Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  As it got dark, a marvellous aroma enveloped us all: wood smoke mixed with the scent of frangipani and bougainvillaea. The air was suddenly fresh and cool. Elsewhere, someone was frying eggs. The village was poor and not at all clean; but I felt, as I sat in the gathering dusk, that it would have been a great place for a few days’ rest. Not just yet, though.

  There weren’t more than 60 people in the place, all of Indian or mixed stock, which wasn’t that unusual in a country where more than 90 per cent of the population was officially listed as mestizo. Before the war, in UN demographical studies, only one in a hundred El Salvadorians had the dubious distinction of being classified ‘white’. Until then, I’d thought that only Israel and South Africa still categorized race.

  My first impression of these people was that while many looked frail and emaciated, they’d done very well for themselves for many centuries without outside help. It was the white man who had brought his usual afflictions, including smallpox and STDs as well as his guns and rum. Like those across the water to the north, these natives too had suffered.

  Nevertheless, as rustic as they may have looked to us interlopers, they seemed a good deal happier than their compadres in the cities. They were a lot more content and possibly more sedate, and that in spite of the troubles. They smiled when we arrived and were still at it when we left early the next morning.

  As promised, the army fed us – beans. There was pork-and-beans, tomato-and-beans, greens-and-beans, beans-and-beans! In fact, we were treated to beans for breakfast, lunch and supper. After four days of it I was beginning to get a little tired of the menu. However, I still like beans, especially with plenty of chilli. Besides, now and again, there was a bottle of warm beer that one of our team had stowed in his bags, to wash it all down.

  How did these people manage? I asked Soto. They were friendly to the army, yet this was bandit country.

  ‘This is a protected village. They defend themselves. They ask us for weapons and we give them to them.’ At first the rebels had tried to force their own stamp of authority on them and other communities and there were many fierce exchanges. Afterwards, when it seemed pointless to lose people for a cause that would be settled anyway after the glorious victory, the FMLN tended to avoid the place. However, any campesino caught in the open or unarmed was killed, always, as was explicitly stated, as an example to others.

  ‘It’s a price they pay’, he said. The villagers were most vulnerable when they went into town, as they sometimes needed to do for medical, family or other reasons. ‘Then the rebels set up road blocks… they murder anybody they suspect of having dealt with our people… quite brutal’, said the lieutenant, and added:

  It’s merciless. It can also be impersonal and cold blooded, which is what has really caused so many of these peasants to revolt. Talk to them yourself… you’ll quickly see that it’s the system that the guerrillas are trying to impose that they despise. One and all. That and the fact that they’re all Christians…

  The Church in El Salvador, we’d learnt even before we arrived, was opposed to most things linked to government, often diametrically, so. It blamed the politicians for the war and in a sense, the priests were right because it was greed that lay at its roots. That said, there is hardly a country in the Western Hemisphere that is not battling corruption in all its forms, though everybody was aware that El Salvador was probably a lot more crooked before hostilities started. For this and other reasons, the Church – or the Liberation Gospel as it came to be called – seemed to have a ready ear both for the revolution and the rebels, especially in some of the rural areas.

  The argument propounded went along the lines that the FMLN offered a better prospect for change. But nobody could reconcile the peasants’ fundamental belief that Marxism was anti-Christian; not even the Holy Fathers. Some of the more passionate ideologists, the so-called ‘worker priests’, tried, but they never really succeeded. To these simple people, a communist was an atheist. End of story.

  One got the impression after a few weeks in the country that it would take a lot more than a guerrilla war to change many of these deeply entrenched beliefs, which went back centuries.

  It all came out while we sat talking about the war after dark. Often we were joined by some of the NCOs and one or two officers, none of whom could speak much English, so Soto would translate. There were probably guerrilla groups doing much the same thing in the mountains within sight of us that beautiful moonlit night. The people with us in the village were as curious about us as we were about them.

  As an aside, many of these simple folk, some of whom might see a single movie a year – and then on an open screen in the countryside with a small generator providing power – were admirers of the American movie hero and cult-figure Rambo. Even among the peasants of remotest South and Central America, this kind of ubiquitous and inescapable junk-culture prevailed.

  Next day we reached Santa Cruz, one of the three or four towns by that name in the region, which was all very confusing to us strangers.

  The going had been hard on us all from early in the day, first marching in a thick clinging mist that obscured everything and later, in rain and mud. It was miserable. I badly needed a shower and I also seemed to have been the only one to have been the focus of mosquitoes, almost the entire night.

  After a brief stop for something to eat (beans again) we climbed slowly up a long path leading into another series of foothills. Twice, single shots rang out. The soldiers would hurry forward in the direction of the sound, but they wouldn’t see anything. The bush was too thick and any kind of response was out of the question, reckoned Lieutenant Soto. At times, he said, if he had an idea of where the firing was coming from, he’d lob a few mortar bombs. But not this time…

  Ghosts walked by night in Santa Cruz, the troops said. It had been abandoned for a year by the time we got there. There had once been a new administrative block and what appeared to be a fine, two-level school, complete with playing fields and a boarding establishment for children who would arrive from outlying districts. The buildings echoed voices eerily and one of the walls in front had a huge hole in it. It was creepy.

  Santa Cruz had been heavily damaged by both sides as hostilities progressed. There was as much graffiti on the walls as shell-pocks. Artillery must have been used at some time or another, or was it rocket fire from the ‘Mikes’?

  A rebel had written in red paint across one of the open spaces of the main building the words, a foot high: Joven Ingresa a la Escuela Militar del FMLN. They’d apparently used it as a training base and there were ammunition cases and cartridge shells everywhere. A Cuban party had even lodged there, another of the officers said.

  ‘Why did you let them keep the town for so long?’ I asked Soto. ‘Once you knew they had it, why didn’t you take it again? Or at least try to do so?’

  ‘Ah’, he said smiling, his usually infectiously convivial self. ‘Thereby hangs a tale.’ Using his bush hat with a red band around it to shade his face against the sun, he pointed down the valley from which we’d just emerged. ‘You see where we came through… it’s all tough country like that around here. The approaches too… very difficult… lots of jungle… and the mountains behind us. Look!’ A large range of hills did indeed undulate from one horizon to the other and there was only one road leading up from the floor of the valley and that was a good 20 clicks away. It wasn’t metalled either, which suggested mines.

  The guerrillas have all the cover that they need. Working as they constantly do from improvised positions, they have the initiative, here, at least. Anyway, when we arrived they just withdrew: tactical retreat… good communist procedure. They’d wait until we’d left, then they’d come back. Once we depart tomorrow, they’ll be here by mid-morning again.

  ‘So why didn’t you stay here; in force? Occupy the place? Permanently.’ He replied:

  Because then they would fight like hell to drive us out. They did it two, three times. It became a point of honour. They shot down one of
our helicopters and killed the three men in it. Although the crew survived the initial impact, they were executed on the spot. They displayed their bodies in a public place… wouldn’t let anybody bury them.

  It was a bad mistake, he said, because such barbarism didn’t go down with these simple village people, who know instinctively what is right and wrong.

  That was when the military commanders in San Salvador decided: ‘Enough! If we cannot keep a permanent force occupying Santa Cruz, then the guerrillas won’t use it either.’ Soto had warned earlier that none of us should wander about unaccompanied and it wasn’t the enemy he was concerned about just then: his mines were laid about in the dirt outside, he intimated.

  It was a pattern that had become all too common throughout the country where regions or large towns were being contested. Santa Cruz, close to the Honduran border (which remained a conduit for men and arms as long as the war went on), retained a high priority for both sides.

  Steve Salisbury, an American journalist friend who covered the war in those parts for several years – and was still around when I last heard – told me of another village that was destroyed by the rebels. The town was Cinquera, which lay about 50 miles north of San Salvador and, at the time, was being defended by a squad of soldiers. All the men and boys who could carry a rifle had been formed into a makeshift selfdefence unit, but they had received little or no military training. Like much else in this war, it was all half-cocked, he reckoned.

  While there, he’d met Maria Lydia Solis, a widow who had gone to fetch money and who had not only lived through it all but had survived.

  The battle kicked off at sunset and went on all night, with the rebels entering the town in the morning. Although there had already been many casualties – including a dozen women and children – the rebels lined up the survivors and killed them all. Only a handful of women and children were spared and Maria Solis was one of them.

  ‘We begged the soldiers not to kill us all but they said we must pay. They took everything of value.’

  FMLN cadres stayed four days and then left and there were any number of horror stories afterwards. Since Cinquera was only an hour’s drive from San Salvador, that sort of thing inevitably lead to questions being asked by the populace: what was the army doing all this time?

  ‘The worst were the wounded that they executed’, reckoned Salisbury. ‘The mayor and his secretary [who was Mrs Solis’ husband] were both badly hurt. Señor Solis had stepped on a mine some weeks before so he was already in a bad way, but no matter, they dragged him outside and shot him in the head.’

  The survivors abandoned Cinquera for good as soon as government forces eventually arrived and the place remained deserted until the end of the war. Few who knew it before were eager to return.

  We didn’t stay long in Santa Cruz either. For one, Soto wasn’t happy. Also, he was worried about us. Radio intercepts had disclosed that the FMLN knew that a bunch of Gringos, some with cameras, were with the column. Once before he’d been mortared while passing through: his platoon had lost a couple of men. He didn’t want that to happen again.

  So we picked up our things and went off again, if only to keep out of trouble.

  In the old days coffee had been a source of wealth to the people who worked these uplands. There was much evidence of the old plantations, although most of the smaller bushes had long ago gone to seed.

  The graceful haciendas that hugged hillsides and offered magnificent views over the surrounding countryside were still intact, although their owners had fled. None of the old homes we passed were occupied, and from what was lying about, it was evident that guerrillas had been there too.

  ‘Be careful where you walk’, Soto said earnestly whenever we came to an area that had formerly been inhabited. ‘They see us coming from a long way off… then they lay their mines and set booby traps… just like in Vietnam.’ Worse, he maintained, the guerrillas had plenty of time to do it.

  ‘So, let my men search the place before you start filming or taking pictures because we don’t need to be calling in a chopper to haul your body out of here…’

  While MacKenzie and Foley were nonchalant, we civvies tried to follow instructions. We’d follow the soldiers and, where possible, try to step in their footprints, but it wasn’t easy.

  We could see from the trappings that life in the old days must have been good. It had probably been a tasteful combination of opulence and a feudal tradition that went back centuries. Naturally, there had been servants galore; their quarters invariably clustered tidily behind the main residence.

  I asked Soto what would happen after the war. Would he and the other landowners go back to the old ways? He evaded the question; it was clearly embarrassing. But then he himself had been a member of the privileged class so it was understandable.

  Of course, the plebeian soldiers who served under him knew it, but in some countries other than communist ones, officers still command more respect if they are gentlemen. Even the Russians, having destroyed the old upper class, found it necessary to invent a new one.

  Some of the farmhouses, though ransacked, were remarkably well preserved. One, on a hill-top that commanded views all the way across to the distant mountains, lay only a short hop by helicopter from San Miguel and looked as if it had been abandoned only recently. In fact, it had been standing empty for years. We weren’t allowed in there because of booby traps, and didn’t complain.

  I heard afterwards that some government troops on another farm, not too far down the road, had been badly burnt by a phosphorus grenade set above a bathroom door. It was triggered by the light switch, even though there hadn’t been any electricity there for years. Old habits die hard, it seems.

  When the time came, getting us out of what had once been a minor paradise wwas a risky exercise. Again, it would be by helicopter, the colonel in San Miguel had decided.

  An array of different types of aircraft was used against the FMLN guerrillas. Even former civilian planes like this one had rockets fitted to their hard points. This photograph was taken at Ilopango Airport, outside the capital. (Author’s collection)

  On the morning of the fourth day, we’d been warned that a chopper would arrive at a particular time and we were to wait at one of the concrete slabs where the coffee was once laid out to dry in the sun. But as always, Alwyn was still filming and he needed more time. He took a while to make his way down to the improvised LZ and I could see that Soto was annoyed.

  The Huey, meanwhile, kept circling. The crew were in radio contact with the ground, very much in a hurry to get the job done. They felt exposed in those mountains because others doing the same thing in the past had become targets. Also, we knew, there had been a chopper or two shot down.

  The Huey refused to land until we were all bunched together. Then it was a quick touchdown followed by an immediate lift-off. We were exposed for only a few crucial moments and, as the gods willed, nothing happened. Not that day, anyway.

  I never did find out what happened to Lieutenant Soto after the war, though a scandal soon enveloped San Miguel’s commanding colonel and he was relieved of his command. It had nothing to do with military matters, some said, and they cited corruption.

  Which is the way things sometimes go in wartime…

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Central American Conflagration

  ‘The civil war raged on in El Salvador, fuelled by US aid to the Salvadoran military. The government harshly repressed dissent, and at least 70,000 people lost their lives in killings and bombing raids waged against civilians throughout the countryside. The country’s infrastructure had crumbled and the nation appeared to be no closer to its goals of peace, prosperity and social justice than when the process began. Then in 1989, the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America shocked the international community into action.’

  Enemies of War, PBS, Washington DC, 2006

  THEGUERRILLAS HIT THE NAVAL base at La Unión on the G
ulf of Fonseca along El Salvador’s Pacific coast some months before we got there. They killed dozens of young conscripts for the loss of a handful of their own.

  It was a remarkable victory for the rebels. Their fighters entered the base some time after midnight and they’d evidently reconnoitred it very carefully over a long period and knew exactly what obstacles had to be overcome. First they cut the throats of the guards. Without firing a shot, they moved quickly among the barracks buildings and hurled grenades into open windows before anyone could even begin to assess the threat, or how to counter it. The raid made a great stir throughout the country.

  A year later, in March 1987, a similar raid was carried out on the headquarters of the 4th Brigade at El Paraiso. Altogether 20 soldiers were officially said to have been killed, though the actual figure was something more like 70.

  An American instructor, Sergeant First Class Greg Fronius, died while trying to rally a defence after their El Salvadorian officers had abandoned their charges. Guerrillas attempted to overrun the camp and kill everyone there, but they weren’t as successful as they might have been.

  Once it was over, enemy losses, said Harry Claflin, were estimated to be close to 100, though the actual number remains in dispute because in keeping with revolutionary ideology, the guerrillas would always try to take their casualties with them. The reason for doing so was to avoid giving their adversaries any kind of moral or propaganda advantage.

  While these attacks happen every now and again, the consequences were seldom as critical as at La Unión. Some people believed the attack on the naval base might have been the turning point of the war. There were those who claimed that the FMLN had gained an almost irreversible advantage.