Introduction: El Salvador

Information about life in El Salvador has always been difficult to come by.

The best way to get my family to talk was by turning everything into an subtle bit of chisme, gossip that passed between receivers of the telephone. And nothing got past Mama — she was my daily anchor newscast before the telenovelas came on for the night.

It was about their problems here, though; nothing seemed to have carried on from El Salvador. Even if you ask anyone else who came from El Salvador during the 70’s and 80’s, you’ll realize those are like the Dark Ages no one speaks of. I listened to the way my mom’s brothers and sisters were consistently in a bickering civil war of their own, to Mama’s dismay. If one relative was in need of help, it was Mama who asked, “Who is going to help?” “Not I,” says an aunt, “Not I,” another would respond, and before you know it, both aunts are not speaking to each other because of their own beliefs of who should do what.

Of course, this was the filtered version she told me, so I never got the full story.

I grew up with that kind of skepticism: That whatever I heard was not the full story, whether it was because it was only one-sided, or part of one side. And that’s how I feel about this trip.

The most peculiar part about El Salvador is the lack of information that exists on the country. I understand that it’s small — they say you can drive through it in less than three hours — but finding a guidebook on this place is limited. I go to the International Travel section in Barnes & Noble at several different locations, section off into the Centra America section (which usually gets 3/4 of a shelf, while Europe gets an entire bookcase), and start my way from the end of Mexico, to Belize… Costa Rica… Cuba… Guatemala… wait. No El Salvador. I’ll even resort to look for it between Panama and Nicaragua — or hey! Maybe they grouped it in the same guidebook with Honduras like a 2 for 1 special? Nope. No El Salvador. Even in Lonely Planet guidebooks, such as “Central America on a shoestring,” El Salvador gets 40 out of the near 2,000-page volume.

The lack of information suggests that no one should go there — maybe go around via Honduras and avoid the crime-ridden slice of land. But I refuse to believe it, and let me tell you why.

Her name is Rufina Amaya.

If you google her up, you’ll discover that she was the sole survivor of the El Mozote Massacre. El Mozote was a hamlet only a few ravines away (30 miles) from where my mom grew up in San Antonio near the Honduran border. You won’t find it on a map because the entire hamlet was wiped out in December 1981.

This massacre isn’t something to skip over in the history books: This was a massacre that violated human rights by killing hundreds of people — hundreds! — in a way that was worse than any of the rings in hell from Dante’s Inferno. This massacre’s operational goal was to “drain the sea to kill all of the fish.” They called it la sequía, and the US-funded Salvadoran army was after the Guerrillas in order to prevent the country from falling into the same fate as Cuba: Communism.

Except that here, there were no fish, only innocent civilians.

“If you want to find guerrillas,” one woman shouted tearfully, “go out there — outside town. But here, here we’re not guerrillas.” (from The Massacre at El Mozote)

Rufina Amaya fearlessly shared her truth to anyone who would listen. She plead to the US government to stop funding the war and training the very troops who murdered her husband (among many others) in the hills, blind-folded, on their knees, shot-at point blank and then decapitated. Meanwhile her children were cooked to death in the sacristy of the church in the hamlet along with all the others.

And no one outside of the country believed her.

“The comandacia didn’t believe us — they didn’t believe the numbers,” a guerrilla said.

The aftermath of the matanza was so incredible, US officials thought it was propaganda from the Guerrillas, and used the “unlikely” numbers of people killed to undermine the truth.

It was a decade before the US would believe Rufina Amaya Marquez’s testimony, when the peace treaties were signed in 1992. It was then, when the anthropologists from Argentina came and dug up the bodies and started counting the bullet shells and skulls, that the truth came out.

There’s more to the story of the massacre, so please don’t begin to judge which side was wrong or right without reading about it first, but the point is: I see myself through Rufina, a person who is trying to scream out the truth about El Salvador’s state. I’ve read several articles and mini-blogs from other backpackers who constantly say how it’s such a shame that people skip this country because of the negative coverage it receives. Articles will even mention that investment in El Salvador’s tourism industry has stifled because of the negative coverage and high risk in these investments.

When I go, I hope I will be happy to know I’ve rediscovered a secret slice of paradise, and that my mom and Antonio will come with me next time.

There’s another woman I want you to meet, though you may already know her: Joan Didion.

Gosh this woman can write so impersonally, it’s hard not to take it personally! In 1982, she went toEl Salvador to write an account on it. Since then, her images epitomized the American sentiment at the time:

“Terror is the given of the place.”

Her observations capture scenes of the disappeared as they’re happening before she understands what’s going on:

“As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes… I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy’s back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.”

Her observations capture the images that many people, such as my mom, think of when they consider El Salvador:

“The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day… A knot of children on the street suggests the presence of a body. Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations… [they] wash up near the lakeside cottages.”

No one — rich or poor — is free from this apparent civil war. The only way to escape it is to close your eyes, and I think that’s the way my mom and Mama have dealt with the past. The night I told my mom I was going to El Salvador, she told me, “My mom used to cover my eyes when we were passing the bodies dumped all over the roads — in every corner — of the city, so that I wouldn’t have to see them.”

Joan Didion sums up this covering of the eyes well:

“In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eye, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth.” Her images have ceased sight and silenced sound and frozen it in the time of the Civil War to the world, and I want to “update” these images to shine a better light on the postwar years in El Salvador.