On a visit home, he witnessed a demonstration of unarmed students and workers in which twenty-one people were killed by government snipers.
He wrote sympathetically about the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a political party that formed following the 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre.
Over the next few years, he wrote and published several novels, including Senselessness, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.
The protagonist in Revulsion is a Thomas Bernhard-esque character who returns to El Salvador after eighteen years to deliver a 119-page diatribe against the country.
[3] Castellanos Moya was granted residencies in a program supported by the Frankfurt International Book Fair (2004-2006) and as a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh (2006-2008).