Salvador

by Joan Didion

  —Mario Rosenthal, editor of the El Salvador News Gazette, in his June 14–20 1982 column, “A Great Day.”

  “You would have had the last interview with an obscure Salvadoran.”

  —An American reporter to whom I had mentioned that I had been trying to see Colonel Salvador Beltrán Luna on the day he died in a helicopter crash.

  “It’s not as bad as it could be. I was talking 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 as much stability in 1982 as we have now. So you see.”

  —The same embassy officer.

  “Normally I wouldn’t have a guard at my level, but there were death threats against my predecessor, he was 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 Salvadoran woman with whom my predecessor lived. This person on the phone claimed that the woman’s family needed to reach her, a death, or illness, and she had left no address. This might have been true and it might not have been true. Naturally I gave no information.”

  —Another embassy officer.

  “AMBASSADOR WHITE: My embassy also 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 junta. They were taken when they captured ex-Major D’Aubuisson and a number of other officers who were conspiring against the Government of El Salvador.

  SENATOR ZORINSKY: … Please continue, Mr. Ambassador.

  AMBASSADOR WHITE: 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 Salvadoran military as active conspirers against the 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 conclusions they came up with. All three of them came up with the conclusion that there is, within this document, evidence that is compelling, if not 100 percent conclusive, that D’Aubuisson and his group are responsible for the murder of Archbishop Romero.

  SENATOR CRANSTON: What did you say? Responsible for whose murder?

  AMBASSADOR WHITE: Archbishop Romero …”

  —From the record of hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, April 9, 1981, two months after Robert White left San Salvador.

  Of all these Americans I suppose I think especially of Robert White, for his is the authentic American voice afflicted by El Salvador: You will find one of the pages with Monday underlined and with quotation marks, he said that April day in 1981 about his documents, which were duly admitted into the record and, as the report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence later concluded, ignored by the CIA; he talked about Operation Pineapple, and blood sugar, and 257 Roberts guns, about addresses in Miami, about Starlight scopes; about documents handed to him directly by Colonel Majano, about compelling if not conclusive evidence of activities that continued to fall upon the ears of his auditors as signals from space, unthinkable, inconceivable, dim impulses from a black hole. In the serene light of Washington that spring day in 1981, two months out of San Salvador, Robert White’s distance from the place was already lengthening: in San Salvador he might have wondered, the final turn of the mirror, what Colonel Majano had to gain by handing him the documents.

  That the texture of life in such a situation is essentially untranslatable became clear to me only recently, when I tried to describe to a friend in Los Angeles an incident that occurred some days before I left El Salvador. I had gone with my husband and another American to the San Salvador morgue, 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 had been too late that morning to see the day’s bodies (there is not much emphasis on embalming in El Salvador, or for that matter on identification, and bodies are dispatched fast for disposal), but the man in charge had opened his log to show us the morning’s entries, seven bodies, all male, none identified, none believed older than twenty-five. Six had been certified dead by arma de fuego, firearms, and the seventh, who had also been shot, of shock. The slab on which the bodies had been received had already been washed down, and water stood on the floor. There were many flies, and an electric fan.

  The other American with whom my husband and I had gone to the morgue that morning was a newspaper reporter, and since only seven unidentified bodies bearing evidence of arma de fuego did not in San Salvador in the summer of 1982 constitute a newspaper story worth pursuing, we left. Outside in the parking lot there were a number of wrecked or impounded cars, many of them shot up, upholstery chewed by bullets, windshield shattered, thick pastes of congealed blood on pearlized hoods, but this was also unremarkable, and 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 a way as to block our leaving. A second motorcycle had been pulled up directly behind the car, and the space in 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 caressed the G-3 propped between his thighs. The reporter asked in Spanish if 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 suppressor on 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 try 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 aimless authority, but I have heard of no solución that precisely addresses this local vocation for terror.

  Any situation can turn to terror. The most ordinary errand can go bad. Among Americans in El Salvador there is an endemic apprehension of danger in the apparently benign. I recall being told by a network anchor man that one night in his hotel room (it was at the time of the election, and because the Camino Real was full he had been put up at the Sheraton) he took the mattress off the bed and shoved it against the window. He happened to have with him several bulletproof vests that he had brought from New York for the camera crew, and before going to the Sheraton lobby he put one on. Managers of American companies in El Salvador (Texas Instruments is still there, and Cargill, and some others) are replaced every several months, and their presence is kept secret. Some companies bury their managers in a number-two or number-three post. American embassy officers are driven in armored and unmarked vans (no eagle, no seal, no CD plates) by Salvadoran drivers and Salvadoran guards, because, I was told, “if someone gets blown away, obviously the State Department would prefer it done by a local security man, then you don’t get headlines saying ‘American Shoots Salvadoran Citizen.’ ” These local security men carry automatic weapons on their laps.

  In such a climate the fact of being in El Salvador comes to seem a sentence of indeterminate length, and the prospect of leaving doubtful. On the night before I was due to leave I did not sleep, lay awake and listened to the music drifting up from a party at the Camino Real pool, heard the band play “Malaguena” at three and at four and again at five A.M., when the party seemed
to end and light broke and I could get up. I was picked up to go to the airport that morning by one of the embassy vans, and a few blocks from the hotel I was seized by 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 was someone else. That the van turned out in fact to be the embassy van, detouring into San Benito to pick up an AID official, failed to relax me: once at the airport I sat without moving and averted my eyes from the soldiers patrolling the empty departure lounges.

  When the nine A.M. TACA flight to Miami was announced I boarded without looking back, and sat rigid until the plane left the ground. I did not fasten my seat belt. I did not lean back. The plane stopped that morning at Belize, setting down on the runway lined with abandoned pillboxes and rusting camouflaged tanks to pick up what seemed to be every floater on two continents, wildcatters, collectors of information, the fantasts of the hemisphere. Even a team of student missionaries got on at Belize, sallow children from the piney woods of Georgia and Alabama who had been teaching the people of Belize, as the team member who settled down next to me explained, to know Jesus as their personal savior.

  He was perhaps twenty, with three hundred years of American hill stock in his features, and as soon as the plane left Belize he began filling out a questionnaire on his experience there, laboriously printing out the phrases, in obedience to God, opportunity to renew commitment, most rewarding part of my experience, most disheartening part. Somewhere over the Keys I asked him what the most disheartening part of his experience had been. The most disheartening part of his experience, he said, had been seeing people leave the Crusade as empty as they came. The most rewarding part of his experience had been renewing his commitment to bring the Good News of Jesus as personal savior to all these different places. The different places to which he was committed to bring the Good News were New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Colorado, and El Salvador. This was la solución not from Washington or Panama or Mexico but from Belize, and the piney woods of Georgia. This flight from San Salvador to Belize to 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 offices in the Hotel Camino Real in San Salvador of the Associated Press, United Press International, United Press International Television News, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News were raided and searched by members of the El Salvador National Police carrying submachine guns; fifteen leaders of legally recognized political and labor groups opposing the government of El Salvador were disappeared in San Salvador; Deane Hinton said that he was “reasonably certain” that these disappearances had not been conducted under Salvadoran government orders; the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense announced that eight of the fifteen disappeared citizens were in fact in government custody; and the State Department announced that the Reagan administration believed that it had “turned the corner” in its campaign for political stability in Central America.

  Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.

  BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION

  WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

  THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

  WHERE I WAS FROM

  POLITICAL FICTIONS

  THE LAST THING HE WANTED

  AFTER HENRY

  MIAMI

  DEMOCRACY

  SALVADOR

  THE WHITE ALBUM

  A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

  SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

  RUN RIVER

  ALSO BY JOAN DIDION

  AFTER HENRY

  In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.

  Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6

  A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2

  DEMOCRACY

  Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5

  THE LAST THING HE WANTED

  Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal —a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1

  MIAMI

  No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.

  Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6

  POLITICAL FICTIONS

  In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

  Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8

  RUN RIVER

  Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9

  SALVADOR

  “Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of
terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

  Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0

  WHERE I WAS FROM

  In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

  History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8