AGOURA HILLS, Calif. - Sept. 15, 2020 - Lucia Mann, a journalist, humanitarian, and social activist, was in El Salvador at the time of the violent civil war between the military-led government and left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. It was a brutal conflict that was supported by the United States with CIA involvement.

This turbulent Central American civil war, which ran from 1980 to 1992, ravaged El Salvador and claimed the lives of approximately 75,000 of its citizens. The many tyrannized, frightened families—mostly poor peasants, indigenous peoples, and child farm workers—meant nothing to the military death squads.

One of the brave women you will meet in this story is Estrella Godwin Lozano (a Waorani tribe descendant of the Amazon rain forest) who suffered terribly before her brutal demise in Laredo, Texas in 2019. She was a "little person" who became traumatically affected by the abuse perpetrated by National Guard soldiers outside her pueblo home. She heroically joined the Sandinistas (Cuban-backed guerillas) to seek revenge upon the villains of her country.

"There is no crown more worthy than a child breadwinner." This saying appropriately reflects the reality for the many young children who bore the brunt of this civil war, who often wound up fending for themselves, and had to scavenge for any type of work to simply survive.

The vivid and far-reaching violations of human rights that took place ultimately prompted Ms. Mann to write The Little Breadwinner—her seventh book—and one that continues to shine a light on repressive cultural mores and both personal and social injustice.

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Joan Faro