Ramos Bejarano, Dionisio

Ramos Bejarano, Dionisio 

(pseudonym Morales Mario). Born Oct. 9, 1918, in San Pedro Sula. A leader of the communist movement in Honduras.

The son of a peasant, Ramos Bejarano graduated from a secondary school in 1936 and enrolled the same year in the law school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City. Upon returning to his homeland in 1938, he helped found workers’ circles for the study of Marxist literature. From 1940 to 1946 he worked on a railroad owned by the United Fruit Company. He wrote several articles exposing the ruthless exploitation of banana-plantation workers and was subsequently arrested.

Since 1946, Ramos Bejarano has devoted himself entirely to revolutionary activity. He helped found the petit bourgeois Revolutionary Democratic Party in 1949 and until 1952 was a leader of the party and editor of the party’s press organ Vanguardia revolucionaria. He laid the groundwork for the creation of a communist party. A cofounder of the Communist Party of Honduras (1954), he has been from its inception a member of the party’s Central Committee and the Central Committee’s Political Commission and general secretary of the party’s Central Committee (first secretary until 1972). Ramos Bejarano has repeatedly been arrested and exiled for his active revolutionary work.