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 wellknown body dump for a driving lesson. This was one of a number of occasions, during the two weeks my husband and I spent in El Salvador, on which I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror.
Whenever I had nothing better to do in San Salvador I would walk up in the leafy stillness of the San Benito and Escalón districts, where the hush at midday is broken only by the occasional crackle of a walkie-talkie, 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 blossoms lie undisturbed on the sidewalks. Most of the houses in San Benito are more recent than those in Escalón, less idiosyncratic and probably smarter, but the most striking architectural features in both districts are not the houses but their walls, walls built upon walls, walls stripped of the usual copa de oro and bougainvillea, walls that reflect successive generations of violence: the original stone, the additional five or six or ten feet of brick, and finally the barbed wire, sometimes concertina, sometimes electrified; walls with watchtowers, gun ports, closed-circuit television cameras, walls now reaching twenty and thirty feet.
San Benito and Escalón appear on the embassy security maps as districts of relatively few “incidents,” but they remain districts in which a certain oppressive uneasiness prevails. In the first place there are always “incidents”—detentions and deaths and disappearances—in the barrancas, the ravines lined with shanties that fall down behind the houses with the walls and the guards and the walkie-talkies; one day in Escalón I was introduced to a woman who kept the lean-to that served as a grocery store in a barranca just above the Hotel Sheraton. She was sticking prices on bars of Camay and Johnson’s baby soap, stopping occasionally to sell a plastic bag or two filled with crushed ice and Coca-Cola, and all the while she talked in a low voice about her fear, about her eighteen-year-old son, about the boys who had been taken out and shot on successive nights recently in a neighboring barranca.
In the second place there is, in Escalón, the presence of the Sheraton itself, a hotel that has figured rather too prominently in certain local stories involving the disappearance and death of Americans. The Sheraton always seems brighter and more mildly festive than either the Camino Real or the Presidente, with children in the pool and flowers and pretty women in pastel dresses, but there are usually several bulletproofed Cherokee Chiefs in the parking area, and the men drinking in the lobby often carry the little zippered purses that in San Salvador suggest not passports or credit cards but Browning 9-mm. pistols.
It was at the Sheraton that one of the few American desaparacidos, a young freelance writer named John Sullivan, was last seen, in December of 1980. It was also at the Sheraton, after eleven on the evening of January 3, 1981, that the two American advisers on agrarian reform, Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, were killed, along with the Salvadoran director of the Institute for Agrarian Transformation, José Rodolfo Viera. The three were drinking coffee in a dining room off the lobby, and whoever killed them used an Ingram MAC-10, without sound suppressor, and then walked out through the lobby, unapprehended. The Sheraton has even turned up in the investigation into the December 1980 deaths of the four American Maryknoll workers. In Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study, prepared and released this summer in New York by the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, there appears this note:
On December 19, 1980, the [Duarte government’s] Special Investigative Commission reported that “a red Toyota 3/4-ton pick-up was seen leaving (the crime scene) at about 11:00 PM on December 2” and that “a red splotch on the burned van” 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 pick-up.” By February 1981, the Maryknoll Sisters’ Office of Social Concerns, which has been 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 pick-up belonging to the Sheraton hotel in San Salvador.…
Subsequent to the FBI’s alleged matching of the paint splotch and a Sheraton truck, the State Department has claimed, in a communication with the families of the churchwomen, that “the FBI could not determine the source of the paint scraping.”
There is also mention in this study of a young Salvadoran businessman named Hans Christ (his father was a German who arrived in El Salvador at the end of World War II), a part-owner of the Sheraton. Hans Christ lives now in Miami, and that his name should have even come up in the Maryknoll investigation made many people uneasy, because it was Hans Christ, along with his brother-in-law, Ricardo Sol Meza, who, in April of 1981, were first charged with the murders of Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman and José Rodolfo Viera at the Sheraton. These charges were later dropped, and were followed by a series of other charges, arrests, releases, expressions of “dismay” and “incredulity” from the US Embassy, and even, recently, confessions to the killings from two former National Guard corporals, who testified that Hans Christ had led them through the lobby and pointed out the victims. Christ and Ricardo Sol Meza have said that the dropped case against them was a government frame-up, and that they were only having drinks at the Sheraton the night of the killings, with a National Guard intelligence officer. It was logical for Hans Christ and Ricardo Sol Meza to have drinks at the Sheraton because they both had interests in the hotel, and Ricardo Sol Meza had just opened a roller disco, since closed, off the lobby into which the killers walked that night. The killers were described by witnesses as well dressed, their faces covered. The room from which they walked is no longer a restaurant, but the marks left by the bullets are still visible, on the wall facing the door.
Whenever I had occasion to visit the Sheraton I was apprehensive, and this apprehension came to color the entire Escalon district for me, even its lower reaches, where there were people and movies and restaurants. I recall being struck by it on the canopied porch of a restaurant near the Mexican embassy, on an evening when rain or sabotage or habit had blacked out the city and I became abruptly aware, in the light cast by a passing car, of two human shadows, silhouettes illuminated by the headlights and then invisible again. One shadow sat behind the smoked-glass windows of a Cherokee Chief parked at the curb in front of the restaurant; the other crouched between the pumps at the Esso station next door, carrying a rifle. It seemed to me unencouraging that my husband and I were the only people seated on the porch. In the absence of the headlights the candle on our table provided the only light, and I fought the impulse to blow it out. We continued talking, carefully. Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror.
2.
3/3/81: Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former Salvadoran army intelligence officer, holds a press conference and says that before the US presidential election he had been in touch with a number of Reagan advisers and those contacts have continued. The armed forces should ask the junta to resign, D’Aubuisson says. He refuses to name a date for the action, but says “March is, I think, a very interesting month.” He also calls for the abandonment of the economic reforms. D’Aubuisson had been accused of plotting to overthrow the government on two previous occasions. Observers speculate that since D’Aubuisson is able to hold the news conference and pass freely between Salvador and Guatemala, he must enjoy considerable support among some sections of the army.… 3/4/81: In San Salvador, the US Embassy is fired upon; no one is injured. Charge d’Affaires Frederic Chapin says, “This incident has all the hallmarks of a D’Aubuisson operation. Let me state to you that we oppose coups and we ha
ve no intention of being intimidated.”
—from the “Chronology of Events Related to Salvadoran Situation” prepared periodically by the United States embassy in San Salvador
Since the Exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those who sacrificed and struggled for freedom: the stand at Thermopylae, the revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw uprising in World War II. More recently we have seen evidence of this same human impulse in one of the developing nations in Central America. For months and months the world news media covered the fighting in El Salvador. Day after day, we were treated to stories and film slanted toward the brave freedom fighters battling oppressive government forces in behalf of the silent, suffering people of that tortured country. Then one day those silent suffering people were offered a chance to vote to choose the kind of government they wanted. Suddenly the freedom fighters in the hills were exposed for what they really are: Cuban-backed guerrillas.… On election day the people of El Salvador, an unprecedented [1.5 million] of them, braved ambush and gunfire, trudging miles to vote for freedom.
—President Reagan, in his June 8, 1982, speech before both houses of the British Parliament, referring to the March 28 election which resulted in the ascension of Roberto D’Aubuisson to the presidency of the Constituent Assembly
From whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I happened to read President Reagan’s speech one evening in San Salvador when President Reagan was in fact on television, with Doris Day, in The Winning Team, a 1952 Warner Brothers picture about the baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. I reached the stand at Thermopylae about the time that el salvador del Salvador began stringing cranberries and singing “Old St. Nicholas” with Miss Day. “Muy bonita,” he said when she tried out a rocking chair in her wedding dress. “Feliz Navidad,” they cried, and, in accented English, “Play ball!”
As it happened, “play ball” was a phrase I had come to associate in El Salvador with Roberto D’Aubuisson and his followers in the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA. “It’s a process of letting certain people know they’re going to have to play ball,” embassy people would say, and: “You take a guy who’s young, and everything ‘young’ implies, you send him signals, he plays ball, then we play ball.” American diction in this situation tends toward the studied casual, the can-do, as if sheer cool and Bailey bridges could shape the place up. Elliott Abrams told The New York Times in July that punishment within the Salvadoran military could be “a very important sign that you can’t do this stuff any more,” meaning kill the citizens. “If you clean up your act, all things are possible,” is the way Jeremiah O’Leary, a special assistant to US national security adviser William Clark, described the American diplomatic effort in an interview given the Los Angeles Times just after the March 28 election. He was speculating on how Ambassador Deane Hinton might be dealing with D’Aubuisson. “I kind of picture him saying, ‘Goddamnit Bobbie, you’ve got a problem 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 because it is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote. I never met Major D’Aubuisson, but I was always interested in the adjectives used to describe him. “Pathological” was the adjective, modifying “killer,” used by former Ambassador Robert 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 manages to enter the US illegally and spends two days in Washington holding press conferences and attending luncheons before turning himself in to immigration authorities”), but “pathological” is not a word one hears in-country, where meaning tends to be transmitted in code.
In-country one hears “young” (the “and everything ‘young’ implies” part is usually left tacit), even “immature”; “impetuous,” “impulsive,” “impatient,” “nervous,” “volatile,” “high-strung,” “kind of coiled-up,” and, most frequently, “intense,” or just “tense.” Offhand it struck me that Roberto D’Aubuisson had some reason to be tense, in that General José Guillermo García, who has 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 mind-set, which turns on plot, and, since half the players at any given point in the game are in exile, on the phrase “in touch with.”
“I’ve known D’Aubuisson a long time,” I was told by Alvaro Magaña, the banker the Army made, over D’Aubuisson’s rather frenzied objections (“We stopped that one on the one-yard line,” Deane Hinton told me about D’Aubuisson’s play to block Magaña), provisional president of El Salvador. We were sitting in his office upstairs at the Casa Presidencial, an airy and spacious building in the tropical colonial style, and he was drinking cup after Limoges cup of black coffee, smoking one cigarette with each, carefully, an unwilling actor who intended to survive the accident of being cast in this production. “Since Molina was president. I used to come here to see Molina, D’Aubuisson would be here, he was a young man in military intelligence, I’d see him here.” He gazed toward the corridor that opened onto the interior courtyard, with cannas, oleander, a fountain not in operation. “When we’re alone now I try to talk to him. I do talk to him, he’s coming for lunch today. He never calls me Alvaro, it’s always usted, Señor, Doctor. I call him Roberto. I say, ‘Roberto, don’t do this, don’t do that,’ you know.”
Magaña studied in the United States, at Chicago, and his four oldest children are now in the United States, one son at Vanderbilt, a son and a daughter at Santa Clara, and another daughter near Santa Clara, at Notre Dame in Belmont. He is connected by money, education, and temperament to oligarchal families. All the players here are densely connected: Magaña’s sister, who lives in California, is the best friend of Nora Ungo, the wife of Guillermo Ungo, and Ungo spoke to Magaña’s sister in August when he was in California raising money for the FMLN-FDR, which is what the opposition to the Salvadoran government was called this year. The membership and even the initials of this opposition tend to be fluid, but the broad strokes are these: the FMLN-FDR is the coalition of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) and the five guerrilla groups in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). These five groups are the Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS), the Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL), the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (PRTC), the Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (ERP), and the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN). Within each of these groups, there are further factions and sometimes even further initials, as in the PRS and LP-28 of the ERP.
During the time that D’Aubuisson was trying to stop Magaña’s appointment as provisional president, members of ARENA, which is supported heavily by other oligarchal elements, passed out leaflets referring to Magaña, predictably, as a communist, and, more interestingly, as “the little Jew.” The manipulation of anti-Semitism is an undercurrent in Salvadoran life that is not much discussed and 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-nineteenth century and those later families, some of them Jewish, who arrived in El Salvador and entrenched themselves around 1900. I recall asking a well-off Salvadoran about the numbers of his acquaintances within the oligarchy who have removed themselves and their money to Miami. “Mostly the Jews,” he said.
In San Salvador
in the year 1965
the best sellers
of the three most important
book stores
were:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; a few books by
diarrhetic Somerset Maugham;
a book of disagreeably
obvious poems
by a lady with a European name<
br />
who nonetheless writes in Spanish about our
country
and a collection of
Reader’s Digest condensed novels.
—“San Salvador” by Roque Dalton Garcia,
Translated by Edward Baker*
The late Roque Dalton García was born into the Salvadoran bourgeoisie in 1935, spent some years in Havana, came home in 1973 to join the ERP, and, in 1975, was executed, on charges that he was a CIA agent, by his own comrades. The actual executioner was said to be Joaquín Villalobos, who is now about thirty years old, commander of the ERP, and a key figure in the FMLN, which, as the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid pointed out last winter in Dissent, has as one of its support groups the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade. The Dalton execution is frequently cited by people who want to stress that “the other side kills people too, you know,” an argument common mainly among those 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 everyone has killed, everyone kills now, and, if the history of the place suggests any pattern, everyone will continue to kill.
The New York Review Abroad Page 14