Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  This is what I'm pretty sure actually happened: Fifteen or twenty-five NPA came down the road, and the hayseed rebel driving the truck lost control on the hill and went off the road. Meanwhile, the remaining dozen NPA-the most a jeepney could hold-rushed the outpost all pumped up and firing their guns in every direction and probably inflicting their own two casualties on themselves. The completely surprised government troops, who were-five will get you ten-having a nap, hightailed it into the shrubbery. Then the NPA grabbed some guns. This is what most NPA actions are about. It's called an agaw-armas, a "gun-grab."

  "So how many guns did the NPA get?" I asked the colonel.

  "Two M-60 heavy machine guns, one M-30 light machine gun and four Armalites." He didn't mind that I hadn't believed a word he said. He could tell I liked a good war story, that was the important thing. Had he heard anything about a pregnant woman being shot? He said it might be true. The day before yesterday Scout Rangers-the Philippine equivalent of Green Berets-had come upon a group of NPA, and he'd heard a civilian had been killed. There was a lot of fighting, he said, around Fatima, the next village up the road.

  Indeed, dozens of refugees were coming from Fatima, their possessions dragging on wooden travois behind the family caribous. But the colonel said he couldn't let us go there, the road might be mined by the NPA.

  I'd have thought that twenty or thirty two-thousand-pound water buffalos would have cleared up the land-mine question. Kathleen and I stood in the tanning-salon sun with the colonel, considering. Filipinos don't argue. They "consider." And after, as it were, a considerable length of time, a truck arrived from the city, carrying rice and canned goods to Fatima. This allowed the colonel to change his mind without losing face. Now it would be okay to go. The food truck would set off any land mines, and we could follow behind it. But first, the soldiers must inspect the truck.

  "It's a food blockade," whispered Kathleen. This seemed to be true. The soldiers said they had to take seven sacks of rice and two dozen cans of peas off the truck so there wouldn't be extra food for the NPA in Fatima. They stacked these by the side of the road, and the truck rumbled away. We started after it in our jeepney.

  "Wait, wait," said the soldiers. "Are you going to Fatima? This food was supposed to go there." And they loaded the rice and peas into our laps.

  In Fatima some families were evacuating, some families were not evacuating and some families weren't sure if they were evacuating or not. They said one army officer had come and told them to stay put, and another army officer had come and told them to move. "What are you fleeing?" we asked. They weren't certain. "Where are you fleeing to?" They weren't positive. "Who's in charge here?" Hard to say. "Had there been any fighting?" Oh, yes, there had been a lot of fighting-in Callawa, the next village up the road.

  Events move around a lot in the Philippine countryside. Whatever's happening is always happening one village away from where you are. "No fighting in this district then?" we said. Well, no. They thought it over. One eager fellow volunteered that the army had looted his house.

  "They stole my pants, my scissors, my radio and my saw," he said. He was holding a large cross-cut saw in his hand. I stared at the tool. "Well, they gave the saw back," he said.

  We asked if anyone had heard about a pregnant woman being shot. Yes, yes. It was an awful thing, terrible, very bad. They were all sad about it. "Did you know her?" No, they'd heard it on the radio.

  We drove on toward Callawa. We were in communist-held territory now. We knew that because a large banner across the road said so. The hills were rising into mountains here and covered with balsam trees. When the road crossed the head of a deep ravine, we could see the amber Davao River twisting through rice fields below us like a gold-link bracelet dropped on a putting green.

  Five kilometers from Fatima we came up on a grizzled old man carrying a wooden hoe and leading a caribou. Man and beast could have belonged in any of the past dozen centuries except the man was wearing flare-leg double-knit slacks and an earth-smeared Ban-Lon shirt as though dressed for some game of peasant golf. When we asked him about the pregnant girl, the old man was matter-of-fact. Yes, sixteen rebels had stayed at his house, more in two other houses nearby. About nine o'clock Sunday morning, while the rebels were having breakfast, the Scout Rangers fired on the houses. One woman with the NPA was killed, hit in the forehead and leg. Yes, she was pregnant. The rebels fired back briefly "but had short arms only." Then they fled.

  "Put a sock in it, buddy," I wanted to say. For all he knew, Kathleen and I were Fawn Hall and Ollie North, Far East division. But omerta is not a Philippine concept.

  The old man wasn't, however, eager to lead us back to his home. He said someone would show us the way in Callawa, if we wanted.

  Callawa looked like everyplace else in the Philippines, sort of cute, sort of ratty, with Latin stucco false fronts on southeast Asian thatch-and-bamboo buildings. The food blockade didn't seem to be working very well here either. Our driver immediately began loading his jeepney with cheap local produce.

  The town's largest landowner invited us to lunch. Yep, he said, Callawa was a red area. The army never came here because people would tell the NPA on them. He laid out an enormous spread-rice, sardines, pork chops, mangos, jackfruit, coconut milk, caramel pudding and three kinds of bananas.

  "Great bananas," I said, "not like what we get back in the States."

  "Yep, we feed those to the caribou," said our host.

  I asked him if he'd been bothered by the NPA, and he said of course he had; they considered him a rich man. He said he paid the NPA a tax, "part out of fear, part out of pity. I bargained with them."

  "How much did they want?" I asked.

  "Ten thousand pesos a month."

  "What do you give them?"

  "Three hundred." This is probably one reason the NPA is communist-because they're such lousy businessmen. If I couldn't negotiate a better deal than that while holding somebody at gunpoint, I'd be a goddamned communist too.

  While we were having lunch, an ambulance and a car from a Davao funeral parlor arrived in town. The pregnant woman's family had come to get her body. A guide was found, and a procession of a dozen people started into the countryside, carrying a stretcher, shovels and plastic sheets. The parents were about sixty, the father stoic, the mother in steady, quiet tears.

  We walked for an hour, across a banana plantation and up onto grassy slopes. A cousin, a young man in his twenties, told me the dead woman had been married only a year. She was twenty-six and six months pregnant. Her husband was in the NPA, and she was a member of the Urban Poor Coalition in Davao, a pro-NPA group harassed by Alsa Masa. She and some thirty other coalition members had fled to Callawa, where she met with her husband. She hadn't seen him in several months. The cousin told me all this as though politics were something like a flu epidemic or a car wreck.

  Kathleen and I found the three crude plank houses where the NPA had stayed. There were chickens and a puppy in one door yard and bullet holes in all the buildings but no humans. Most of the bullets had struck the houses too high to hit anyone. They'd gone through the flimsy constructions, in one side and out the other. But in one house there was a sleeping pallet in a corner and several bullet holes just where you'd prop a pillow against the wall.

  Everything in the scene spoke of idiocy. The NPA had two or three dozen people cooped up and hadn't secured a perimeter. The houses were sited so that four or even three Scout Rangers could have surrounded them and forced everyone to surrender-or killed them all. But, instead, the Scout Rangers had obviously stood away and just let blast, not even bothering to aim. They'd killed one pregnant girl, and all the rest had escaped in broad daylight. We could see where the NPA group had run across a plowed field; they'd dropped a cheap pistol holster, some propaganda leaflets and an empty cartridge box.

  The grave was a hundred yards away, marked with a cross of lashed sticks. It was by the side of a path on a high, broad meadow in a nimbus of hills. The undertaker's
men began to dig. The mother yelled, "Where are the masses when we need them? How could they leave her like this?"

  The undertaker's men dug carefully, holding their shovel blades almost parallel to the ground and tossing aside little scoops of soil. They wore bandanas across their faces. Everyone else breathed through handkerchiefs. The smell was already as strong as a vision. There is no odor like the odor of a dead human. It's a saccharine putrescence-rotting meat and prom corsages, a sweet, gagging stink. It penetrates clothes and skin. No matter how many times you shower, no matter how many times you tell the poor laundry girl at the hotel to take your clothes back and wash them again, the scent returns like a worry or an evil thought. It's not even such a bad smell, no worse than whiskey vomit, but the reek of our own death goes like a shock to some early, unevolved ganglion just at the head of the spine, to the home of all wordless, thoughtless fear.

  The first part of the body to come unearthed was a knee, swollen black and round as the crown of a hat. When the mother saw this, she screamed and fell, not in a faint but attacking the ground with her fists and forehead and screaming something, screaming everything, I guess, there is to scream. It took three of her family to pull her away. They led her into the shade, where she sat splay-legged and cried, open-faced and open-lunged, making a sound I'd never heard from an adult, a rhythmic sobbing louder than a yell, the sound infants make, meant to wake the world.

  The undertaker's men kept at their work, clearing the dirt from two bloated sausage arms and from the mound of pregnant belly and then from the face. The features had swollen and begun to liquify into a wide, smooth, sickening bruise-with the face of a young girl disappearing into slime, beauty haunting horror. They pulled at her hips, and the body came free, stiff, distended, overripe inside its ghastly skin, hair trailing clots of sod. What ideology has that oozing face for a price? What abstraction is worth that smell?

  I convinced Kathleen to fly to Negros the next day, to visit a sugar-planter friend of Tina's family. Maybe there'd be a vast, tileroofed hacienda with servants to bring lots of drinks to banish the memory of that dead girl and gardens out to the horizon to look at to make her face go away and a swimming pool, a huge swimming pool, to splash chlorine up our noses.

  But no such thing. Instead, we met Ed Alunan, who had given up a singing career in Manila to save his mother's estate from bankruptcy. He lived in a city apartment. The estate, like many of the "big" land holdings in the Philippines, was just a couple hundred hectares of cane with a peasant village in the middle where the "haciendero" families had lived for generations. Ed drove us there in a dented Japanese car.

  The Alunans were turning over 10 percent of their land to Cory's land-reform program. Each family on the estate would get a garden plot to grow cash crops. Tina told me later that Ed was in trouble with both the left and the right-with the NPA because he was a landowner and with the landowners because he supported reform. "He'll get shot, already," she said.

  Ed had had some difficulty convincing his hacienderos that the garden plots were a good idea. "We don't want our children to be tied to the land," they'd said. "We want them to go to the city. We want them to go to school." Ed was at pains to show them the gardens were an investment, a way to have something of their own so they could pay for their children's schooling.

  He sent for specialists from the government's Land Reform Ministry. The specialists told the villagers how they could buy the land for a very modest price with a low-interest government loan that could be paid back over many years and so forth. The villagers listened politely. When the specialists were finished, they asked their audience, "Are there any questions?"

  "Yes," said the hacienderos. "Does Ed know you're doing this?"

  Ed had to go back to the estate and explain that he'd invited the government specialists to come. The villagers nodded and listened to the whole land-reform proposal again.

  "Are there any questions?" said Ed.

  "Yes," said the hacienderos. "Does your mother know you're doing this?"

  But they'd gotten the idea at last, said Ed. And now they were full of enthusiasm and had all sorts of progressive projects under way.

  "Like what?" said Kathleen, looking askance at the estate's primitive houses and boodle of naked children.

  "They came and asked if they could decorate the threshing floor on Saturday nights," said Ed, "and hire a fellow with a cassette deck and get all the other hacienderos in the area to come and dance and buy beer."

  So maybe there's hope for the Philippines. I'm sure there is. There has to be hope for people whose first step out of peonage is to start a discotheque.

  DECEMBER 1985

  This little country had been nothing but in the news since 1979linchpin of something-or-other, vital this-and-that. Every liberal crybaby had been screaming about the death squads. Every conservative bed wetter had been hollering about the communists. For all I could tell we were going to go to war down there. And I didn't even know what it looked like.

  I thought El Salvador was a jungle. It isn't. El Salvador has the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern California plus-and this was a relief-no Californians. My flight came in over the cordillera that separates El Salvador from Honduras. The mountains were crisp and pointy like picture-book Alps but forested to the peaks. We flew across a wide, neatly cultivated valley and then turned east above the spectacular volcanic cones that divide the central valley from beaches as beautiful as any I've ever tried to avoid at Christmastime. The airport was in the coast littoral, among green fields. Tidy lines of palm trees stood along the roads.

  Where do we get our information about these places? From a president who can't remember which side Iran is on? From news media so busy being terse and fair that the guerrillas might as well be fighting on the Oprah Winfrey show? I want to know what it smells like. Are the girls pretty? Do they have little plastic Santas in the dime stores? (You bet they do, also sandbagged gun emplacements with red-foil Christmas-tree silhouttes on the front.)

  I got a taxi into San Salvador. It was a little Toyota station wagon whose driver had filled the rear window with blinking lights, dangling Wise Men and FELIZ NAVIDAD in glitter letters. The road to town runs forty kilometers up through the lava-soil hills. The sun set with dispatch. The night was warm, but with a dry, cool breeze. People were sitting down to dinner in the thatched houses by the roadside. There was an autumnal, back-to-classes, college-football scent from the burning cane fields.

  Nothing particularly sinister was on view, unless you count armed men-though every Latin country seems to have plenty of these. In the capital, some of the architecture was a shambles, but not from war, just from the earthquakes that level everything periodically.

  I expected to see gross, barbaric haciendas owned by the oligarchy, the so-called Fourteen Families, who control more than half of El Salvador's industry and agriculture. But San Salvador's richest suburb, Colonia Escalon, looked like the second-string good parts of L. A. It could have been Sherman Oaks with walls around the yards.

  The wealthiest 20 percent of the population gobbles up 66.4 percent of El Salvador's personal income. Maybe this is unfair, but it still didn't look like any oligarch had enough worldly goods to scare Barry Manilow's accountant. Rapacious as they may be, there's only so much to squeeze from a primitive agrarian country smaller than Vermont. Down at the shore, I was shown a beach house being built by some fabulously corrupt general. It wouldn't have passed muster as a garage in Malibu Colony. It was interesting to think about the rich U.S. liberals, the Jane Fondas, the Norman Lears, the Shirley MacLaines, whining about exploitation in Central America while sitting in houses four times as large as any owned by the Fourteen Families.

  The middle class-usually described as "infinitesimal" or "statistically almost nonexistent"-appeared to be all over the place, honking their horns in dusty Jap cars and dented minipickups. At rush hour, San Salvador seemed to be populated not by 1 million people but by 1 million New York c
abdrivers, though Salvadorans speak more English than New York cabbies. All of the well-off people and many of the poor have been to the United States.

  El Salvador is not nearly so filled with litter, filth and begging as Mexico. The beach town of La Libertad is supposed to have the best surfing east of Waimea Bay. There are some impressive Indian ruins at Tazumal and Chalchuapa. And TACA, the national airline, lost my luggage, just like airlines do in regular vacation spots.

  I went to get some clothes at a new, upscale shopping center. It looked like a mall in Dayton. Because I'm obviously norteamericano, a half dozen people stopped and introduced themselves. What part of the States was I from? And how was the Ohio State football team doing? It was a handsome crowd. The conquistadors weren't as civilized as our own founding fathers; they fucked the Indians before they killed them. Now everybody in El Salvador is a slight mix, a sort of Mestizo Lite, Iberian of feature but prettier colored. The women are heartbreaking.

  The scene at the mall was less exotic than the Cuban parts of Miami, except for one mystifying detail. I could find no jeans shorter than thirty-two inches. I'm five feet nine, a hand taller than most Salvadorans, and my inseam measurement is only thirty inches. A salesgirl borrowed a needle and thread from a sewing shop next door and basted my new trousers at the cash register. This is a country of beautiful eyes and bad pants cuffs.

  You can go to El Salvador, for the moment at least, and see nothing too dreadful, just some assorted anomalies. The soldiers guarding the highway to the airport were dressed in full camouflage but also in Day-Glo-orange road-crew vests. It must have been tough choosing between guerrilla sniper fire and the way the average Salvadoran drives.

  But when you pick your hotel, you pick according to the kind of fear you prefer. The Sheraton, outside town on the hip of the San Salvador volcano, houses U. S. military trainers, State Department and CIA types and oligarchs home on a visit after taking their bank accounts out for air in Miami. Behind the hotel, running down the volcano into town, is one of San Salvador's dozens of slum-filled ravines, or barrancas. This one is known locally as Calle Ho Chi Minh (Ho Chi Minh Street). The hotel security guards are probably useless against the left-wing guerrillas who trundle up and down the barranca. And the guards are probably in league with the rightwing death-squad boys who hang out at the bar. In January 1981, two U. S. agrarian-reform advisers were gunned down in the Sheraton dining room by pistoleros, who escaped through the lobby at a slow walk. A month before, a U.S. freelance journalist had been desaparecidoed there. Gossip has it he was in the bar and asked somebody who happened to be an esquadron de muerte member how to get in touch with the guerrillas.