It will be my most ambitious work, I think, something about my own love-hate relationship with El Salvador," he said.