José Batres Montúfar

José Batres Montúfar was born on 18 March 1809 in San Salvador, then a province of Guatemala, into an old colonial family. A military engineer, he fought in the civil wars of the isthmus and was taken prisoner. In 1837 he accompanied the English engineer John Baily as his assistant; Baily had been commissioned to survey the route of an interoceanic canal in Nicaragua. His younger brother Juan, aged twenty-one, died there of the climate. Political chief of a department in 1839 and a deputy in 1842, he left the army because of illness in May 1844 and died on 9 July of the same year, aged thirty-five.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryLas falsas aparienciasJosé Batres Montúfar · 1845not translated into EnglishLiteraturePublic domain