In an unnamed country in Central America the army is massacring Indians in the highlands and burning down their villages to put down an armed rebellion.

The Catholic Church sides with the Indians and is working to bring the genocide to light by compiling a report of testimonies of survivors. A writer from a neighboring country, exiled and down on his luck, is commissioned by a friend to edit the volume, "cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger," as he puts it.

		"SENSELESSNESS" By Horacio Castellanos Moya New Directions ($15.99)

The stark, ungrammatical language of the testimonies, narrated by people whose native language is not Spanish, captures his imagination as a writer. He is himself apolitical -- cynical, alcoholic, oversexed. But he feels drawn into the world of the testimonies and the scenes of terrible violence they describe. He begins to fear for his own life.

Is he himself, and by extension the educated, middle-class world he represents, immune from the repression that he is chronicling? It becomes increasingly hard to tell.

That situation is the core of Horacio Castellanos Moya's darkly comic, noir-ish novel.

Castellanos Moya is from El Salvador, a country deeply wracked by protracted civil conflict between left and right over the past 25 years.

In his own country he was a prominent novelist and journalist but, like the character in his novel, who is a kind of self-portrait in a distorting mirror, for much of his career he has had to live elsewhere.

To be a writer in El Salvador (or a trade unionist or a priest on the side of the poor or a member of a left-wing party) is a dangerous occupation.

Today he lives in Pittsburgh, sponsored by City of Asylum, a program designed to support writers threatened by repression or violence in their own countries.

In a way the Central American conflict, which forms the background of "Senselessness," was the last great battle of the Cold War. And the good guys won. Or did they? That is the question Castellanos Moya's novel implicitly poses.

It is not a political novel in the conventional sense. It does show the violence of the army and the paramilitary death squads, but it is also a sometimes hilarious satire of the well meaning but often naive human rights activists.

A picture of what the war in Central America looked like from the side of the defeated, not unlike the testimonies the writer is compiling, may be found in "I, Rigoberta Menchu. An Indian Woman in Guatemala," one of the great books of modern Latin American literature.

But Menchu's book first appeared in 1982. Does anyone remember the war in Central America in these days of Iraq and Afghanistan?

In many ways the world we live in today has deep connections to that moment; we just don't see them.

The battle between the army and the rural peasants in Guatemala cost 200,000 lives. Many more thousands were killed on both sides in Nicaragua and El Salvador each. And the fighting dislocated the lives of millions of others.

Today about one in five Salvadorans have immigrated to the United States, and there are large, growing communities of Nicaraguans and Guatemalan immigrants, most undocumented.

Many of the former combatants -- or their children -- make up the urban gangs called the Maratruchas, rapidly spreading in U.S. cities like Los Angeles or Newark, N.J.

The American ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, the architect of the Contra war in Nicaragua, was John Negroponte. The current deputy secretary of state served as President Bush's proconsul in Iraq and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The Sandinistas, in a country bled dry by that war, lost the elections in 1990. Today they are back in power, in a Latin America that has shifted dramatically to the left in the past seven years, although not in El Salvador, whose government remains one of Bush's strongest allies in the region and whose army was part of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq.

The Contra War spawned among other things the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan government secretly provided arms to the same regime in Iran we may soon be at war with.

"Senselessness" reminds us that we also are not immune to the consequences of actions committed in our name, that Latin America is in inside the United States today, that to forget history is to be condemned to repeat it, to not to wake up from its nightmares.