Salvador

..DIDION'S

FACT.STREWN NOTEBOOK BLURS FROM TERROR.INDUCED SWEAT . . a tourist guide manque; a surrealist docudrama; a withering indictment of American foreign policy; and apoetic explorationinfear . . . A CONSUMMATE POLITICAL ARTWORK . . . EX. CELLENT.'' -Chicago Ti,ibuneBook World ..THE

SALVADORANS ASSUME MOST POLIT: ICAL MURDERS ARE COMMITTED BY GOVERNMENT SECURITY FORCES-NEARLY 7,000IN ONE YEAR . . . Joan Didion writes with a muted outrage that appalls the mind and stiffens the spine." -Boston Globe "Bodies are found everywhere-in vacant lots, in garbage,in'rest rooms, in bus stations. . . bodies, bodies-and vultures to feed on them wherever they lie. . . ACHILLINGACCOUNT." John Barkham Reviews

" SALVADORshineswith enlighteningobservation. No one has interpreted the place better . . . Its languageis lean and precise, in short what we have come to expectfrom Miss Didion." -The New YorkTimesBook Review

"HORRIFYING . . . the daily appearanceof unexplained corpses,the constantpresenceof weapons in the handsof unidentifiablemen . . . EL SALVADOR HAS TRULY BECOME THE HEART OF DARKNESS.'' -Atlantic Monthly

Booksby Joan Didion Run River SlouchingTowards Bethlehem Play It as It Lays A Book of Common PraYer The White Album Salvador Publishedby WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

Most washington square PressBooksare availableat specialquantity discountsfortulk purchasesfor salespromotions,premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can dso be created to fit specific needs. For details write the office oI'the Vice Presidentol' SpecialMarkets, Pocket Books, l23O Avenue ol'the Americas,New York' New York 10020.

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u WSP lt WASHINGTONSQUAREPRESS PUBLISHEDBY POCKETBOOKSNEW YORK

Portions of this book were publishedin The New YorkReviewof Books in October 1982. The author wishes to thank the following

for their permission

to reprint lines from:

The song "American Pie," written by Don McLean, published by Mayday Music and Benny Bird Company, A I97l . Used by permission. All rights resemed' The specified abridged excerpt from pp. 58-59 in The Autumn of the Patriarch Dy Translatedfrom the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. Copyright @ 1975 by Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez. English translation copyright @ 1976 by Harper &

Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez. Row, Publishers,

Inc. Reprinted

The excerpt from "Heart of Doubleday

permission

by permission

of Darkness" from & Company, Inc.

of the publisher. Youth by Joseph Conrad. Reprinted

by

The lines from the poem by Roque Dalton Garcfufrom the book El Salvador: The Face ofthe Revolutionby Robert Armstong and Janet Shenk. Copyright A 1982, South End Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

A WashingtonSquarePresspublication of POCKET BOOKS, a divisionof Simon & Schuster,Inc' 1230Avenueof the Americas,New York, N'Y. 10020 Copyright @ 1983by Joan Didion Publishedby arrangementwith Simon and Schuster Library of CongressCatalogCard Number: 83-3?7 All rights reseryed,includingthe right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information addressSimon and Schuster,1230Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020 ISBN: 0-671-50174-7 First Washington Square Pressprinting November, 1983 10987654321 WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS,WSP and colophonare registeredtrademarksof Simon & Schuster,Inc. Printedin the U.S.A.

I am indebted for generalbackgroundparticularly to ThomasP. Anderson'sMatanza: EI Salvador'sCommunist Revolt of 1932(University of NebraskaPress: Lincoln, l97l) and The War of the Dispossessed: Honduras and El Salvador, 1969(University of NebraskaPress:Lincoln, 1981);to David Browning'sE/ Salvador: Landscape and Society (Clarendon Press: Oxford, l97l): and to the ofrcers and staff of the United Statesembassyin San Salvador.I am indebted most of all to my husband,John Gregory Dunne, who was with me in El Salvador and whose notes on. memories about, and interpretationsof events there enlarged and informed my own perception of the place.

This book is for Robert Silvers and for Christopher Dickey

"All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-byI learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppressionof SavageCustoms had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance.And he hadwritten it, too. I've seenit. I've readit. It was eloquent,vibrating with eloquence.. . . 'By the simple exerciseof our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,'etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, althoughdifficult to remember,you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm.This was the unbounded power of eloquence-of words-of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteadyhand, may be regardedas the exposition of a method. It was very simple,and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentimentit blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminateall the brutes!' " -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

/-n three-vear-old El Salvador InternaI"" tional Airport is glassyand white and splendidly isolated, conceived during the waning of the Molina "National Transformation" as convenientlessto the capital (San Salvador is forry miles awlft until recently a drive of severalhours) than to a central hallucination of the Molina and Romero regimes, the proiectedbeachresorts,the Hyatt, the PacificParadise, tennis, golf, water-skiing, condos,Costa del Sol; the visionaryinvention of a tourist industry in yet another republic where the leading natural causeof death is gastrointestinalinfection. In the general absenceof touriits thesehotels havesincebeenabandoned,ghost and to land at this resortson the empty Pacific beaches, to to them is airport built service plunge directly into a statein which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolveinto its reverse. Immigration The only logic is that of acquiescence. is negotiatedin a thicket of eutomaticweapons,but by whoseauthoriry the weaponsare brandished(Army or National Guard or National Police or Customs Policeor Treasury Policeor one of a continuing proliferadonof other shadowyand overlappingforces) is J

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JOAN DIDION

a blurred point, Eye contactis avoided.Documentsare scrutinizedupsidedown. Once clearof the airport, on the new highway that slicesthrough green hills renby the cloud cover of the tropideredphosphorescent cal rainy season,one seesmainly underfedcattle and mongrel dogsand armoredvehicles,vans and trucks and CherokeeChiefs fitted with reinforcedsteel and bulletproofPlexiglesan inch thick. Suchvehiclesaree, fixed featureof local life, and are popularly associated and death.There wasthe Cherokee with disappearance the Dutch televisioncrew killed seen following Chief in Chalatenango provincein March of t982.There was the red Toyota three-quafter-tonpickup sighted near the van driven by the four AmericanCatholic workers on the night they were killed in 1980.There were, in the late springand summerof 1982,the three Toyota paneltrucks,oneyellow, oneblue,andonegreen'none bearingplates,reportedpresentat eachof the massdetendons (a "detention" is anotherfixed featureof local life, and often precedesa "disappearance")in the Amatepecdistrict of San Salvador.These are the details-the modelsand colors of armored vehicles,the makesand calibersof weepons,the particularmethods and decapitationusedin particular of dismemberment instances-on which the visitor to Salvadorlearnsimmediately to concentrate,to the exclusionof past or future concerns,asin a prolongedamnesiacfugue.

Terror is the given of the place. Black-and-white police carscruisein pairs,eachwith the barrel of a rifle r+

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extruding from an openwindow. Roadblocksmaterialize tt random, soldien fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, saferies clicking on and off. Aim is teken asif to passthe time. Every morning El Didrio de Hoy end La Prensd Grtfca c$ry czutionary stories. "UnA madre y flis dos hijos faeron dsesinados con drma cortcnte (corao) por ocho sujetosdesconocidosel lunes en la noche": A mother and her two sonshacked to death in their bedsby eight descanocidos, unknown men. The same morning's paper: the unidentified body of a young man,strangled,found on the shoulderof a road.Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyedby bayoners,one faced cerved to rePresente cross. It is largely from theserepor$ in the newspepers that the United Statesembassycompilesits body counts, which are transmittedto Washington in a weekly dispatch referred to by embasy people as "the grimgrem." Thesecountserepresentedin a kind of torrured codethat fails to obscurewhat is taken for grantedin El Salvador,that government forces do most of the killing. In a January I 5 1982 memo to Washington, for example,the embassyisued a "guarded" breakdown on its count of. 6,909 "reported" political murders betweenSeptember16 1980and Septemberlf 1981.Of these6,909,according to the memo,922were "believed committed by security forces," 952 "beIieved committedby leftist terrorists," 136"believed committed by rightist terrorists," and 4,g9g "comt5

JOAN DIDION

mitted by unknown assailents,"the famous desconocidos favored by those San Salvador newspapers still publishing. (The figures actually add up not to 6,909 but to 6,899,leaving ten in a kind of official limbo.) The memo continued: "The uncertainty involved here can be seenin the fact that responsibility cannot be fixed in the majority of cases.We note, however, that it is generally believed in El Salvador that a large number of the unexplained killings are carried out by the security forces, officially or unofficially. The Embassy is aware of dramatic claims that have been made by one interest group or another in which the security forces figure as the primary agents of murder here. El Salvador'stangled web of attack and vengeance, traditional criminal violence and political mayhem make this an impossible charge to sustain. In saying this, however, we make no attempt to lighten the responsibility for the deaths of many hundreds, and perhaps thousands,which can be attributed to the security forces. . . ." The body count kept by what is generally referred to in San Salvador as "the Human Rights Commission" is higher than the embassy's,and documented periodically by a photographer who goes out looking for bodies. These bodies he photographs are often broken into unnatural positions, and the faces to which the bodies are attached (when they are attached) ere equally unnatural, somedmesunrecognizable ashuman faces, obliterated by acid or beaten to a mash of misplaced ears and teeth or slashedear to ear and invaded l6

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by insects."Encontddo en Antiguo Cuscatldnel dia 2J de Marzo 1982:camisonde dormir celester"the typed caption reads on one photograph: found in Antiguo CuscatldnMarch 2t 1982wearing a sky-blue nightshin. The captionsare laconic. Found in SoyapangoMry 21 1982,Foundin Meiic*anos Junell 1982. Found at El Play6n Mry 30 1982,white shirt, purple pants,black shoes. The photograph accompanying that last caption showsa body with no eyes,becausethe vultures got to it before the photographerdid. There is a special kind of practicalinformation that the visitor to El Salvador acquiresimmediately,the way visitors to other placesacquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums.In El Salvadorone learns that vulturesgo first for the soft tissue,for the eyes,the exposedgenitalia,the open mouth. One learnsthat an openmouth canbe usedto makea specificpoint, can be stuffed with somethingemblematic;stuffed, sx/, with a penis,or, if the point hasto do with land title, stuffed with someof the dirt in question.One learnsthat hair deteriorateslessrapidly than flesh,and that a skull surroundedby a perfectcoronaof hair is a not uncommon sightin the body dumps. All forensicphotographsinducein the viewer a certain protective numbness,but dissociationis more difficult here.In the first placetheseare not, technically, "forensic" photographs,sincethe evidencethey document will neverbe presentedin a court of law. In the secondplacethe disfigurementis too routine. The locationsere too near,the datestoo recent.There is the of the relativesof the diseppeared: the women presence

r7

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who sit every day in this crampedoffice on the grounds of the archdiocese,waiting to look at the spiral-bound photo albumsin which the photographsarekept. These albums have plastic covers bearing soft-focus color photographsof young Americansin dating situations (strolling through autumn foliage on one album, recumbent in a field of daisieson another), and the womeq looking for the bodiesof their husbendsand brothersand sistersand children,pessthem from hand to handwithout commentor expression. "One of the moreshadowyelementsof the violent scenehere [is] the deathsquad.Existenceof these groupshaslong beendisputed,but not by many Salvadorens.. . . Who consdtutesthe deathsquads is yet enotherdifficult question.We do not believe that these squadsexist as permanentformations but rather asad hoc vigilantegroupsthat coalesce according to perceivedneed.Membershipis also uncertain, but in addition to civilians we believe that both on- andoff-dury membersof the security forces ere participants.This was unofficially confirmed by right-wing spokesmanMai. Robeno D'Aubuisson who statedin an interview in early l98l that securiqyforce membersutilize the guise of the death sguadwhen a potentially embarrassing or odioustaskneedsto be performed." -From

the confidntial but later declassified fanuary 15, 1982 memo preaiously cited, drafted for tbe StateDeparttnentby the political sectionat the embassyin SanSalaador.

l8

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The dead and piecesof the dead rurn up in EI Salvadoreverywhere,every day, astaken for granted asin a nightmare,or a horror movie.Vultures of course suggestthe presenceof a body. A knot of children on the street suggeststhe presenceof a body. Bodiesturn up in the brush of vacantlots, in the garbagethrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stetions. Some are dropped in Lake Ilopango,a few mileseastof the city, and washup near the lakesidecottagesand clubsfrequentedby what remainsin SanSalvadorof the sportingbourgeoisie.Some still turn up at El Play6n,the lunar lava field of rotting human flesh visible at one time or another on every televisionscreenin Americabut characterized in June of tggz in the El SalaadorNeussGazette,an Englishlanguageweekly editedby an American namedMario Rosenthal,as an "uncorroboratedstory . . . dredged up from the filesof leftist propaganda."Othersrurn up at Puerta del Diablo, aboveParqueBalboa,a national Turicenna describedas recently as the April-July 1982issueoI Aboard TACA, the magezineprovided on the national airline of Et Salvador,as passengers "offering excellentsubiectsfor color photography." I drove up to Puertadel Diablo one morning in June of 1982,pastthe CasaPresidencial andthe camouflaged watch towers and heavyconcentrations of troopsand arrnssouth of town, on up e narrow road narrowed further by landslidesand deepcrevicesin the roadbed, a drive so insistentlypremonitory that after a while I beganto hopethat I would passPuertadel Diablo without knowing it, iust missit, write it off, turn around t9

JOAN DIDION

and go back.There washoweverno way of missingit. Puerta del Diablo is a "view site" in an older and distinctly literary tradition, nature aslesson,an immense cleft rock through which half of El Salvadorse€ms framed, a site so romantic and "mystical," so theatrically sacrificial in aspect,that it might be a cosmic landscape painting.The parody of nineteenth-century plece presentsitself as pathetic fallacy: the sky t'broodsot'the stones"we€p," a constantseepageof weter weighting the ferns and moss.The foliage is thick and slick with moisture. The only sound is a steadybuzz,,Ibelieveof cicadas. Body dumps are seenin El Salvadoras a kind of visitors' must-do,difficult but worth the detour. "Of courseyou haveseenEl Play6n," an aideto President Alvaro Magafiasaidto me one day, and proceededt
someone else

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asked. "There were supposedto have been three on top yesterday." The point about whether or not there had been any on top was that usually it was necessaryto go down to see bodies. The way down is hard. Slabs of stone, slippery with moss, are set into the vertiginous cliff, and it is down this cliff that one begins the descent to the bodies, or what is left of the bodies, pecked and maggoty massesof fesh, bone, hair. On somedays there have been helicopters circling, tracking those making the descent. Other days there have been militia at the top, in the clearing where the road seemsto run out, but on the morning I was there the only people on rop were a man and a woman and three small children, who played in the wet grasswhile the woman started and stopped a Toyota pickup. She appeared to be learning how to drive. She drove forward and then back toward the edge, apperently following the man's signals,over and over again. We did not speak, and it was only later, down the mountain and back in the land of the provisionally living, that it occurred to me that there was a definite question about why a man and a woman might choose a well-known body dump for a driving lesson. This was one of a number of occasions, during the two weeks my husbandand I spent in El Salvador,on which I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanismof terror.

Whenever I had nothing better to do in San Salvador I would walk up in the leafy stillnessof the San Benito and Bcal6n districts, where the hush at midday is 2l

JOAN DIDION

broken only by the occasional crackle of a walkietalkie, the click of metal moving on a weapon. I recall a day in San Benito when I opened my bag to check an address,and heard the clicking of metal on metal all up and down the street. On the whole no one walks up here, and pools of blossomslie undisturbed on the sidewalks. Most of the housesin SanBenito are more recent than those in Escal6n, lessidiosyncratic and probably smarter, but the most striking architectural features in both districts are not the housesbut their walls, walls built upon walls, walls stripped of the usual copa de oro and bougainvillea, walls that reflect successivegeneretions of violence: the original stone, the additional five or six or ten feet of brick, and finally the barbed wire, somedmes concertina, sometimes electrified; walls with watch towers, gun ports, closed-circuit television cameras, walls now reaching twenty and thirty feet. San Benito and Escal6n appear on the embassysecurity maps as districts of relatively few "incidents," but they remain districts in which a certain oppressive uneasinessprevails. In the first place there are always and deaths and disappear"incident5"-dsfsntions ances-in the barrancds, the ravines lined with shanties that fall down behind the houseswith the walls and the guards and the walkie-talkies; one day in Bcal6n I was introduced to a woman who kept the lean-to that served as a grocery in e barranca just above the Hotel Sheraton. She was sticking prices on bars of Camay and Johnson's baby sospr stopping occasionally to sell a plastic bag or two filled with crushed ice and Coca22

SALVADOR

Cola,and all the while shetalkedin a low voice about her fear, about her eighteen-yesr-oldson, about the boys who had beentaken out and shot on successive nights recently in a neighboringbarranca. In the secondplacethereis, in Fscal6n,the presence of the Sheratonitself, a hotel that hasfigured rather too prominently in certain local storiesinvolving the disappeeranceand deathof Americans.The Sheratonalwaysseemsbrighter andmoremildly festivethan either the CaminoReal or the Presidente,with children in the pool and flowers and pretty women in pastel dresses, but there are usually severalbulletproofed Cherokee Chiefsin the parking area,andthe men drinking in the lobby often cerry the little zipperedpursesthat in San Salvador sugge$ not passporrsor credit cards but Browning 9-mm. pistols. It was at the Sheratonthat one of the few American desaparecidos, r young free-lancewriter namedJohn Sullivan,waslastseen,in Decemberof 1980.It wasalso at the Sheraton,after elevenon the eveningof January 3 1981,that the two Americanadviserson agrarianreform, Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, were killed, along with the Salvadorandirector of the Institute for Agrarian Transformation, Josd Rodolfo Viera. The threewere drinking coffeein a dining room off the lobby, andwhoeverkilled them usedan Ingram MAGIO, without soundsuppressor,and then walked out through the lobby, unapprehended. The Sheraton heseventurned up in the investigationinto the December 1980deathsof the four American churchwomen, SistersIta Ford and MauraClarke,the two Maryknoll 2'

JOAN DIDION

nuns; SisterDorothy Kazel, the Ursuline nun; and Jean Donovan, the lay volunteer.ln ]ustice in El Salaador: A CaseStudy, prepared and releasedin July of t98z in New York by the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights, there aPPearsthis note: "On December 19, 1980, the [Duarte government's] SpecialInvestigative Commissionreported that'a red Toyote t/4-tonpickup was seenleaving (the crime scene) at about 11:00 P.M. on Decem'a red splotch on the burned van' ber 2' and that of the churchwomen was being checked to determine whether the paint splotch'could be the result of a collision between that van and the red Toyota pickup.' By February 1981,the Maryknoll Sisters' Office of Social Concerns, which hasbeen actively monitoring the investigation, received word from a source which it considered reliable that the FBI had matched the red splotch on the burned van with a red Toyota pickup belonging to the Sheraton hotel in San Salvador. . . . Subsequentto the FBI's alleged matching of the paint splotch and a Sheraton truck, the State Department hasclaimed, in L communication with the families of the churchwomen, that'the FBI could not determine the source of the paint scraping."' There is alsomention in this study of a young Salvadoran businesman named Hans Christ (his father was a German who arrived in El Salvador at the end of World War II), a paft owner of the Sheraton. Ffans Christ lives now in Miami, and that his name should 2+

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haveevencomeup in the Maryknoll investigationmade many people uncomfortable, becauseit was Hans Christ, along with his brother-in-law, Ricardo Sol Meza,who, in April of 1981,was first chargedwith the murdersof Michael Hammerand Mark Pearlman andJosdRodolfo Viera at the Sheraton.Thesecharges were later dropped,and were followed by ^ seriesof othercharges,arrests,releases, expressions of "dismay" and "incredulity" from the American embassy,and even,in the fall of I9BZ,confessions to rhe killings from two former National Guard corporals,who testified that Hans Christ had led them through the lobby and pointedout the victims. Hans Christ and Ricardo Sol Mezahavesaidthat the droppedcaseagainsrthem was a governmentframe-up,and that they were only having drinks at the Sheratonthe night of the killings, with a National Guard intelligenceofficer.It was logical for HansChrist and Ricardo Sol Mezato havedrinks at the Sheratonbecausethey both had interestsin the hotel, and Ricardo Sol Meza,had just openeda roller disco, sinceclosed,off the lobby into which the killerswalked that night. The killers were describedby witnessesas well dressed, their facescovered.The room from which they walkedwas at the time I wasin SanSalvadorno longer a restaurant,but the marks left by the bullets were still visible,on the wall facing the door. WheneverI had occasionto visit the SheratonI was apprehensive, and this apprehensioncame to color the entire Fscal6n district for me, even its lower reaches, where there were peopleand moviesand restaurants.I recall being struck by it on the canopied 25

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porch of a restaurantneerthe Mexicanembassy,on an or habithadblackedout eveningwhenrain or sabotage the city andI becameabruptly aware'in the light cast by ^ passingcar, of two human shadows,silhouettes illuminatedby the headlightsand then invisibleagain. One shadowsetbehind the smokedglasswindows of a Cherokee Chief parked at the curb in front of the restaurent;the other crouched berweenthe pumps at the Fssostationnext door, carrying a rifle. It seemed to me unencouragingthat my husbandand I were the only peopleseatedon the porch.In the absenceof the headlightsthe candleon our table providedthe only light, andI fought the impulseto blow it out. We continued talking carefully. Nothing cameof this, but I did not forget the sensationof having beenin a single instant demoralized,undone, humiliated by fetr, which is what I meantwhen I saidthat I cameto underof terror. standin El Salvadorthe mechanism

26

"3lJl81: RobertoD'Aubuison, a former Salvadoran ermy intelligenceofficer, holds a pressconference and saysthat before the U.S. presidential election he had beenin touch with a number of Reagan advisersand those contects have continued. The armedforcesshouldask the junta to resign, D'Aubuisson says.He refusesto name a date for the action, but says'March is, I think, a very interestingmonth.'He alsocallsfor the abandonmentof the economicreforms.D'Aubuisson had been accusedof plotting to overthrow the governmenton two previousoccasions. Observers speculatethat since D'Aubuisson is able to hold the news conferenceand passfreely betweenSalvador and Guatemala,he mustenjoy considerable support among somesectionsof the army.. .. 3l+l8l: In SanSalvador, the U.S.embassy is fired upon; no one is infured. Charg6d'Affaires Frederic Chapin sayso'This incident has all the hallmarks of a D'Aubuisson operation.Let me stete to you that we opposecoupsand we haveno intentionof beingintimidated."' -From the "Chronology of Eaents Relatedto SalaadordnSituation" preptred periodically by tbe United Statesembassy in SanSohtodor. 27

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"Since the Exodus from EgyPr, historianshave written of thosewho sacrificedand struggledfor freedom:the standat Thermopylae,the revolt of the storming of the Bastille,the WarSpartacus, sawuprisingin World'War II. More recentlywe haveseenevidenceof this samehumanimpulsein one of the developingnationsin CentralAmerica. For months and months the world news media coveredthe fighting in El Salvador.Day after day, we weretreatedto storiesand film slantedtoward the brave freedom fighters battling oppressive governmentforcesin behalf of the silent,suffering peopleof that tortured country.Then oneday thosesilentsufferingpeoplewereoffereda chance to vote to choosethe kind of governmentthey wanted.Suddenlythe freedomfightersin the hills were exposedfor what they really arci Cubanbackedguerrillas.. . . On electionday the people of El Salvador,an unprecedented[ 1.5million] of them, braved ambushand gunfire, trudging miles to vote for freedom." -President Reagan,in hislune I 1982speecb before both housesof the Brttisb Parliament, referring to the March 28 1982 election afiich resuhed in tbe ascensionof Roberto D'Aubuissonto the presidencyof the ConstituentAssembly. From whencehe shallcometo iudge the quick and speech the dead.I happenedto readPresidentReagan's one eveningin San Salvadorwhen PresidentReagan 28

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wasin fact on television,with Doris Day, inThe Winning Team, a 1952 Warner Brothers picture abour the baseballpitcher Grover ClevelandAlexander. I reachedthe stand at Thermopylaeat about the time thateI salztad or d.eI Salaador beganstringing cranberries and singing"Old St. Nicholas"with Miss D"y. *Muy bcnita," he saidwhen shetried out a rocking chair in herwedding dress."FelizNavidad,"they cried,and,in accentedEnglish, "Play ball!" As it happened"play ball" wasa phraseI hadcometo asociatein El Salvadorwith RobertoD'Aubuissonand hisfollowersin the NationalistRepublicanAlliance,or ARENA. "It's a processof letting certainpeopleknow they're going to have to play ball," embassypeople would say, and: "You take a guy who's young, and everything 'young' implies,you sendhim signals,he playsball, then we play ball." Americandiction in this situationtendstoward the studiedcasual,the can-do, asif sheercool andBaileybridgescould shapethe place up. Elliott Abrams toldThe NeasYork Times in July of.tggz that punishmentwithin the Salvadoranmilitary could be "e very importantsignthar you can'r do this stuffany more," meaningkill the citizens."If you clean up your act,all thingsarepossible," is the way Jeremiah O'Leary,a specialasistantto U.S.nationalsecurityadviser William Clark, describedthe American diplometic effort in an interview given Tbe Los Angeles Times)ust after the March 28 1982election.He was speculatingon how Ambassador DeaneHinton might be dealingwith D'Aubuisson."I kind of picture him saying, 'Goddamnit, Bobbie, you've got a problem

JOAN DIDION

and. . . if you're what everyone said you are, you're going to make it hard for everybody."' Roberto D'Aubuisson is a chain smoker, as were many of the people I met in El Salvador, perhaps becauseit is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote. I never met Maf or D'Aubuisson, but I was always interested in the adiectivesused to describe him. "Pathological" was the adjective, modifying "killer," used by former ambassadorRobert E. White (it was White who refused D'Aubuisson a visa, after which, according to the embassy's "Chronology of Events" for June 30 1980, "D'Aubuisson managesto enter the U.S. illegally and spends two days in Washington holding Pressconferences and attending luncheons before turning himself in to immigration authorities"), but "pathological" is not a word one heard in-country, where meaning tends to be transmitted in code. In-country one heard "young" (the "and everything 'young' implies" part was usually left tacit), even imt'impetuousrt' "impulsiver" "impatientr" "nermature" l vousr" "volatile," "high-strungr" "kind of coiled-up," and, most frequently, "intense," or iust "tense." Offhand it struck me that Roberto D'Aubuisson had some reasonto be tense,in that General Jos6Guillermo Garcfa, who had remained a main player through several changes of government, might logically perceive him as the wild card who could queer everybody's ability to refer to his election as a vote for freedom. As I write this I realize that I have fallen into the Salvadoran mindset, which turns on plot, and, since half the players at 30

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any given point in the gameare in exile,on the phrase "in touch with." "I've known D'Aubuissona long time," I was told by Alvaro Magafla,the banker the Army made,over D'Aubuisson's rather frenzied obiections ("We stoppedthat one on the one-yardline," DeaneHinton told me about D'Aubuison's play to block Magafia), provisionalpresidentof EI Salvador.We were sitring in his office upstairsat the CasaPresidencial,en ary and spaciousbuilding in the tropical colonialstyle, and he was drinking cup after Limogescup of black coffee, smokingone cigarettewith each,carefully, an unwilling actorwho intendedto survivethe accidentof being castin this production. "Since Molina was president.I usedto come here to SeeMolina, D'Aubuison would be here, he was a young man in military intelligence, I'd seehim here." He grzedtoward the corridor thar opened onto the interior courtyard, with cannas, oleander,a fountain not in operation. "When we're alonenow I uy to talk to him. I do talk to him, he's coming for lunch today. He never callsme Alvaro, it's always usted, Sefror, Doctor, I call him Roberto. I say,Roberto, don't do this, don't do that, you know." Magafiastudiedin the United States,at Chicago,and his four oldest children are now in the United States, one son at Vanderbilt, a son and a daughterar Santa Clara,and anotherdaughternearSantaClara,at Notre Damein Belmont.He is connectedby money,education, and temperementto oligarchal families.AII the players here are denselyconnected: Magaffa'ssister, who livesin California,is the besrfriend of Nora Ungo, 31

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the wife of Guillermo Ungo, and Ungo spoke to Magaffa's sister in August of t9g2 when he was in which California raising money for the FMLNJDR, government is what the opposition to the Salvadoran was called this yeer. The membership and even the initials of this opposition tend to the fluid, but the broad strokes are these: the FMLN-FDR is the coalidon between the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) and the five guerrilla groups ioined together in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front These five groups are the SalvadoranCommunist Party (PCS), the Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL), the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (PRTC), the People's Revolutionary Army (FMLN).

(ERP), and the Armed Forces of Nadonal Resistance (FARN). Within each of thesegrouPs' there are further factions, and sometimeseven further initials, as in the PRS andLP-28 of the ERP. During the time that D'Aubuisson was trying to stoP Magafia's appointment es provisional president' members of ARENA, which is supported heavily by other oligarchal elements, passed out leaflets referring to Magafia, predictably, as a communist, and, more interesdngllr as "the little J.*." The manipulation of anti-Semitism is an undercurrent in Salvadoranlife that is not much discussedand probably worth some study, since it refers to a tension within the oligarchy itself, the tension between those families who solidified their holdings in the mid-nineteenrh century and those later families, some of them Jewish, who arrived in El Salvador and entrenched themselvesaround 1900.I recall asking a well-ofi Salvadoran about the numbers of his 32

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acquaintances within the oligarchy who have removed themselvesand their money to Miami. "Mostlv the Jews,"he said. "In SanSalvador in the year 1965 the bestsellers of the three mostimportant book stores were: The Protocolsof the Eldersof Zion; a few booksby diarrheticSomerset Maugham; a book of disagreeably obviouspoems by a lady with a Europeanname who nonetheless writesin Spanishaboutour counffy and a collectionof Reader'sDigestcondensed novels." -(($4n Salaador"by Roque Dalton, translated by EdusardBdker. The late Roque Dalton Garcfa was born into the Salvadoranbourgeoisiein 1935,spenr some years in Havana,cemehomein 1973to join the ERP, or the People'sRevolutionaryArmy, and, in 1975,was executed,on chargestharhewasa CIA agent,by his own comrades.The actual executionerwas said to be JoaquinVillalobos,who is now aboutthirty yearsold, commanderof the ERP,anda key figurein the FMLN, which,asthe Mexicanwriter GabrielZaid pointed out 55

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in the winter 1982issueof Dissenf,has as one of its support groups the Roque Dalton Culrural Brigade. The Dalton execution is frequently cited by people who want to stressthat "the other sidekills peopletoo, you know," an argumentcommonmainly emongthose, like the State Department, with a stake in whatever government is current in El Salvador,since, if it is taken for granted in Salvador that the government kills, it is also taken for granted that the other side kills; that everyonehaskilled, everyonekills now, and, if the history of the place suggestsany pettern' everyone will continueto kill. "Don't say I saidthis, but there are no issueshere," I was told by a high-placedSalvadoran."There are only ambitions."He meant of coursenot that there were no ideasin conflict but that the conflictingideas were held exclusivelyby peoplehe knew, that, whateverthe outcomeof enyfighting or negotiationor couP would ultimately or countercoup,the CasaPresidencial but by Maryknolls and campesinos not by occupied be the alreadyentitled,by. GuillermoUngo or a Joaquin Villalobos or evenby Roque Dalton'sson' Juan Jos6 Dalton, or by JuanJos6Dalton'scomradein the FPL, Jos6Antonio MoralesCarbonell,the guerrilla son of Jos6Antonio Morales Ehrlich, a former memberof the Duartejunta who had himselfbeenin exileduring the Romeroregime.In an open letter written shortly before his arrestin San Salvadorin June 1980,Josd Antonio MoralesCarbonellhadchargedhisfatherwith an insufficient appreciationof "Yankee imperialism." Jos6Antonio MoralesCarbonellandJuanJos6Dalton t+

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tried togetherro enrerthe United Statesin the summer of 1982,for a speakingengagement in SanFrancisco, but were refused visasby the American embassyin Mexico Ciry. Whatever the issu.swere that had divided Morales Carbonellandhisfather andRoqueDalton andJoaqufn Villalobos, the prominent Salvadoranto whom I was talking seemedto be saylng,they were issuesthat fell somewhereoutside the lines normally drawn to indicate"left" and "right." That this man sa,wla sitaacifin asonly one more realignmentof power amongthe entitled, a conflict of "ambitions" rather than "issues,,' was,f recognized,what many peoplewould call a conventionalbourgeoisview of civil conflict, and offered no solutions,but the people with solutions ro offer were mainly somewhereelse,in Mexico or Panamaor Washington.

The place brings everything into question. One afternoonwhen I had run out of the Halazonetablets I dropped every night in a pitcher of tap water (a dementedgringd gesnrre,I knew eventhen, in a country where everyonenot born there wes ar leastmildly ill, including the nurse at the American embassy),I walked acrossthe streetfrom the Camino Real to the Metrocenter,which is referred to locally as ,,Central America'sLargestShoppingMall." I found no Halazone^t the Metrocenterbut becameabsorbedin making notesaboutthe mallitself,aboutthe Muzak playing "I Left My Heart in SanFrancisco" and ,,American 3t

JOAN DIDION

Pie" (". . . singing this'Lr)illbe the day tbat I die . . .") although the record store featured a cassettecalled Classicsof Paragu'a1,about the pdtd de foie gras for salein the supermarket,about the guard who did the weaponscheck on everyonewho enteredthe supermarket, about the young matrons in tight Sergio Valente ieans,trailing maidsand babiesbehindthem and buying towels,big beachtowels printed with mapsof Manhattan that featured Bloomingdale's;about the number of things for sale that seemedto suggesta fashion for "smart drinking," to evoke modishcocktail hours. There were bonles of Stolichneyl vodka and mixer, there were ice buckpackagedwith glasses ets, there were bar czrts of every conceivabledesigR, displayedwith samplebottles. This wasa shoppingcenterthat embodiedthe future for which El Salvadorwas presumablybeing saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this beingthe kind of "color" I knew how to interpret,the kind of inductive iron/, the detail that was supposedto illuminate the story.As I wrote it down I realizedthat I wesno longer much interestedin this kind of irony, that this wes e story that would not be illuminatedby such details, that this was a story that would perhapsnot be ilevenlessa "story" luminatedat all,that thiswasperhaPs than a true nocheobscura.As I waited to crossback over the Boulevardde los Heroesto the CaminoReal I noticed soldiersherding a young civilianinto a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead,not wanting to seeanythingat all.

36

"12/11/81: El Salvador'sAtlacatl Battalionbegrns L 6-day offensive sweep against guerrilla strongholds in Morezin."

-From

the U.S. Embassy"Chronology of Eaents."

"The departmentof Morazin, one of the country's most embattledareas,wes the sceneof another armed forces operationin December,the fourth in Morazin during 1981.. . . The hamlet of Mozote was completelywiped out. For this reason,the severalmassacres which occurred in the samearee at the sametime are collectively known as the 'Mozote massecre.' The apparent solesurvivor from Mozote,RufinaAmaya,thirtyeight years old, escapedby hiding behind trees near the housewhere sheand the other women hadbeenimprisoned.Shehastestifiedthat on Friday, Decemberll, troopsarrived and begantaking people from their homesar about 5 in the morning.. . . At noon, the men were blindfolded and killed in the rown'scenter.Among them was Amaya'shusband,who was nearly blind. In the eerly afternoon the young .womenwere taken to the hills nearbn where they were raped, then 37

JOAN DIDION

kilted and burned. The old women were taken next end shot. . . . From her hiding place,Amaya heard soldiers discusschoking the children to death;subsequentlysheheardthe children calling for help, but no shots.Among the children murderedwere three of Amaya's,all under ten years of age.. . . It shouldbe stressedthat the villagers in the area had been warned of the impending military operationby the FMLN and some did leave.Thosewho choseto stay,suchasthe evangelical Protestantsand others,consideredthemselvesneutralin the conflict andfriendly with the 'Becausewe army. According to Rufina Amaya, knew theArmy people,we feltsafe.'Herhusband, shesaid,had beenon good terms with the local 'a military and evenhad what shecalled military safe-conduct.'Amaya and other survivors[of the nine hamletsin which the killing took placel accusedthe Atlacatl Battalionof a maior role in the killing of civiliansin the Mozote LreL" -From

tbe luly 20 1982Supplemm'tto the "Report on Human Rights in El Salaador" and prepmedby AmericasWatcb Commi.ttee tbe AmericanCivil LibertiesUnion.

At the time I was in El Salvador,six months after and a the eventsreferred to as the Mozote messacre 1982 cerReagan's President month or so before July tification that sufficientprogresswas being made in specifiedereas("human rights," and "land reform," and "the initiation of a democraticpolitical process," 38

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phrasesso remote in situ as to render them hallucinatory) to qualify El Salvadorfor continuingaid,a maior offensivewas taking placein Moraz6n,up in the mean hill country between the garrison town of San Fran, ciscoGoteraandthe Honduranborder.ThisJune 1982 fighting wasreferred to by both sidesasthe heaviestof the war to date, but actual information, on this as on all subjectsin SanSalvador,was hard to comeby. Reports drifted back. The Atlacatl, which wes trained by American advisersin 1981,was definitely up thereagain,aswere two other battalions,the Atonal, trained,like the Atlacatl, by Americansin El Salvador, andthe Ram6nBelloso,just back from training ar Forr Bragg.Every morning COPREFA, the pressoffice at the Ministry of Defense,reported many FMLN casualties but few government. Every afternoon Radio Venceremos,the clandestineguerrillaradio station,reported meny government casualtiesbut few FMLN. The only way to get eny senseof what washappening was to go up there,but Morazin was hard to reach: a key bridge betweenSan Salvadorand the easternhalf of the country, the Puente de Oro on the Rio Lempa, had beendynamitedby the FMLN in October 1981, and to reachSanFrancisco Gotera it was now necessaryeitherto crossthe Lempaon a railroadbridge or to fly, which meant going out to the military airport, Ilopango,andtrying to ger oneof the seven-passenger prop planesthat the Gutierrez Flying Serviceoperated betweenIlopangoandagrassyfield outsideSanMiguel. At SanMiguel one could sometimes get a taxi willing to go on up to SanFranciscoGotera,or a bus,the prob-

JOAN DIDION

lem with a bus being that even a roadblock that ended well (no one killed or detained) could take hours, while every pessengerwas questioned.Between san Miguel and Gotera, moreover, there was a further problem, another blown bridge, this one on the Rio Seco, which wussecoenough in the dry months but often impassable in the wet. June was wet. The Rio Seco seemed doubtful. Everything about the day ahead, on the morning I started for Gotera, seemeddoubtful, and that I ser out on such a venture with a real lightening of the spirit sugges$ to me now how powerfully I wanted to get out of San Salvador, to spend t dey free of its ambiguous tension, its overcast, its mood of wety somnambulism. It was only a trip of perhaps eighty miles, but getting there took most of the morning. There was, first of all, the wait on the runwey at llopango while the pilot tried to get the enginesto catch. "Cinco minu,tos," he kept saying, and, as a wrench was produced, "Mommtito." Thunderclouds were massingon the mountains to the east.Rain spattered the fuselage. The plane was full, seven paying Passengersat ninetyfive colonesthe round trip, and we watched the tinkering without comment until one and finally both of the enginesturned over. Once in the air I was struck, as always in Salvador, by the miniature aspect of the countrlrr an entire republic smaller than some California counties (smaller than San Diego County, smaller than Kern or Inyo, smaller by two-and-a-half times than San Bernardino), the very circumstance thet has encouraged the illusion +0

SALVADOR

that the placecanbe managed,salvaged,a kind of pilot proiect, Iike TVA. There below us in a twenry-fiveminute flight lay half the country, t landscapealready denselygreen from the rains that had begun in May, intenselycultivated,deceptivelyrich, the coffeespreading down every ravine, the volcanic rangeslooming abruptly andthen receding.I watchedthe slopesof the mountainsfor signsof fighting but sawnone.I watched for the hydroelectricworks on the Lempabut sawonly the blown bridge. There were four of us on the fight that morning who wantedto go on to Gotera, my husbandand I and ChristopherDickey from The Wdshington Post end JosephHarmesfrom Neassq,pee, , and when the plane set down on the grassstrip outside San Miguel a deal was stmck with a taxi driver willing to take us ar leasr to the Rio Seco.We sharedthe taxi asfar asSanMiguel with a local woman who, although sheand I sat on a single bucket seat,did not speak,only staredstraight ahead,clutching her bag with one hand and trying with the other to keepher skirt pulled down over her black laceslip.When shegor out ar SanMiguel there remainedin the taxi a traceof her perfume,Arplge. In SanMiguel the streetsshowedthe marksof January's fighting, and many sructures were boardedup, abandoned.There had been a passablemotel in San Miguel, but the owners had managedto leave the country. There had beena passableplaceto eat in San Miguel, but no more.Occasionalroop trucks hurtled pasqpresumablyreturning empty from the front, and we all madenote of them, dutifully. The heat rose. +L

JOAN DIDION

Sweat from my handkept blurring my tally of emPty troop trucks, and I copiedit on a clean Page,painstakingly, asif it mettered. The heat up here was drier than that in the capital, harsher,dustier, and by now we were resignedto ig resignedto the jolting of the taxi, resignedto the frequent occasionson which we were required to stoP, get out, presentour identification (carefully, reaching slowly into an outer pocket,everymovecalculatednot to startle the soldiers,many of whom seemedbarely pubescent,with the M-16s), and wait while the taxi was seerched.Someof the youngersoldierswore crucifixes wrapped with bright yarn' the pink and green of the yarn stainednow with dustand sweat.The taxi driver was perhapstwenty years older than most of thesesoldiers,a stocky, well-settledcitizen wearingexbut at eachroadblock,in a motion pensivesunglasses, as to be almostimperceptible,he would so abbreviated touch each of the two rosariesthat hung from the rearview mirror and crosshimself. By the time we reachedthe R(o Seco the question of whether or not we could crossit seemedinsignificant, anotherminor distractionin a day that hadbegun at six and was now, beforenine,alreadylessa day than a way of being alive. We would try, the driver announced,to ford the river, which appearedthat day to be running shallow and relatively fast over an unPredictablebed of sandandmud.We stoodfor a while on the bank and watcheda man with an earthmoverand winch try againand againto hook up his equipmentto a truck that hadfounderedmidstream.Smallboysdove 42

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repeatedlywith hooks,andrepeatedlysurfaced,unsuccesful. It did not seementirely promising,bur there it was,and there, in due time, we were: in the river, first following the sandbarin a wide crescenqthen off the bar, stuck, the enginedead.The taxi rocked gently in the current.The water bubbledinch by inch through the floorboards. There were women bathing naked in the shallows,and they paid no attention to the eafthmover, the small boys, the half-submergedtaxi, the gringosinside it. As we waited for our turn with the earthmoverit occurred to me thet fording the river in the morning meantonly that we were going to haveto ford it rgain in the afternoon, when the earthmover might or might not be around, but this was thinking ahead,and out of synchwith the dey at hand.

When I think now of that day in Gotera I think mainly of waiting, hangingaround,waiting outsidethe ctnrtel ("ConneNDo,"the signsread on the gates,and VERoES," with a greenberet) and waiting out"BorN.A.s sidethe church and waiting outsidethe Cine Morazah, where the posterspromisedFright and The Abominable Snowman end the open lobby was lined with .5O-caliber machinegunsand 120-mm.mobilemortars. There were soldiersbilleted in the Cine Morazdn,and a few of them kicked a soccerball, idly, among the mortars.Others fokedamongthemselvesat the corner, outsidethe saloon,and flirted with the women selling Coca-Colain the stallsberweenthe Cine Morazdn and the parishhouse.The parishhouseand the church and 43

JOAN DIDION

the stallsand the saloonand the Cine Morezin end the cunrtel all faced one another, acrosswhat was lessa squarethan a dusty widening in the road,an arrangeA.y ment that lent Goteraa certainprosceniumasPect. event at all-the arrival of an armoredpersonnelcarrier, say, or a funeral processionoutsidethe church: instantly into an oPera,with tendedto metamorphose all playersonstage:the Soldiersof the Garrison,the Young Ladiesof the Town, the Vendors'the Priests, the Mourners,and, sincewe were onstegeas well, a dissonantand provocative element, the norteamericonos,in norteamericanocostume,old Abercrombie khakis here,Adidas sneakersthere, a Lone Star Beer caP. We stood in the sun and tried to avoid adverseattendon. We drank Coca-Colaand madesurreptitious notes.We lookedfor the priestsin the parishofficebut found only the receptionist,a dwarf. We presentedour credentialsagainand againat the cudrtel,trying to see the colonel who could give us permissionto go up the few kilometers to where the fighting was, but the colonelwasout, the colonelwould beback,the colonel was delayed.The young officer in chargeduring the but he could not give us permission, colonel'sabsence had graduatedfrom the EscuelaMilitar in one of the classestrained in the spring of l9aZ et Fort Benning ("Mar-vel-ous!" was his impressionof Fort Benning) and seemedat leastamenableto us asAmericans.Possibly there would be a patrol going up. Posibly we could ioin it. In the end no patrol went up and the colonelnever +4

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cameback (the reasonthe colonelnevercameback is that he was killed that afternoon,in a helicopter crash nearthe Honduran border,but we did not learnthis in Gotera) and nothing cameof the day but overheard rumors,indefinite observations,fragmentsof information that might or might not fir into a pattern we did not perceive.One of the six A-37B Dragonfly attack ietsthat the United Stateshaddeliveredjust that week to llopangoscreamedlow overhead,then disappeared. A companyof soldiersburst through the cuartel gates and double-timedto the river, but when we caught up they were only bathing sheddingtheir uniforms and splashingin the shallowwarer.On the bluff abovethe river work was being completedon a helipad that was saidto covertwo messgra{esof deadsoldiers,but the graveswere no longer apparent.The taxi driver heard, from the soldierswith whom he talkedwhile he waited (talkedand playedcardsand ate tortillas and sardines and listenedto rock-and-roll on the taxi radio), that nvo whole companieswere mising in action, lost or dead somewherein the hills, but this was received information,and equivocal. In someweys the leastequivocalfact of the day was the singlebody we had seenthar morning on the road betweenthe Rio Secoand Gotera,nearSanCarlos,the nakedcorpseof a manaboutthirty with a cleanbullethole drilled neatly between his eyes.He could have beenstrippedby whoever killed him or, since this was a country in which clotheswere too valuableto leave on the dead,by someone who happened pesr:therewas no way of telling. In any casehis genitals had been 45

JOAN DIDION

coveredwith aleafy branch,presumablyby the campesinoswho were even then digging a greve.A subaersiao, the driver thought, becausethere was no family in evidence(to be relatedto someonekilled in El Salvadoris a prima facie deathwerrant, and families tend to vanish), but all anyonein Gotera seemedto know was that there had been another body at Precisely that place the morning before, and five others before that. One of the priestsin Goterahad happened to seethe body the morning before,but when he drove past San Carlos later in the day the body had been westrying to make buried.It wasagreedthat someone a point. The point was unclear.

We spentan hour or so that day with the priests,or with rwo of them, both lrish, and rwo of the nuns' one Irish and one American, all of whom lived together in the parish housefacing the cuartel in t situation that remainsin my mind as the one actual instanceI have witnessedof gracenot simply underpressurebut under siege.Except for the American,SisterPhyllis' who had arrived only a few months before, they had rll been in Gotera a long time, twelve years,nine years,long enoughto have establishedamongthemselvese greve a courtesy and good humor that companionableness, made the courtyard porch where we sat with them seemcivilization'slast standin Moraz6n,which in certainwaysitwas. The light on the porch wascool andaqueous,filtered through ferns and hibiscus,and therewere old wicker 46

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rockers and L map of PennoeuH Sex FneNcrsco GorBna.anda woodentablewith a typewriter,a canof Planter's Mixed Nuts, copies of Liaes of the Saints: Ilhtstrated md The Rules of the Secular Franciscan Order.In the shadowsbeyondthe tablewesa battered refrigeratorfrom which, after a while, oneof the priests got bottles of Pilsenerbeer, and we sat in the sedative halfJight and drank the cold beer and talked in a desultory way about nothing in particular, about the situation,but no solutions. These were not peoplemuch given to solutions,to abstracts:their lives were grounded in the specific. There had beenthe funeral that morning of a parishionerwho haddiedin the night of cerebralhemorrhage. There had beenthe two children who died that week, of diarrhea,dehydration,in the squattercampsoutside town where some12,000refugeeswere then gathered, many of them ill. There was no medicinein the camps. There was no weter anywhere, and had been none sincearound the time of the election, when the tank that suppliedGotera with water had beendynamited. Five or six weeksafter the tank was blown the rains had begun, which was bad in one way, becausethe rain washedout the latrinesat the camps,but good in enother, becauseat the parish house they were no Ionger dependententirely on water from the river, soupy with bacteriaand amoebaeand worms. "We have the roof water no'w," Sister Jean,the Irish nun, said. "Much cleaner.It's greenish yellow, the river water, we only useit for the toilets." There had been, they agreed,fewer dead around +7

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since the election, fewer bodies, they thought, than rn the capital, but as they began reminding one another of this body or that there still seemedto have been quite a few. They spoke of thesebodies in the matter-of-fact way that they might have spoken, in another kind of parish, of confirmation candidates, or casesof croup. There had been the few up the road, the two at Yoloaiquin. Of course there had been the forty-eight near Barrios, but Barrios was in April. "A gaardia wrc killed last Wednesday," one of them recalled. "Thursday." "Was it Thursday then, Jerry?" "A sniper." "That's what I thought. A sniper." We left the parish house that day only becauserain seemedabout to fall, and it was clear that the Rio Seco had to be crossed now or perhaps not for days. The priests kept a guest book, and I thought as I signed it that I would definitely come back to this porch, come back with antibiotics and Scotch and time to spend,but I did not get back, and some weeks after I left El Salvador I heard in a third-hand way that the parish house had been at least temporarily abandoned, that the priests, who had been under threats and pressurefrom the garrison, had somehowbeen forced to IeaveGotera. I recalled that on the day before I left El Salvador Deane Hinton had askedme, when I mentioned Gotera, if I had seenthe priests,and had expressedconcern for their situation. He was particularly concerned about the American, Sister Phyllis (an American nun in a parish under siege in a part of the country even then under attack from American A-378s was nothing the 48

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American embassyneeded in those last delicate weeks before certification), and had at some point expressed this concern to the comrndante at the garrison. The comandante, he said, had been surprised to learn the nationalities of the nuns and priests; he had thought them French, becausethe word used to describe them was always "Franciscan." This was one of those occasionalwindows that open onto the heart of El Salvador and then close, a glimpse of the impenetrable interior.

At the time I was in El Salvador the hostilities at hand were referred to by those reporters still in the country as "the number-four wer," after Beirut, IranIra{, and the aftermath of the Falklands. So many reporters had in fact abandoned the Hotel Camino Real in San Salvador (gone home for a while, or gone to the Intercontinental in Managua, or gone to whatever hotels they frequented in Guatemala and Panama and Tegucigalpa) that the dining room had discontinued its breakfast buffet, e, fact often remarked upon: no breakfast buffet meant no action, little bang-bang, a period of editorial indifference in which stories were filed and held, and film rarely made the network news. "Get an NBC crew up from the Falklands, we might get the buffet back," they would say, and, "It hots up a little, we could have the midnight movies." It seemed that when the networks arrived in force they brought movies down, and showed them at midnight on their video recorders,,Apocaly pseN ott, and Woody Allen's Banands.

JOAN DTDTON

Meanwhileonly the regularswere there. "Are you going out today?" they would sey to one anotherat breakfast,and, "This might not be a bad day to look around." The Avis counter in the bar suppliedsigns reading"PRBNslINrBnNlcroNAL"with every car and with a typed van,andmodifiedits insuranceagreements clauseexcluding damageincurred by terrorists.The American embassydeliveredtranslatedtranscriptsof Radio Venceremos,preparedby the CIA in Panama. The COPREFA office at the Ministry of Defensesent over "urgent" notices, taped to the front desk, announcing eventsspecificallydevised,in those weeks beforecertification,for the Americanpress:the ceremonial transfer of land titles, and the ritual display of "defectors,"terrifiedJookingmenwho were reported in La PrensaGrifica to have"abandonedthe ranks of subversion, weary of somany liesandfalsepromises." A handful of reporters continued to cover these events,particularly if they were stagedin provincial garrisonsand offered the posibiliry of action en route, but action was lessthan certain,and the situation less accessible than it had seemedin the daysof the breakfast buffet. The American adviserswould talk to no one,although occasionallya repofter could find a few drinking at the Sheratonon Saturdaynight and initiate a little generalconversation.(That the American adviserswere still billeted at the Sheratonstruck me as somewhatperverse,pardcularly becauseI knew that the embassyhad moved its visiting AID people to a guardedhousein SanBenito, "FranklR I'd rather stay at the Sheraton,"an AID man hadtold me. "But since t0

SALVADOR

the two union guys got killed at the Sheraton,they want us here.") The era in which the guerrillascould be found lust by going out on the highwayhadlargely ended;the only certain way to spendtime with them now was to crossinto their territory from Honduras, through conta$ with the leadershipin Mexico. This was a processthat tended to discourageday-tripping, and in any caseit was no longer a war in which the LrNBs,Er, dateline"SoprnwttnneBnsrNp Gupnnrr"r.e, Ser,veuon"wes presumedautomatically to illuminate much at all. Everyonehadalreadyspenttime, too, with the availablegovernmentplayers,most of whom had grown so practicedin the processthat their interviewswere now performances,lessapt to be reported than reviewed, and analyzedfor subtle changesin delivery. Roberto D'Aubuissonhad eventaken part, wittingly or unwittingly, in an actual performance: a sceneshot by a Danishfilm crew on location in Haiti and El Salvador for a movie about a foreign correspondenqin which the actor playing the correspondent"interviewed" D'Aubuisson, on camera,in his office. This Danish crew treated the Camino Real not only as a normal location hotel (the star, for example,was the only personI ever saw swim in the CaminoReal pool) but alsoasa story element,on oneoccasionshootinge scene in the bar, which lent daily life during their stay e peculiar extra color. They left San Salvadorwithout makingit entirely clear whetheror not they had ever told D'Aubuissonit wasiust a movie.

51

r twenty-two minutespast midnight on SaturdayJune lg, 1982,therewasa maior earthquake in El Salvador,one that collapsedshacksand set off andinjured severalhundredpeoplebut killed landslides only about a dozen (I say "ebout" a dozen because figures on this, as on everything else in Salvador, varied), surprisingly few for an earthquakeof this one'sapparentintensity (Cal Tech registeredit at 7.0 on the Richter scale,Berkeley ^t 7.+) and length, thirty-seven seconds.For the severalhours that precededthe earthquakeI had beenseizedby the kind of amorphousbad mood that my grandmother believed an adiunct of what is calledin California"earthquake weather," a sultriness,a stillness'an unnaturallight; the iitters. In fact there wasno particularprescienceabout my bad mood,sinceit is alwaysearthquakeweatherin SanSalvador,and the iitters are endemic. I recall having comeback to the CaminoReal about ten-thirty that Friday night, after dinner in a Mexican restaurent on the PaseoEscal6n with a Salvadoran painternamedVictor Barriere,who hadsaid,when we met at a party t few daysbefore,that he was interested they sooften czmeand in talkingto Americansbecause went with no understandingof the country and its hist2

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tory. Victor Barrierecould offer, he explained,a special perspectiveon the country and its history, becausehe was a grandsonof the late GeneralMaximiliano Hern6ndezMartinez, the dictator of El Salvadorbetween 1931and l9+4 and the authorof what Salvadorans still the massacre, cill ld matonz,a, or "killing" thoseweeks in 1932whenthe governmentkilled uncountablethousandsof citizens, a lesson. ("IJncountable" because estimatesof thosekilled vary from six or seventhousandto thirty thousand.Even higher figuresare heard in Salvador,but, asThomasP. Andersonpointed out in Matanza:EI Salvodor'sConnnunistReaoh of 1932, "Salvadorans,Iike medievalpeople,tend to us€ numbers like fifty thousand simply to indicate a great number-statistics are not their strongpoint.") As it happenedI had beeninterestedfor someyears in GeneralMartinez, the spirit of whoseregimewould seemto haveinformed Gabriel GarciaMirquez's Tbe Autunm of the Patridrch.This originalpatriarch,who wasmurderedin exilein Hondurasin 1966,wasa rather sinistervisionary who entrenchedthe military in Salvadoranlife, was said to haveheld sdances in the Casa and conductedboth the country'sand his Presidencial, own affairsalong lines dictated by eccentric insights, which hesometimes sharedby radiowith the remaining citizens: "It is good that children go barefoot.That way they can better receivethe beneficialeffiuvia of the planet,the vibrationsof the earth.Plantsand animalsdon't useshoes." 53

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But "Biologistshave discoveredonly five senses. in reality there are ten. Hunger, thirst, Procreation, urination, and bowel movementsare the not includedin the listsof biologists." senses I had first come acrossthis sideof GeneralMartinez in the United States Government Printing Office's Area Handbook f or El Safuador,L generallystraightforward volume ("designedto be useful to military and other personnelwho needa convenientcompilabetweenthe tion of basicfacts") in which, somewhere basic facts about General Martinez's progrem for buildingschoolsandthe basicfactsaboutGeneralMartfnez's program for increasingexports,there aPpears this sentence:"He kept bottlesof colored water that including he dispensedascuresfor almostany disease, cancerand hearttroublenand reliedon complexmagical formulas for the solution of nationalproblems." This sentencespringsfrom theArea Handbookf or El Salaadorasif printed in neon,and is followed by one evenmorearresting:"During an epidemicof smallpox in the capital,he attemptedto halt its spreadby stringing the city with a web of coloredlights." Not a night passedin SanSalvadorwhen I did not imagineit strungwith thosecoloredlights,and I asked Victor Barriere what it had been like to grow up as the grandsonof GeneralMartinez.Victor Barrierehad studied for e while in the United States,at the San Diego campusof the University of California,and he spoke perfect unaccentedEnglish,with the slightly formal constructionsof the foreignspeaker,in a fluted, 5+

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melodic voice that seemedalways to suggesta higher reasonableness. The generalhad been, he said, sometimes misunderstood.V.ry sffong men often were. had beeninevitable.Someonehad to Certain excesses take charge."It wes sometimesstrangegoing to school with boys whosefathersmy grandfatherhad ordered shot," he allowed,but he rememberedhis grandfather mainly asa "forceful" man,a man "capableof inspiring great loyalty," a theosophistfrom whom it had been possibleto learn an appreciationof "the classics,""a senseof history," "the Germans."The Germansespecially had influencedVictor Barriere'ssenseof history. "When you've read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,what's happenedhere,what'shappeninghere,well ." Victor Barriere had shrugged, and the subject changed,althoughonly fractionally, sinceEl Salvador is one of thoseplacesin the world where thereis lust one subfect, the situation, the problenn, its various facetspresentedover andover again,ason a stereopticon. One turn, and the facet was former ambasador Robert White: "A real jerk." Another, the murder in March of tggOof ArchbishopOscarArnulfo Romero: "A real bigot." At first I thought he meantwhoever stood outsidean open door of the chapelin which the Archbishop was sayingmassand drilled him through the heartwith e .Z}-caliberdumdumbullet,but he did not: "Listening to that man on the radio every Sunday," he said, "was like listeningto Adolf Hitler or BenitoMussolini."In any case:"We don't reallyknow who killed him, do we? It could have been the right . . ." He drew the words out, cantabile."Or . . . 55

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it could have been the left. We have to ask ourselves, who gained? Think about it, Joan." I said nothing. I wanted only for dinner to end. Victor Barriere had brought a friend along, a young man from Chalatenango whom he was teaching to paint, and the friend brightened visibly when we stood up. He was eighteen years old and spoke no English and had sat through the dinner in polite misery. "He can't even speak Spanish properly," Victor Barriere said, in front of him. "However. If he were cutting cane in Chalatenango,he'd be taken by the Army and killed. If he were out on the street here he'd be killed. So. He comes every day to my srudio, he learns to be a primitive painter, and I keep him from getting killed. It's better for him, don't you agree?" I said that I agreed. The rwo of them were going back to the house Victor Barriere shared with his mother, L diminutive woman he addressed as "Mommy," the daughter of General Martinez, and, after I dropped them there it occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presenceof obvious "material" and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread. One of the most active death squadsnow operating in El Salvador calls itself the Maximiliano Hernindez Mart(nez Brigade, but I had not askedthe grandson about that.

In spite of or perhaps becauseof the fact that San Salvador had been for more than two years under an almost constanr state of siege,a city in which arbitrary 56

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detentionhad beenlegalized (Revolutionary Governing Junta Decree 507), curfew violations had been known to end in death,and many peopledid not leave their housesafter dark, a certain limited frivoliqy still obtained.When I got back to the CaminoReal after dinner with Victor Barriere that Friday night there was for examplea private parry at the pool, with live music,dancing,an acrual congaline. There were alsoa numberof peoplein the ber, many of them watching, on televisionmonitors,"SefioritaEl Salvador7982,"the selectionof El Salvador'sentry in "SefioritaUniverso 1982,"scheduledfor July 1982in Lima. Somethingabout "Sefiorita flniverso" struck a familiar note,andthen I recalledthat the MissUniverse conte$itselfhadbeenheldin SanSalvadorin 1975,and had endedin what might havebeenconsidereda predictable welr with student protes$ about the money the governmentwas spendingon the contest,pnd the government's predictableresponse, which wasto shoot someof the studentson rhe streetand disappear others. (Desaparecer,or "disappear," is in Spanishboth an intransitiveand a transitiveverb, and this flexibiliry has beenadoptedby thosespeakingEnglishin El Salvador, asinlohn Sullh,tan wasdisappeared fram the Sberatan; tbe goaemmentdisappedredthe students,there being no equivalentsituation,and so no equivalentword, in English-speaking cultures.) No mentionof "Sefiorita [.Iniversolg7S" dampened "SefioritaEl Salvador1982,"which, by the time I got upstairs,hadreachedthe point when eachof the finalists was askedto pick a question from a basket and 57

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answerit. The quesdonshadto do with the hopesand dreamsof the contestants,and the answersran to "Diosr" "PAzr""El Salvador."A localentertainerwearing a white dinner iacket and a claret-coloredbow tie sang"The Imposible Dream,"in Spanish.The iudges and the moment of decision begantheir deliberations, 1982would be Sefforita El Salvador arrived: Sefiorita San Vicente, Miss JeannetteMarroquinn who was severalinchestaller than the other finalists,and more gringa-looking.The four runners-up reacted, on the whole, with rether lessgrace than is the custom on theseoccasions,and it occurredto me that this was a contestin which winning meantmore than a scholarship or a screentest or a new wardrobe; winning here could mean the difference between life and casual death, a provisional safe-conductnot only for the winner but for her entire family' "God damnit, he cut inauguralribbons,heshowed himself large as life in public taking on the risks of power as he had neverdone in more peaceful times,what the hell, he played endlessgamesof dominoeswith my lifetime friend General Rodrigo de Aguilar and my old friend the minister of healthwho were the only oneswho . . . daredask him to receive in a specialaudiencethe beauty queen of the poor, an incredible creature from that miserablewallow we call the dogfight district. . . . fil not only receive her in a special audiencebut I'll dancethe first weltz with her,by he God, havethem write it up in the newsPaPers, 58

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ordered,this kind of crap makesa big hit with the poor. Yet, the night after the audience,he commentedwith a ceftain bitternessto GeneralRodrigo de Aguilar that the queenof the poor wasn't evenworth dancingwith, that shewasescommon as so meny other slum Manuela Sdnchezes with her nymph's dres of muslin petticoatsand the gilt crown with artificial iewels anda rosein her hand under the watchful eye of a morher who looked after her as if shewere madeof gold, so he gaveher everythingshewantedwhich wasonly electricity and running water for the dogfight district. . . ." That is Gabriel Garcfa Mirquez, The Autumn. of the Patriarch. On this evening that began with the grandsonof GeneralMaximilianoHern indez Martinez and progressedto "Sefiorita El Salvador1982" and ended,at 12222t.u., with the earthquake,I beganto seeGabriel Garcia Mirquez in a new light, asa social realist.

There were a numberof metaphorsto be found in this earthquake,not the least of them being that the one mafor building to suffer exrensivedamagehappenedalso to be the maior building mosr specifically and elaboratelydesignedto withstandearthquakes, the American embassy. When this embassywas built, in 1965,the idea was that it would remainfluid under stress,its deeppilings shifting and sliding on Teflon

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pads, but over the past few years, as shelling the embassy came to be a favorite way of expressing dissatisfaction on all sides,the structure became so fortified-the steel exterior walls, the wet sandbagsaround the gun emplacements on the roof, the bomb shelter dug out underneath-as to render it rigid. The ceiling fell in Deane Hintonrs office that night. Pipes burst on the third floor, fooding everything below. The elevator was disabled, the commissery a sea of shattered glass. The Hotel Camino Real, on the other hand, which would appear to have been thrown together in the insouciant tradition of most tropical construction, did a considerable amount of rolling (I recall crouching under a door frame in my room on the seventh floor and watching, through the window, the San Salvador volcano appear to rock from left to right), but when the wrenching stopped and candles were found and everyone got downstairs nothing was broken, not even the glassesbehind the bar. There was no electricity, but there was often no electricity. There were sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire on the street (this had made getting downstairs more problematic than it might have been, since the emergency stairway was exPosedto the street), but sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire on the street were not entirely unusual in San Salvador. ("sometimes it happenswhen it rains," someonefrom the embassy had told me about this phenomenon. "They get excited.") On the whole it was businessas usual at the Camino Real, particularly in the discothdque off the lobby, where, by the time I got down60

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stairs, an emerg'ency generator seemedalready to have been activated, waiters in black cowboy hats darted about the dance floor carrying drinks, and dancing continued, to Jerry Lee Lewis's "Grear Balls of Fire."

Actual information was hard to come by in El Salvador, perhaps because this is not a culture in which a high value is placed on the definite. The only hard facts on the earthquake, for example, arrived at the Camino Real that night from New York, on the AP wire, which reponed the Cal Tech reading of T.A Richter on an earthquake cenrered in the Pacific some sixty miles south of San Salvador. Over the next few days, as damage reports appearedin the local pepers, the figure varied. One day the earthquake had been a 7.0 Richter, another day a 6.8. By Tuesday it was again a 7 in La Prensa Grdfica, but on a different scale altogether, not the Richter but the Modified Mercalli. All numbers in El Salvador tended to materialize and vanish and rematerialize in a different form, as if numbers denoted only the "use" of numbers, an intention, a wish, a recognition that someone,somewhere, for whatever reason,neededto hear the ineffable expressed asa number. At any given time in El Salvador a great deal of what goes on is considered ineffable, and the useof numbers in this context tends to frustrate people who try to understand them literally, rather than as propositions to be foated, "heardr" "mentioned." There was the case of the March 28 1982 election, about which there continued into that summer the 6l

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rather scholasticargument first posed by Centrnl American Studies,the publication of the Jesuit university in San Salvador:Had it taken an averageof 2.5minutesto casta vote,or less?Couldeachballotbox hold 500 ballots,or more? The numberswere eerily Salvadoran.There were said to be 1.3 million people eligibteto vote on March 28, but 1.5 million people were saidto havevoted.These1.5million peoplewere said,in turn, to representnot 115percentof the 1.3 million eligiblevotersbut 80 Percent(or, on another float, "62-68 percent") of the eligiblevoters,who accordingly no longernumbered1.3million,but a larger number. In any caseno one really knew how many eligiblevoterstherewere in El Salvador,or evenhow meny people.In any caseit had seemednecessaryto provide a number.In any casethe electionwas over' a la solacifinpacif'ca. success, Similarly, there wes the question of how much money had left the country for Miami since 19792 DeaneHinton, in March of 1982,estimated$74Omillion. The Salvadoranminister of planningestimated, the samemonth, twice that. I recall askingPresident Magaffa,when he happenedto saythat he had goneto lunch every Tuesday for the Pastten years with the officers of the Central ReserveBank of El Salvador, which reviewsthe very exPortandimport ffansactions through which money traditionally leavestroubled countries,how much he thoughtwasgone."You hear figures mentioned," he said. I askedwhat figures he heardmentionedat theseTuesdaylunches."The figure they mentionedis six hundred million," he said. He 62

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watched as I wrote that down, 600,000,000, cennal bank El Salaador."The figure the FederalReservein New York mentioned,"he added, "is one thousand million." He watched as I wrote that down too, 11000,000,000, Fed NY. "Those peopledon't want to stay for life in Miami," he said then, but this did nor entirelyaddressthe question,nor wasit meanrto. Not only numbersbut namesare understoodlocally to haveonly a situationalmeaning,and the changeof a nameis meantto be acceptedasa changein the nature of the thing named.ORDEN, for example,the paramilitaryorganizarionformally foundedin 1968to function, along classicpatronagelines, as the government'seyesandearsin the countryside,no longerexists as ORDEN, or the Organizaci6n Democr6tica Nacionalista,but asthe Frente DemocrdticaNacionalista, a transubstantiationnoted only cryptically in the State Department'sofficial"justification" for the January28 1982certification:"The Salvadorangovernment,since the overthrow of GeneralRomero, hastaken explicit ectionsto end humanrights abuses.The paramilitary organization'ORDEN' has been oudawed,although someof itsf ormermembersmay still beactiae.,'(Italics added.) This tactic of solving a problem by changing its nameis by no meanslimited to the government.The small office on the archdiocesegrounds where the scrapbooksof the deadare kept is still called,by virtually everyonein SanSalvador,"the Human Rights Commission"(Comisi6nde los DerechosHumanos), but in fact both the Human Rights Commissionand 6'

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Socorro Juridico, the archdiocesan legal aid office, were ordered in the spring of tggZ to vacate the church propert/r and, in the local weft did so: everything pretty much stayed in place, but the scrapbooksof the dead were thereafter kept, officially, in the "Oficina de Tutela Legal" of the "Comisi6n Arquidiocesana de Justicia y PmJ' (This "Human Rights Commission," in any case,is not to be confused with the Salvadoran government's "Commission on Human Rights," the formation of which was announced the day before a scheduled meeting between President Magafia and Ronald Reagan. This official comisidn is a sevenmember panel notable for its inclusion of Colonel Carlos Reynaldo L6pez Nuila, the director of the National Police.) This renaming was refcrred to as a "reorganization," which is one of many words in El Salvador that tend to signal the presence of the ineffable. Other such words are "improvement," "perfection" (reforms are never abandoned or ignored, only "p.tfected" or "improved"), and that favorite from other fronts, "pacification." Language has always been used a little differendy in this part of the world (an apparent statement of fact often expresses something only wished for, or something that might be true, a storlr as in Garcia Mdrquez's mdny years later, as be faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Bumdia ru,asto remember that distant afternoon when his f ather took him to discwer ice), but "improvement" and "perfection" and "pacification" derive from another tradi-

6+

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tion. Languageasit is now usedin El Salvadoris the languageof advertising,of persuasion, the product being one or anotherof the solucianescrafted in Washingtonor Parlama or Mexico,which is partof the place's pervasiveobscenity. This languageis sharedby Salvadorans and Americans,asif a linguistic deal had beencut. "Perhapsthe most striking measureof progress[in El Salvador]," AssistantSecretaryof StateThomasEnderswasableto sayin August of.tggZin a speechat the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco,"is the transformation of the military from an institution dedicatedto the statusquo to one that spearheads land reform and supportsconstitutional democracy." Thomas Enders was able to say this precisely becausethe Salvadoranminister of defense,General Jos6 Guillermo Garcia, had so superior a dedicationto his own sratusquo that he played the American card as Roberto D'Aubuisson did not, played the game,played ball, understoodthe importanceto Americansof symbolicaction:the importance of letting the Americanshave their land reform program,the importanceof letting the Americanspretend that while "democracyin El Salvador"may remain "a slenderreed" (that was Elliott Abramsin The New York Times), the situationis onein which "progress" is measurable ("the ministerof defense hasorderedthat all violations of citizens' rights be stopped immediatelyi' the StateDepartmentnoted on the occasionof the July 1982certification,a happy ending); the impoftanceof giving the Americansan acceptablepresi-

65

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dent, Alvaro Magafla, and of pretending that this acceptable president was in fact commander-in-chief of the armed forces, el generalisimo* la soluci6n. La solucifln chenged with the market. Pacification, although those places pacified turned out to be in need of repeated pacification, wx Ia soluci6n. The use of the word "negotiations," however abstract that use may have been, was la soluciiln. The election, although it ended with the ascensionof a man, Roberto D'Aubuisson, essentially hostile to American policf, was Ia solucifin for Americans. The land reform Program' grounded as it was in political rather than economic reality, was la soluci6n as symbol. "It has not been a total economic success," Peter Askin, the AID director working with the government on the program, told The Neat York Times in August 1981, "but up to this point it has been a political success.I'm firm on that. There does seem to be a direct correlation between the agrarian reforms and the Peasentsnot having become more radicalized." The land reform Program' in other words, was based on the principle of buying off, buying time, giving a linle to gain a lot, minifundismo in support of latifundismo, which, in a country where the left had no interest in keeping the peasentsless "radi cilized" and the right remained unconvinced that these peasantscould not simply be eliminated, rendered it a progrem about which only Americans could be truly enthusiastic, less a "reform" than an exercisein public relations. Even la verdad, the truth, was a degenerated phrase

66

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in El Salvador:on my first eveningin the country I wasaskedby a Salvadoranwomanat an embassypafty what I hoped to find our in El Salvador.I said that ideally I hopedto find out la aerdad,and shebeamed approvingly.Other journalists,shesaid,did not wanr ld aerddd.She called over rwo friends,who also approved: no one told la aerdad.If I wrote la aerdadit would be good for El Salvador.I realizedthat I had stumbledinto a code, that thesewomen used/a aerdad asit wasusedon the bumperstickersfavoredthat spring and summerby ARENA people."JounNer,rsrs,Trlr, rHe Tnurs!" the bumper stickerswarned in Spanish, and they meant the uuth according to Roberto D'Aubuisson.

In the absenceof information (and the presence, often, of disinformation) even the mosr apparently straightforwardevent takeson, in El Salvador,elusive shadows,like a fragment of retrieved legend. On the afternoonthat I was in SanFranciscoGotera trying to seethe commanderof the garrison there, this contandante,ColonelSalvadorBeltrin Luna,was killed, or wasgenerallybelievedto havebeenkilled, in the crash of a Hughes 500-D helicopter.The crash of a helicopterin a war zonewould seemto lend itself to only a limited numberof interpretations(the helicopterwas shot down, or the helicopter sufferedmechanicalfailure, are the two that cometo mind), but the crashof this particular helicopter became,like everything else

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in Salvador, an occasion of rumor, doubt, suspicion, conflicting reports, and finally a kind of listless uneasiness. The crashoccurred either near the Honduran border in Morazin or, the speculation went, actually in Honduras. There were or were not four people aboard the helicopter: the pilot, a bodyguard, Colonel Beltrin Luna, and the assistantsecretary of defense, Colonel Francisco Adolfo Castillo. At first all four were dead. A day later only three were dead: Radio Venceremos broadcast news of Colonel Castillo (followed a few days later by a voice resembling that of Colonel Castillo), not dead but a prisoner, or said to be a prisoner, or perhapsonly claiming to be a prisoner. A day or so later another of the dead materialized, or appeared to: the pilot was, it seemed,neither deadnor a prisoner but hospitalized,incommunicado. Questions about what actually happened to (or on, or after the crash of, or after the clandestine landing of) this helicopter provided table talk for days (one morning the newspaPersemphasizedthat the Hughes 500-D had been comprddo en Guatemala, bought in Guatemala, a detail so solid in this otherwise vaPorous story that it suggestedrumors yet unheard, intrigues yet unimagined), and remained unresolved at the time I left. At one point I askedPresidentMagaffa, who had talked to the pilot, what had happened. "They don't say," he said. Was Colonel Castillo a prisoner? "I read that in the paper, /€s." Was Colonel Beltr6n Luna dead? "I have that impression." Was the bodyguard dead? "Well, the pilot said he saw someone lying on 68

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the ground, either dead or unconscious,he doesn't know, but he believesit may havebeenCastillo'ssecuriry man, yes." Where exactly had the helicopter crashed?"I didn't ask him." I looked at Presidenr Mtgafia, and he shrugged."This is very delicate," he said."I havea problemthere.I'm supposedto be the soif I askhim, he shouldtell me. commander-in-chief, But he might sayhe'snot going to tell me,then I would have to arre$ him. So I don't ask." This is in many ways the standarddevelopmentof a story in El Salvador, and is also illustrative of the position of the provisionalpresidentof El Salvador.

News of the outsideworld drifted in only fitfully, andin peculiardetails.LdPrensaGrif.ca carrieda regular column of news from San Francisco, California, and I recall readingin this column one morning that e man identified asa former presidentof the Bohemian Club had died, Lt a;geseventy-rwo, at his home in Tiburon. Most deys The Midnti Herald came in at somepoint, andsporadicallyThe NeasYork Timesor The WasbingtanPost,but there would be dayswhen nothing camein at all, and I would find myself rifling back sportssectionsof,Tbe Miami Herald for installments of Cbrissie:My Oasn Story, by Chris Evert Lloyd with Neil Amdur, or haunting the paperback standat the hotel, where the collection ran mainly to romencesand specialtyitems, like The Worlils Best Dirty I okes,a volumein which all the iokesseemedto begin: "A midgetwent into a whorehouse. . ."

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In fact the only news I wanted from outside increasingly turned out to be that which had originated in El salvador: all other information seemed beside the poinq the point being here, now, the situation, the problema, what did they mean the Hughes 500-D was comprado en Guatemala, was the Rio Seco passable, were there or were there not American advisers on patrol in Usulut6n, who was going out, where were the roadblocks, were they burning cars today. In this context the rest of the world tended to recede. and word from the United States seemed profoundly re_ mote, even inexplicable. I recall one morning picking up this message,from my secretary in Los Angeles: "JDD: AlessandraStanley from Ti.me, Zlj /27 l:-tl lr0. They heard you were in El Salvador and wanted some input from you for the cover story they're preparing on the women's movement. Ms. stanley wanted their correspondent in Central America to contact you_I said that you could not be reached but would be calling me. She wanted you to call: Jay Cocks 212/g4l_ 2633." I studied this messagefor a long dme, and tried to imagine the scenario in which a"Time stringer in El Salvador received, by Telex from Jay Cocks in New York, a request to do an interview on the women's movement with someone who happened to be at the camino Real Hotel. This was not a scenario that played, and I realized then that El salvador was as inconceivable to Jay cocks in the high keep of the TimeLife Building in New York as this messagewas to me in El Salvador.

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was told in the summerof tg8z by both Alvaro Magafia and Guillermo Ungo that although eachof courseknew the other they were of "different generations."Magafia was fifty-six. Ungo was fiftyone.Five yearsis a generationin El Salvador,it being a placein which not only the rest of the world but time itself tendsto contractto the hereand now. History is ld matanz,a,and then current events,which recede even as they happen: General Jos6 Guillermo Garciawasin the summerof 1982widely perceivedas a fixtureof long standing,animmovableobiect through severalgovernmentsand shiftsin the nationaltemperament, a survivor. In context he was e survivor, but the contextwas iust three years,sincethe Maiano coup. All eventsearlierthan the Mafanocoup had by then vanishedinto uncertainmemory,and the coup itself, which took placeon October 15 1979,was seenasso distantthat there was commontalk of the nextjuaentud militar, of the cyclical readinessfor rebellion of what was always referred to as"the new generation" of young officers. "We think in five-year horizons," the economicofficerat the Americanembassytold me oneday."Anything beyondthat is evolution."Ffe was talkingaboutnot havingwhat he called"the luxury of

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the long view," but there is a real sensein which the five-yearhorizonsof the Americanembassyconstitute the longestview takenin El salvador,either forward or back. one reasonno onelooksback is that the view could only dispirit: this is a nationalhistory peculiarlyresistant to heroicinterpretation.There is no ribertadorto particularly remember.Public statuesin SanSalvador tend toward representations of abstracts,the winged Liberty downtown, the Salaadordel Mundo at the junction of AvenidaRooseveltand paseoEscal6nand the santaTecla highway;the expressionist spirit straining upward, outsizedhandsthrust toward the sky, at the Monument of the Revolution up by the Hotel Presidente.If the country'shistory asa republicseems devoidof sharedpurposeor unifying event,a recordof insensateambitionsand their accidentalconsequences, its three cenruriesasa colony seemblankerstili: spanish coloniallife wascenreredin corombiaand panama to the southand Guatemalato the norrh, and salvador lay between, e neglected frontier of the Captaincy Generalof Guatemalafrom l52i until lg2l, the year Guatemaladeclaredits independencefrom spain. so attenuatedwas El Salvador'ssenseof itself in its moment of independencethat it petitioned the united statesfor admissionto the union asa stere.The united Statesdeclined. In fact El Salvadorhad alwaysbeena frontier, even before the spaniardsarrived. The grearMesoamerican culturespenetretedthis far southonly shallowly.The great South American cultures thrust this far north 72

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only sporadically.There is a sensein which the place remainsmarked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximiqy to the cultural zero. Some aspectsof the local culture were imposed.Others were borrowed. An instructive moment: at an exhibition of native crafts in Nahuizalco, near Sonsonate,it was explained to me that a traditional native craft was the making of wicker furniture, but that little of this furniture wasnow seenbecauseit was hard to obtain wicker in the traditional wly. I asked what the traditional way of obtaining wicker had been. The traditional way of obtaining wicker, it turned out, had been to import it from Guatemala. In fact there were a number of instructive elements aboutthis day I spentin Nahuizalco,a hot Sundayin June.The eventforwhich I haddriven down from San Salvadorwasnot merelya craft exhibit but the opening of a festival that would last severaldays,the sixth annual Feria Artesanalde Nahuizalco,sponsoredby the Casade la Cultura progremof the Ministry of Education aspart of its effon to encourageindigenousculture. Sincepublic policy in El Salvadorhasveeredunerringly toward the elimination of the indigenous population,this oficial celebrationof its culture seemed an undertakingof someambiguitR particularly in Nahuizalco:the uprisingthat led to the 1932matdnzdbeganand endedamongthe Indian workerson the coffee fincasin this part of the country, and Nahuizalcoand the other Indian villagesaround Sonsonate lost an entire generationto the mdtanz,a. By the early sixtiesesti73

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matesof the remainingIndian populationin all of El Salvadorrangedonly between four and sixteenPercent; the restof the populationwas classifiedasladino, a cultural rather than an ethnic designation,denoting only Hispanization,including both acculruratedInand reiectedby thoseupper-clas dians rnd mesrtzas, membersof the populationwho preferredto emphasize their Spanishancestry. Nineteen thirty-two wes a year around Nahuizalco when Indians were tied by their thumbs and shot againstchurch walls,shot on the road and left for the dogs, shot and bayonetedinto the massgravesthey by the haddug.Indian dresswasabandoned themselves no longer ws language, Indian survivors.Nahuatl, the spokenin public. In many ways race remeinsthe ineffable elementat the heart of this particular darkness: even as he conductedthe mutdnzf,,GeneralMaximiliano Hernindez Martinez was dismissed,by many of the very oligarchswhoseinterestshe wasProtecdngby killing Indians,as"the little Indian." On this hot Sunday frfty yearslater the celebrantsof Nahuizalco'sindigenousculture would arrangethemselves,bY noon, into two distinct cemps,the ladinossitting in the shade of the schoolyard,the Indians squatting in the brutal sun outside.In the schoolyardthere were trees,and tables,where the Queenof the Fair, who hada wicker crown and Europeanfeatures,set with the local gudrdidrerchofwhom hadan automaticweapon,a sidearm, anda bayonet.The'guardiadrmkbeer andplayedwith their weapons.The Queenof the Fair studiedher ox-

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blood-red fingernails.It took twenry centavosto enter theschoolyard,anda certainculturalconfidence. There had beenIndian dancesthat morning. There had been music. There had been the "blessingof the market": the statueof SanJuan Bautistacarried, on a platform trimmed with wilted gladioli, from the churchto the markeqthe school,the homesof the bedridden. To the extent that Catholic mythology has beenover four centuriessuccessfullyincorporatedinto local Indian life, this blessingof the market was ar least part of the "actual" indigenousculture, but the dances and the music derived from other traditions. There wasa SupremaBeersoundtruck parkedin front of the Casade la Cultura office on the plaza,and the music that blared all day from its loudspeakers was "Roll Out the Barrel," "LL Cucarachar" "Everybody Salsa." The provenanceof the danceswas more complicated.They were Indian, but they were lessremembered than recreated,and as such derived not from local culture but from a learnedidea of local culture, an official imposition made particularly ugly by the cultural impotence of the participants.The women, awkward and uncomfortablein an approximationof native costume,movedwith difficulqy into the dusty' sueet and performed a listlessand unpracticeddance with baskets.Whatevermen could be found (mainly little boys and old men, since those young men still alive in placeslike Nahuizalcotry not to be noticed) hadbeendressedin "warrior" costume:headdreses of crinkled foil, swordsof cardboardand wood. Their

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hair was lank, their walk furtive. Someof them wore The othersavertedtheir eyes.Their role in sunglasses. the fair involved stampingandlunging and brandishing their cardboard weapons,a displry of warriot machismo,andthe extentto which eachof themhadbeen unmanned-unmanned not only by history but by u factor lessabstract,unmannedby the real weaponsin the schoolyard,by the G-3 assaultrifes with which the guordia played while they drank beer with the Queen of the Fair-rendered thisdisplaydeeplyobscene. I had begunbefore long to despisethe day, the dirt, the blazingsun,the pervasivesmellof rotting meat,the absenceof even the most rudimentary skill in the handicraftson exhibit (therewere sewnitems,for example,but they were sewnby machineof sleazyfabric, and the simplestseamswere crooked),the brutalinng music from the sound truck, the tedium; had begun most of all to despisethe fair itself, which seemedcontrived, pernicious,a kind of official opiatenan attemPt to recreateor perpetuateaway of life neithereconomically nor socially viable.There was no pleasurein this day. There was e great deal of ioylessmilling. There was someshadein the phze, from treesplasteredwith ARENA posters,but nowhere to sit. There was e fountain paintedbright blue inside,but the dirty weter wassurroundedby barbedwire, andthe signread:"Sn PnoHrnBSBNrensrAeuI," no sittingallowed. I stood for a while and watched the fountain. I bought a John Deerecap for sevencolonesand stood in the sun and watched the little ferris wheel,and the merry-go-round,but there seemedto be no children 76

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with the money or will to ride them, and after a while I crossedthe plazaand went into the church, avoiding the bits of masonrywhich still fell from the bell tower damagedthat week in the earthquakeand its aftershocks.In the church a massbaptismwastaking place: thirty or forry infants and older babies,and probably a few hundred mothers and grandmothersand aunts and godmothers.The altar was decoratedwith asrers in condensedmilk cans.The babiesfretted, and several of the mothersproducedbagsof Fritos to quiet them. A pieceof falling masonrybouncedoff a sgaffoldin the back of the church, but no one looked back. In this church full of women and babiestherewere only four men present.The reasonfor this may have been cultural, or may have had to do with the time and the place,andthe G-3sin the schoolyard.

During the week before I flew down to El Salvador a Salvadorenwoman who works for my husbandand me in Los Angelesgaveme repeetedinstructionsabout what we mustandmustnot do. We mustnot go out et night. We must stay off the street wheneverpossible. We must never ride in busesor taxis,never leave the capital,neverimaginethat our passporrs would protect us. We must not even considerthe hotel a safeplace: peoplewere killed in hotels.Shespokewith considerablevehemence, becausetwo of her brothershad been killed in Salvadorin Augustof l98l, in their beds.The throatsof both brothershad beenslashed. Her father had beencut but stayedalive. Her mother had been

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beaten.Twelve of her other relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins,had been taken from their housesone night the sameAugust, and their bodies had been found some time later, in a ditch. I assuredher that we would remember, we would be careful, we would in fact be so careful that we would probably (trying for a light touch) spend all our time in church. She became still more agitated, and I realized that I had spoken es a norteamericana: churches had not been to this woman the neutral ground they had been to me. I must remember: Archbishop Romero killed saying massin the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador. I must remember: more than thirty People killed at Archbishop Romero's funeral in the Metropolitan Cathedral in SanSalvador.I must remember: more than twenty people killed before that on the stepsof the Metropolitan Cathedral. CBS had filmed it. It had been on television, the bodies ferking, those still alive crawling over the dead as they tried to get out of range. I must understand: the Church was dangerous. I told her that I understood, that I knew all that, and I did, abstractly, but the specific meaning of the Church sheknew eluded me until I was actually there, at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador, one afternoon when rain sluiced down its corrugated plastic windows and puddled around the supports of the Sony and Phillips billboards near the steps.The effect of the Metropolitan Cathedral is immediate, and entirely literary. This is the cathedral that the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero refused to finish, on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence 78

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over its display, and the high walls of raw concrete bristle with suuctural rods, rusting now, staining the concrete,sticking out at wrenched and violent angles. The wiring is exposed.Fluorescenttubeshangaskew. The great high altar is backedby warped plyboard. The crosson the altaris of bareincandescent bulbs,but the bulbs,that afternoon,were unlit: there wasin fact no light at all on the mainaltar,no light on rhe cross,no light on the globe of the world that showedthe northern American continent in gray and the southernin white; no light on the doveabovethe globe,Saloador del Mundo. ln this vast brutalist specethat was the cathedral,the unlit altar seemedto offer a singleineluctablemessage:at this time and in this placethe light of the world could be construedasout, off, extinguished. In many ways the Metropolitan Cathedralis an authentic piece of political arr, e starementfor El Salvador as Guemica was for Spain.It is quite devoid of sentimentalrelief. There areno decorativeor architectural referencesto familiar parables,in fact no stories at all, not eventhe Stationsof the Cross.On the afternoon I was there the flowers laid on the altar were dead.There were no tracesof normal parish activity. The doorswere opento the barricadedmain sreps,and down the stepsthere was a spill of red paint, lest anyoneforget the blood shedthere.Here and there on the cheap linoleum inside the cathedral there was what seemedto be actualblood, dried in spots,the kind of spotsdroppedby a slow hemorrhage,or by a woman who does not know or does nor care that she is menstruating.

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There were severalwomen in the cathedralduring the hour or so I spent there, a young woman with a baby, an older woman in houseslippers,a few others' all in black. One of the women walked the aislesas if up and down, acrossand back,croonby compulsiono ing loudly asshewalked. Another knelt without moving at the tomb of Archbishop Romero in the right ffansept. "LooR e MoNseNonRonnERor"the crude needlepointtapestryby the tomb read,"Praiseto Monsignor Romero from the Mothers of the Imprisoned, the Disappeared,and the Murdered," the Comit{ de y AsesiMadresy Famitiaresde Presos,Desdparecidos, nadosPoliticosdeEI Salaador. The tomb itself wascoveredwith offeringsand petitions, notes decoratedwith motifs cut from greeting cardsand cartoons.I recallonewith figurescut from e Bogr Bunny strip, and anotherwith a pencil drawing of a baby in a crib. The baby in this drawing seemedto be receiving medication or fluid or blood intravenously, through the IV line shown on its wrist. I studiedthe notesfor a while and then went back and looked againat the unlit altar,and at the red paint on the main steps,from which it was possibleto seethe guardsmenon the balcony of the National Palace are hunchingbackto avoidthe rain.Many Salvadorans offended by the Metropolitan Cathedral,which is ai it should be, becausethe place remainsperhapsthe only unambiguouspoliticalstatementin El Salvador,a metaphoricalbomb in the ultimatePowerstation.

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". . . I had nothing more to do in San Salvador. I had given a lecture on the topic that had occurred to me on the train to Tapachula: Linleknown Books by FamousAmerican AuthorsPudd'nheadWilson, The Deail'sDictionary, The WildPalms.I hadlookedat the university;andno one could explainwhy therewasa mural of Marx, Engels,and Lenin in the university of this rightwing dictatorship." -Paul Theroux, The Old PatagonianExpress. The universityPaulTherouxvisitedin SanSalvador westhe National University of El Salvador.This visit (and, given the context, this extraordinarylecture) took plecein the lareseventies, a periodwhen the National University was actuallyopen.ln 1972the Molina governmenthad closedit, forcibll, with tanksand artillery and planes,and had kept ir closedunril 1974. In 1980the Duarte governmentagainmoved ffoops onto the campus,which then had an enrollment of about30,000,leavingfifty deadandofficesand laboratoriessysrematically smashed. By the time I visitedEl Salvadora few classes were being held in storefronts aroundSanSalvador,but no one other than an occasionalreporterhad beenallowedro enter the campus sincethe day the troops camein. Those reportersallowed to look had describedwalls still splashedwith the spray-paintedslogansleft by the students,floors littered with tangledcomputertapeand with copiescf what the National Guardsmenin chargecharacterized es subversiaopemphlets,for examplea reprint of an 8l

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article on inheritedenzymedeficiencyfrom The Ne|d) EnglandI oumal of Medicine. In someways the closing of the National University seemedanorherof thosesalvadoransituationsin which no onecameout well, and everyonewasmadeto bleed a little, nor excludingthe National Guardsmenleft behind to have their ignorance exposedby gringo reporters. The Jesuit university, UCA, or La Universidad Centroamericana Jos6Sime6nCafias,had emerged asthe mostimportant intellectualforce in the country, but the Jesuitshad been so widely identified with the left that somelocal scholarswould not attendlectures or seminarsheld on the UCA camPus.(ThoseJesuits still in El Salvadorhad in fact beenunder a categorical threat of deathfrom the White Warriors Union since 1977.The Carter administrationforced PresidentRomero to protect the Jesuits,and on the day the killing was to havebegun,July 22, 1977,the NationalPolice are saidto havesat outsidethe Jesuitresidencein San Salvadoron their motorcycles,with UZIs.) In any case UCA couldmanagean enrollmentof only about5,000. The scientific disciplines,which never had a particularly tenacioushold locally, had largely vanishedfrom local life. Meanwhilemany peoplespokeof the National University in the presenttense,asif it still existed,or asif its closing were e roudne event on somelong-term academic calendar.I recall talking one day to a former member of the faculty at the National University, a womenwho had not seenher officesincethe morning shenoticed the trooPsmassingoutsideand left it. She 82

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lost her books and her researchand the uncompleted manuscriptof the book shewas then writing, but she describedthis serenely,and seemedto find no immediatecontradictionin losingher work to the Ministry of Defenseandthe work shedid later with the Ministry of Education.The campusof the National University is said to be growing over, which is one wey conrradictionsgeterased in the tropics. I was invited one morning to a gatheringof Salvadoran writers, a kind of informal coffeehour arrenged by the American embassy.For somedays there had beena questionaboutwhere to hold this caf6 literario, sincethereseemed to be no singlelocationthat was not consideredoffJimits by at leastone of the guests,and at one point the ambassador's residencewas put forth asthe mostneutralsetting.On the day beforethe event it was finally decidedthat UCA was the more appropriateplace ("and iust nevermind," asone of the embassypeopleput it, thar somepeoplewould not go to UCA), andat ten the next morningwe gatheredthere in a largeconference room anddrankcoffeeandtalked, at first in platitudes,andthenmoreurgently. Theseare someof the sentences spokento me that morning: It'snot possibleto speokof intellecnnt lif e in El Salaador.Every ddy aselosemore. We ore regressing constantly.Intellectual lif e is drying up. you are Iooking at the intellectudllife of Et Sahtador.Here. In this room. We are the only suraiaors.Some of the othersareout of the ccuntry, othersarenot v;riting becausethey ore mgdgedin political actiaity. Somehave beendisappeared, nuny of the teachershavebeen dis83

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appeared.Teacbingis aery drngeroas,if a studentmis' interpretsa:hat a teachersays,then the teachermay be arrested.Someare in exile,the restare dead.Los nruertos,yoa knou? We are the only onesleft. There is no oneafter usrnoy oungones.Itis all m)er,y ou know? Art noon there was an exchangeof books arndcurcicula aitae,The cultural attach6from the embassysaid that she,for one,would like to seetlttscaf6 literario closeon a hopeful note, and someoneprovided one: it was a hopeful note that norteamericanosend' centroameri' cnnoscould havesuch a meeting.This is what passed for a hopeful note in SanSalvadorin the summerof 1982.

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of the united statesof Ambassador

America in El Salvador,DeaneHinton, received on his deskevery morning in the summerof tggZ a list of the Americanmilitary Personnelin-country that day. The numberon this list, I wastold, wasneverto exceed 55.Somedaystherewere asfew as 35.If the number got up to 55, and it was thought essentialto bring in someoneelse,then a trade was made: the incoming Americanwas juggled againstan outgoingAmerican, one normally stationedin Salvadorbut shunteddown to Panamafor as long as necessaryto maintain the magicnumber. Everything to do with the United StatesMilitary Group, or MILGP, ws treatedby the embassyas a kind of magic, a totemic Presencecircumscribed by potent taboos.The AmericanA-378spresentedto EI Salvadorin June of that year were actually flown up from Panamanot by Americansbut by Salvadorans trainedat the United StatesSouthernAir Commandin Panamafor this expresspurPose.American advisers could participatein patrols for training purposesbut could not participate in patrols in combat situations. When both CBS and Tbe Ne'u York Times, one day that June,reportedhavingseenrwo or three American

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advisersin what the reportersconstruedas a combat situationin Usulutin province,ColonelJohn D. Waghelstein,the MILGP commander,was called back from playing tennisin Panama(his wife had met him in Panama,there being no dependentsallowed in El Salvador)in order,ashe put it, "to dealwith the press." I happenedto arrive for lunch at the ambasador's just asColonelWaghelsteinreportedin from residence Panamathat day, and the rwo of them,alongwith the embassypublic affairs ofFcer,walked to the far end of the swimmingpool to discussthe day'sproblemout of my hearing. Colonel Waghelstein is massivelybuilt, crew-cut,tight-lipped,and very tanned,almosta carand the notion toon of the American military Presence, that hehadcomeup from Panamato dealwith the press was novel and interesting,in that he had made,during his tour in El Salvador,a pretty tersepoint of not dealing with the press.Somemonthslater in Los AngelesI sawan NBC documentaryin which I noticedthe special effort Colonel Waghelsteinhad madein this case. American advisershad actually beenmadeavailableto NBC, which in turn adopted a chiding tone toward CBS for the June "advisersin action" story. The total effect was mixed, however, sinceevenas the advisers complainedon cameraabout how "very few people" askedthem what they did and about how some reporters "spend all their time with the other side," the cameraanglesseemedsuch that no adviser'sface was distinctly seen.There were other points in this NBC documentarywhen I thought I recognizeda certain official hand, for examplethe mention of the "some86

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times cruel customs" of the Pipil Indians in El Salvador.The customin questionwasthat of flaying one another alive, a piece of pre-Columbian lore often tenderedby embassypeople as evidencethet from a human-rightspoint of view, the trend locally is up, or at any rateholding. ColonelWaghelsteinstayedat the ambassador's that day only long enough for a drink (a Bloody Mary, which he nursedmorosely),and,after he left, the ambasador and the public affairsofficer and my husband and I sat down to lunch on the coveredterrace. We watched a lime-throated bird in the garden. We watched the ambassador'sEnglish sheepdog bound acrossthe lawn at the sound of shots,rifle practice at the FscuelaMilitar beyond the wall and down the hill. "Only time we had any quiet up here,"the ambasador saidin hishigh Montana twang, "waswhen we sentthe whole school up to Benning." The shots rang our again.The sheepdog barked. "Quieto," the houseman crooned. I havethought since about this lunch a grear deal. The wine was chilled and poured into crystal glasses. The fish was servedon porcelainplatesthat bore the Americaneagle.The sheepdog and the crystal and the Americaneagletogetherhadon mea cerreinanestheric effect, temporarily deadeningther receptiviry to the sinisterthat afiicm everyonein Salvador,and I experiencedfor a momentthe official Americandelusion,the illusion of plausibility, the sensethat the American undertakingin El Salvadormight turn out to be, from the right angle,in the righr light,.just another difficult

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but possiblemissionin anotheruoubled but possible country. DeaneHinton is an interesting man. Before he replacedRobert White in SanSalvadorhe had servedin Europe,SouthAmerica,andAfrica. He hadbeenmarried twice, once to an American, who bore him five children before their divorce, and once to a Chilean, who had died not long before,leavinghim the stePfather of her five children by an earlier marriage-At the time I met him he had iust announcedhis engagement to a SalvadorannamedPatriciade Lopez.Someone who is about to marry a third time, who thinks of himselfasthe father of ten, andwho hasspentmuch of his careerin chanceyposts-MombasaoKinshasa,Santiago, SanSalvador-is apt to be someonewho believes in the possible. Robert White, was relieved of the His predecessor, in February1981,in whet White SanSalvadorembassy a later characterizedas purge,by the new ReaganPeople, of the State Department'sentire Latin American section.This circumstancemadeDeaneHinton seem' to menyin the United States,the bearerof the administration's big stick in El Salvador,but what DeaneHinton actually saidabout El Salvadordiffered from what Robert White saidabout El Salvadormorein style than in substance.DeaneHinton believed,asRobert White believed,that the situation in El Salvadorwas bad, terrible, squalidbeyond anyone'sPower to understandit without experiencingit. DeaneHinton alsobelieved,as Robert White believed to a point, that the situation

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would be, in the absenceof one or another American effort,stillworse. DeaneHinton believesin doingwhat he can. He had goften arres$ on the deaths of the four American churchwomen.He had even("by yelling somemore," he said) goften the governmentto announcethesearrests,no smallaccomplishment,sinceEl Salvadorwas a counffy in which the "announcement"of an arrestdid not necessarily follow the arrestitself.In the caseof the murdersof Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlmanand Jos6Rodolfo Viera at the Sheraton,for example,it was not the governmentbut the Americanembassywhich announcedat leasttwo of the varioussuccessive arres$, thoseof the former guardsmenAbel Camposand Rodolfo OrellanaOsorio. This embassy"announcement" wasreportedby the Americanpresson September15 1982,and was followed immediatelyby another ennouncem€nt:on September16 1982,"a police spokesmen" in SenSalvadorannouncednot the arest but the "release"of the samesuspec$,after what was described ase monthin custody. To persistin so distinctly fluid a situationrequired a personalityof considerableresistance.Deane Hinton was eventhen working on getting new errestsin the Sheratonmurders.He was eventhen working on getting trialsin the murdersof the four Americanwomen, a trial being anotherstep thet did not, in El Salvador, necessarilyfollow an errest.There had been progress. There hadbeenthe election,a potentsymbol for many Americansand perhapsevenfor someSalvadorans,al-

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though the symbolic content of the event showedup rather better in translationthan on the scene."There wassomeshootingin the morning," I recallbeingtold by a parishpriestabout electiondayin his district,"but it quieted down around nine e.pr. The army had a truck going around to go out and vote-Ta Voto Es La Solucifin,you know-so they went out and voted. They wanted that stamp on their identity cards to show they voted. The stempwas the proof of their good will. Whether or not they actually wanted to vote is hard to say.I guessyou'd haveto saythey were morescaredof the army than of the guerrillas,so they voted." Four monthsafter the fact. inThe NeasYork Times Magazine, former ambassadorRobert White wrote aboutthe election: "Nothing is moresymbolicof our current predicamentin El Salvadorthan the Administration's bizarre ettempt to recast D'Aubuisson in a more favorablelight." Even the fact that the election had resultedin what White called "political disaster" could be presented,with a turn of the mirror, positively: one men'spolitical disastercould be another's democraticturbulence,the birth pans of what Assismnt Secretary of State Thomas Enders persisted in calling "nescent democratic institutions." "The new Salvadorandemocrac/," Enderswas saying five monthsafter the election,not long after Justiceof the PeaceGonzalo Alonso Garcfa, the nventieth prominent Christian Democrat to be kidnappedor killed sincethe election,had beendraggedfrom his housein SanCayetanoltepequeby fifteenarmedmen,"is doing 90

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what it is supposedto do-bringing a broad spectrum of forces and factions into a functioning democratic system." In other words even the determinationto eradicate the oppositioncouldbeinterpretedasevidencethat the model worked. There was still, moreover,a certain obeisanceto the land reform program, the lustrousintricaciesof which were understoodby so few that almostany interpretationcould be construedasposible. "About 207, 207 alwaysappliedonly to 1979,that is what no oneunderstands," I hadbeentold by President Magefiewhen I tried at one point to get straight the actualstatusof Decree207,thelegislationmeantto implement the "Land-to-the-Tiller" program by providing that title to all land farmed by renantsbe transferred immediatelyto thosetenants."There is no one more conservativethan a smallfarmer," PeterShiras,a former consultantto the Inter-American Development Bank,had quotedan AID official assayingabout 207. "We're going to be breedingcapitalistslike rabbits." Decree207hadbeenthe sourceof considerable confusion and infighting during the weeksprecedingmy arrival in El Salvador,suspendedbut not suspended, on andoff andon again,but I hadnot beforeheardenyone describeit, asPresidentMagafiaseemedto be describing it, asa propositionwound up to self-destruct. Did he mean,I askedcarefully, that Decree 207, implementing Land-to-the-Tiller, applied only to tgTg becauseno landowner,in practice,would work against his own interestsby allowing tenantson his land after 207 took effect?"Right!" PresidentMagaffahad said, 9l

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asif to a slow student."Exactly! This is what no one understands.There were no new rental contractsin 1980or 1981.No onewould rent out landunder207, they would haveto be$Lzy to do that." What he said was obvious,but out of line with the rhetoric, and this conversationwith PresidentMagaf,a aboutLand-to-the-Tiller,which I had hearddescribed through the spring as e centerpieceof United States poticy in El Salvador,hadbeenone of many occasions when the Americaneffort in El Salvadorseemedbased a dreamworkdevisedto obscure on auto-suggestion, any intelligencethat might trouble the dreamer.This impressionpersisted,and I was struck, a few months later, by the suggestionin the repoft on El Salvador released by the PermanentSelectCommitteeon Intelli(U.S. Intelligenceof the House of Represenmtives gencePerformtnce in CennalAmerica:Achiarcments and SelectedInstancesof Concern) that the intelligence was itself a dreamwork, tending to support policy, the report read, "rather than inform it," providing "reinforcementmore than illumination,""'ammunition'ratherthananalysis." A certain tendency to this kind of dreamwork, to improving upon rather than illuminating the situation, may have been inevitable,sincethe unimproved situation in El Salvadorwas such that to considerit was to considermoral extinction."This time they won't get awey with it," RobertWhite wasreportedto havesaid ashe watchedthe bodiesof the four Americanwomen draggedfrom their common grave,but they did, and White wasbrought home.This is a country that cracks 92

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Americans,and DeaneHinton gavethe senseof a man determinednot to crack. There on the terrace of the official residenceon Avenida La Capilla in the San Benito district it was all logical. One stepfollowed another, progresswas slow. We were Americans, we would not be demoralized.It was not until late in the lunch, at a point betweenthe saladand the profiteroles, that it occurredto me that we were talking exclusively about the appearances of things, abour how the situation might be madeto look better, about trylng to get the Salvadoran governmentto "appear"to do what the Americangovernmentneededdonein order to make it "appear"that the Americanaidwasiustified. necesseryto stop Roberto D'AuIt was sometimes buisson"on the one-yardline" (DeaneHinton's phrase about the ARENA anempt to commandeerthe presidency) because Roberto D'Aubuissonmadea negative in the United States,madethings, as Jereappearance miah O'Leary, the assistantto nationalsecurity adviser William Clark, had imagined Hinton advisingD'Aubuissonafter the election,"hard for everybody."What made a positiveappearancein the United States,and things easierfor everybody, were elections,and the announcementof arrestsin casesinvolving murdered Americans,and ceremoniesin which tractablecampesinoswereawardedland titlesby army officers,and the TreasuryPolicesaton the platform,and the president came, by helicopter. "Our land reform program," Leonel G6mez,who had worked with the murdered Jos6 Rodolfo Viera in the SalvadoranInstitute of Agrarian Transformation, noted in Food Monitor, 93

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"gave them en opportuniry to build up points for the next U.S.AID grant." By "them" LeonelG6mezmeant not his compatriotsbut Americans,meent the American Institute for Free Labor DeveloPment,meantRoy Prosterman,the architect of the Land-to-the-Tiller progremsin both El SalvadorandVietnam. In this light the American effort had a distinctly circular aspect(the aid was the card with which we got to do it our wtlr andappearingto do it the Salvadorans our way was the card with which the Salvadoransgot the aid), and the questionof why the effort was being madewent unanswered.It was possibleto talk about Cuba and Nicarague, and by extension the Soviet (Jnion, and national securiry,but this seemedonly to iustify a momentumalreadyunderway: no one could doubt that Cuba and Nicaraguahad at various points supportedthe armedoppositionto the Salvadorangovernment,but neither could anyonebe surprisedby this, or, given what could be known about the players,be unequivocally convinced that American interestslay on one sideor enotherof what evenDeaneHinton referred to asa civil war. It was certainly possibleto describesomemembers of the opposition,es DeaneHinton had, as "out-andout Marxists," but it was equally possibleto describe other membersof the opposition,as the embasy had at the inception of the FDR in April of 1980,es "a broad-basedcoalition of moderate and center-left groups." The right in El Salvadornever madethis distinction: to the right, anyonein the oppositionwas a communisqalong with most of the American press, 94

SALVADOR

the Cetholic Church, and, as time went by, all Salvadoran citizens not of the right. In other words there remaineda certein ambiguiry about political terms es they were understoodin the United Statesand in El Salvador,where "left" mey meen, in the beginning, only a resistanceto seeingone'sfamily killed or disappeared.That it comeseventually to mean something elsemay be, to the extent that the United Stateshas supported the increasingpolarization in El Salvador, theProcrusteanbedwe madeourselves. It wasa situationin which Americaninterestswould seemto havebeen bestservedby attempting to isolate ('out-and-out the Marxists" while supporting the "broad-basedcoalition of moderate and center-lefr grouprs,"discouraging the one by encouraging the other, co-opting the opposition;but American pnlicy, by accepting the invention of "communism," as definedby the right in El Salvador,ase daemonicelement to be opposedat eventhe most draconiccosq had in fact achieved the reverse."We believe in gringos," Hugh Barrera, an ARENA contender for the presidency, told Laurie Becklund of The Los Angeles Timeswhen sheaskedin April of 1982if ARENA did not feer losing American aid by trying to shut the ChristianDemocratsout of the government."Congress would not risk losing a whole country over one parq.. That would be turning againsta U.S. ally and encouresng Sovietinterventionhere.It would not be intelligent." In other words "anti-communism"was seen, correctly, as the bait the United Stateswould always take. 9t

JOAN DIDION

That we hadbeendrawn, both by a misapprehenston of the local rhetoric and by the manipulationof our into a geme we did not own rhetorical weaknesses, understand,a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemedapparent,and yet therewe remained-In this light all argumentstended to trail off. Pros and cons seemedequally off the point. At the heart of the American effort therewassomethingof the familiar ineffable,asif it were taking placenot in El Salvadorbut in a mirage of El Salvador,the mirageof a society not unlike our own but "sick," a temporarilyfeveredrepublic in which the antibodiesof democracyneeded only to be encoureged,in which words had stable meaningsnorth and south ("election," sa/, and "Marxist") and in which there existed,waiting to be tapped by our support,somelatent good will. A few daysbefore I arrived in El Salvadorthere appearedrn Diario de Hoy a full-page advertisementplacedby leadersof the Women's Crusadefor Peaceand Work. This advertisementaccusedthe United States,in the personof its ambassador,Deane Hinton, of "blackmailing us with your miserableaid, which only keepsus subfugatedin underdevelopmentso that powerful countries like yours cen continue exploiting our few riches and having us under your boot." The Women's Crusade for Peaceand Work is an orgaruzeaonof the right, with links to ARENA, which may suggesthow latent that goodwill remains.

96

SALVADOR

This "blackmail" motif, and its arrestingassumpdon that trying to keep Salvadoransfrom killing one another constituteda new and panicularly crushingimperialism,beganturning up more andmore frequently. were appearingin By Octoberof 1982advertisements the SanSalvadorpapersallegingthat the blackmailwas resultingin a "betrayrl" of El Salvadorby the military, who were seenas "lackeys" of the United States.At a San SalvadorChamber of Commercemeeting in late October, Deane Hinton said that "in the first two weeksof this month at leastsixty-eight human beings were murdered in El Salvador under circumstances which are familiar to everyone here," stressedthat American aid was dependentupon "progress" in this area,and fielded somefifty written questions,largely hostile,one of which read, "Are you trying to blackmailus?" I was readthis speechover the telephoneby an embassyofficer, who describedit as "the ambasador's sffongeststatementyet." I was puzzledby this, since had made most of the semepoints, at the ambassador a somewhatlower pitch, in a speechon February 11, 1982;it was hard to discern a substantiveadvancebetween,in February,"If thereis oneissuewhich could force our Congressto withdraw or seriouslyreduceits supportfor El Salvador,it is the issueof humanrights," and, in October: "If not, the United States-in splte of our other interests,in spite of our commitment to the struggle againstcommunism,could be forced to to El Salvador." In fact the speeches deny assistance

97

JOAN DIDION

seemedalmost cyclical, seasonaleventskeyed to the particular rhythm of the six-month certification process;midway in the certification cycle things appeer "bad," and are then made, at least rhetorically, to appeer "better," "improvement" being the k.y to certification. I mendonedthe February speechon the telephone, but the embassyofficer to whom I wasspeakingdid not seethe similarity; this was,he said,a "stronger" stetement, and would be "front-page" in both The Washington Post and The Los AngelesTimes. In fact the story did appearon the front pagesof both The Washington Post end The Los Angeles Times, suggesting that every six months the news is born anew in El Salvador.

WheneverI hear someonespeaknow of one or another solucihn for El SalvadorI think of particular Americanswho have spent time there, each in his or her own way inexorably alteredby the fact of having beenin a certain placeet a ceftain time. Someof these Americanshave since movedon and others remain in Salvador,but, like survivorsof a common netural disaster,they are equally markedby the place. "There arrea,lot of optionsthat aren'eplayable. We could come in militarily and shapethe place up. That's an option, but it's not playable,because of public opinion. If it weren't for public opinion, however, El Salvadorwould be the ideal labora98

SALVADOR

tory for a full-scalemilitary operetion.It's small. There are hemisphericcultural It's self-contained. similarities." -A

United Statesembassyoficer in SanSalaador.

"June l5th wasnot only a greatday for El Salvador, receiving$5 million in additionalU.S. aid for the private sectorand a fleet of fighter planesand their correspondingobservationunits, but also a greatday for me.Ray Bonner lof The Neru York Timesl actually spoke to me at Ilopango airport and took my hand and shook it when I offered it to him. . . . Also, another correspondentpulled me asideand said that if I was such a punctilious iournalist why the hell had I written something about him that wasn't true. Here I made no attempt to defend myself but only quoted my source.Later we talked and ironed out some wrinkles. It is a greet day when journalistswith opposingpointsof view cenget togetherandlearn somethingfrom eachother,after all, we areall on the sameside. I even wrote a note to Robert E. White (which he ignored) not long ago after he protestedthat I hadnot publishedhis Letter to the Editor (which I had) suggestingthat we be friendly enemies.The only enemy is totalitarianism,in any guise:communistic,socialistic,capihe has talisticor militaristic.Man is uniquebecause free will andthe capacityto choose.When this is

JOAN DIDION

suppressed he is no longer a men but an animal. That is why I say that despitediffering points of view, we are noneof us enemies." -Mdrio

Rosentbal,editor of the El Salvador News Gazette,in his lune 14-20 1982 colu//tn, "A Great Day.t'

"You would have had the last interview with an obscureSalvadoran." -An

American reporter to whom I had mentioned that I had been trying to see Colonel Sal,uadorBehrdn Luna on the day he died in a helicopter crash.

"ft's not as bad asit could be. I was walking to the political risk people at one of the New York banks and in 1980 they gave El Salvador only a ten percent chance of asmuch stabilityin 1982 aswe have now. So you see." -The

sameembdssyoffi.cer.

"Normally I wouldn't have a guard at my ievel, but there were death threats against my predecessor, he wes on a list. I'm living in his old house.In fact something kind of peculiar happened today. Someone telephoned and wanted to know, very urgent, how to reach the Salvadoranwoman with whom my predecessorlived. This person on the phone claimed that the woman's family neededto reach her, a death, or illness, and she had left no 100

SALVADOR

addres. This might have been true and it might not have been true. Naturally I gave no information." -Another

embassy ofi.c er.

"AlasAss,aoon Wnrrr: My embassyalso sent in several months earlier these captured documents. There is no doubt about the provenance of these documents as they were handed to me directly by Colonel Adolfo Majano, then a member of the lunta. They were taken when they captured exMajor D'Aubuisson and a number of other officers who were conspiring againstthe Government of El Salvador. Please continue, Mr. SBNeron ZoruNsrv: Ambassador. ANrsessnnonWsrrE: I would be glad to give you copies of these documents for your record. In these documents there are over a hundred names of people who are participating, both within the Salvadoranmilitary as active conspirersagainstthe Government, and also the names of people living in the United States and in Guatemala City who are actively funding the death squads.I gave this document, in Spanish,to three of the most skilled political analysts I know in El Salvador without orienting them in any way. I just asked them to read this and tell me what conclusionsthey came up with. All three of them ceme up with the conclusionthat there is, within this document, evidence that is compelling, if not 100 percent conclusive, that D'Aubuisson and his group are r€101

JOAN DIDION

sponsiblefor the murder of Archbishop Romero. SnNeron CneNsroN: What did you say? Responsible for whose murderl AnanassaponWHrrn: Archbishop Romero

-From the recordof hearingsbefore the Committee on Foreign Relations,U.S. Senate, April 9, 1981, tu,o montbs after Robert Wbite left SanSohtador. Of all theseAmericansI supposeI think especially of Robert White, for his is the authentic American voiceaffiictedby El Salvador:Youwill find one of the pdges uith Monday underlined and qaitb quotation marks,he saidthat April day in 1981about his documents,which were duly admittedinto the record and, asthe report of the HousePermanentSelectCommittee on Intelligencelater concluded,ignored by the CIA; he talkedabout OperationPineapple,and blood suger, in Miami, about and257Robertsguns,aboutaddresses Starlight scopes;about documentsbanded to him directly by ColonelMdjano,aboutcmnpellingifnot conclusiaeeaidenceof activitiesthat continuedto fall upon the earsof his auditors assignalsfrom space,unthinkable,inconceivable,dim impulsesfrom a black hole.In the serenelight of Washingtonthat spring deyin 1981, two monthsout of SanSalvador,Robert White's distance from the place was alreadylengthening: in San Salvadorhe might havewondered,the final turn of the mirror, ,uhat Colonel Majano had to gain by handing hirn thedocuments.

r02

SALVADOR

That the texture of life in such a situation is essentially unranslatablebecameclearto me only recently, when I tried to describeto a friend in Los Angeles an incidentthat occurred somedaysbeforeI left El Salvador. I had gone with my husbandand enother American to the San Salvadormorgue,which, unlike most morgues in the United States,is easily accessible, through an open door on the ground floor around the back of the court building. We hed beentoo late that morning to see the day's bodies (there is not much emphasison embalming in El Salvador,or for that matter on identificadon,and bodiesare dispatchedfast for disposal),but the manin chargehadopenedhis log to showusthe morning'sentries,sevenbodies,all male, none identified, none believedolder than twenty-five. Six hadbeencertified deadby armnde fuego, firearms, and the seventh,who had alsobeenshot,of shock.The slabon which the bodieshadbeenreceivedhad already been washeddown, and water stood on the floor. There were many fies, and an electricfan. The other American with whom my husband and I had gone to the morgue that morning wes a newspaperreporter,and sinceonly sevenunidentifiedbodies bearingevidenceof.armade fuegodid not in SanSalvadorin the summerof 1982constitutea newspapersrory worth pursuing, we left. Outside in the parking lot there were a number of wrecked or impounded cars, meny of them shot up, upholsterychewedby bullets, windshieldshattered,thick pastesof congealedblood on pearlizedhoods,but thiswasalsounremarkable, and

103

JOAN DIDION

it was not until we walked back around the building to the reporter's rented car that each of us began to sense the potentially remarkable. Surrounding the car were three men in uniform, two on the sidewalk and the third, who was very young, sitting on his motorcycle in such Lwly asto block our leaving. A second motorcycle had been pulled up directly behind the car, and the spacein front was occupied. The three had been joking among themselves, but the laughter stopped as we got into the car. The reporter turned the ignition.on, and waited. No one moved. The two men on the sidewalk did not meet our eyes. The boy on the motorcycle stared directly, and caressedthe G-3 propped berween his thighs. The reporter askedin Spanishif one of the motorcycles could be moved so that we could get out. The men on the sidewalk said nothing, but smiled enigmatically. The boy only continued staring, and began twirling the flash suppressoron the barrel of his G-3. This was a kind of impasse. It seemed clear that if we tried to leave and scraped either motorcycle the situation would deteriorate. It also seemed clear that if we did not ffy to leave the situation would deteriorate. I studied my hands. The reporter gunned the motor, forced the car up onto the curb far enough to provide a minimum space in which to maneuver, and managed to back out clean. Nothing more happened, and what did happen had been a common enough kind of incident in El Salvador, a pointless confrontation with aimlessauthority, but I have heard of no soluci6n that precisely addressesthis local vocation for terror. 104

SALVADOR

Any situation can turn ro rerror. The most ordinary errand can go bad. Among Americansin El Salvador there is an endemic apprehensionof danger in the apparently benign. I recall being told by a network anchorman that one night in his hotel room (it was at the time of the election,and becausethe Camino Real wasfull he had beenpur up ar rhe Sheraton)he took the mattressoff the bed and shoved it against the window. He happenedto havewith him severalbulletproof veststhat he had brought from New York for the cameracrew, and before going to the Sheraton lobby he put oneon. Managersof American companies in El Salvador (Texas Instrumentsis still there, and Cargill, and some others) are replaced every several months,and their presenceis kept secret.Some companiesbury their menagers in a number-rwoor numberthree post. American embasy officers are driven in armoredand unmarkedvans(no eagle,no seal,no CD plates) by Salvadorandrivers and Salvadoranguards, because, I was told, "if someonegetsblown away, obviously the StateDepartmentwould prefer it done by a local security man,then you don't get headlinessaying 'American Shoots SalvadoranCirizen."' These local security men cerry automaticweaponson their laps. In such a climate the fact of being in El Salvador comesto seema sentenceof indeterminatelength, and the prospectof leaving doubtful. On the night before I wasdueto leaveI did not sleep,lay awakeandlistened to the music drifting up from e party at the Camino Realpool, heardthe band play "Malaguena"ar three l0t

JOAN DIDION

and at four and again at five A.M., when the party seemedto endandlight broke and I couldget uP.I was picked up to go to the airport that morning by one of vens,anda few blocksfrom the hotelI was the embassy seizedby the conviction that this was not the most direct way to the airport, that this was not an embassy guard sitting in front with the Remington on his lap; that this wassomeoneelse.That the van turned out in fact to be the embassyvan, detouring into SanBenito to pick up en AID official, failed to relax me: once at the airport I sat without moving and averted my eyesfrom the soldierspauolling the empty departure lounges. When the nine e.rvr.TACA flight to Miami was announcedI boardedwithout looking back, and sat rigid until the plane left the ground. I did not fasten my seatbelt. I did not lean back. The planestopped that morning at Belize, setdng down on the runway lined with abandonedpillboxes and rusting camouflagedtanksto pick up what seemedto be every floater on two continen$, wildcatters, collectorsof information, the fantastsof the hemisphere.Even a team of s$dent missionariesgot on at Belize,sallow children from the piney woods of Georgia and Alabamawho had been teaching the people of Belize, as the team member who settled down next to me explained,to know Jesusastheir personalsavior. He was perhapstwenty, with three hundred years of American hill stock in his features,and as soon es the planeIeft Belizehe beganfilling out a questionnaire on his experiencethere, laboriously printing out the 106

SALVADOR

phrases,in obedienceto God, opportunity to renea) ccnmiffltent, most reanrding part of my experience, most disbeorteningpart. Somewhereover the Keys I askedhim what the most dishearteningpart of his experiencehad been.The most disheartening part of his experience,he said, had been seeingpeople leave the Crusadeas empty as they came.The most rewarding part of his experiencehad beenrenewing his commitment to bring the Good News of Jesusas personal saviorto all thesedifferent places.The difierent places to which he wes committed to bring the Good News were New T,ca,lc;nd, Iceland, Finland, Colorado, and El Salvador.This wrc la solucidnnot from Washington or Panamaor Mexico but from Belize,and the piney woods of Georgia. This flight from San Salvadorto Belizeto Miami took place at the end of June 1982. In the week that I am completing this report, at the end of October 1982,the officesin the Hotel Camino Real in SanSalvadorof the AssociatedPres, United PressInternational, United PressInternational Television News, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News were raidedandsearchedby membersof the El Salvador National Police carrying submachineguns;fifteen leadersof legally recognizedpolidcal and labor groups opposing the government of El Salvadorwere disappearedin SanSalvador;DeaneHinton saidthat he was "reasonablycertain" that thesedisappearances had not been conducted under Salvadorangovernment orders;the Salvadoran Ministry of Defenseannounced that eight of the fifteen disappearedcitizenswere in fact in governmentcustodl; and the StateDepartment r07

JOAN DIDION

announced that the Reagan administration believed that it had "turned the corner" in its campaign for political stability in Central America.

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