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.
The Camino Real, closer to downtown, houses the press. It's a friendlier place, but if you make the mistake of buying the reporters drinks, they'll tell you stories of kidnapping, torture and assassination that will make your guts run like a white-water raft trip.
In the past seven years, nearly twenty thousand of El Salvador's 5 million people have been murdered by the death squads. And the army and the guerrillas are bidding fair to kill the rest. Something like fifty thousand people are dead from the civil war, five hundred thousand are homeless, and another five hundred thousand are on the lam in the United States.
There's another kind of horror, not as dramatic but a lot more pervasive. At any given moment, nearly half the Salvadoran work force is unemployed. And most of these who are employed receive less than the minimum wage, which is pretty minimum. Per capita annual income is $710. The poorer half of the population has a daily calorie intake that is a third less than what the Organization of American States considers healthy. Eighty percent of their children suffer from malnutrition.
Much of this poverty is hidden. It's out in the countryside in places ignored by central government since before the Spanish conquest. And the rest is tucked into the barrancas, because rich Salvadorans, unlike the rich in Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and most of Latin America, have the sense to live on the hillsides and keep the gully bottoms and ravines for the squalor.
It's hard to fathom another society, especially a troubled one, hard to figure its contradictions, measure its attitudes, see it in its underpants. I thought I had an insight at the Mercado Central, the market in downtown San Salvador where peasants and artisans bring their goods. It is a massive, newish cement building that looks like a parking garage for trolls. The two floors are low ceilinged and lit by a desultory scattering of single fluorescent tubes. And the place is packed, a thrashing minnow seine of small, tan people.
Coming in from the blinding sunshine, I felt a gestalt hit me, a Jungian race vision-the cruel Pipils and Mayas flaying victims to the sun, strange, hairy -man-horse conquistadors, the forced labor repartimientos, the Inquisition, the esquadrones de muerte-the odor of the charnel house struck me full in the face. But actually I'd walked into a hanging side of beef.
The market was a jolly enough place, once I'd disentangled myself from the cow. The interior was labyrinthed with aisles a foot wide, the floor piled and the ceiling hung with things to eat. There were eggs in six-foot ziggurats, baskets of live chickens, cheeses like snow tires, peppers in bundles cute as country-kitchen wallpaper and stacks of fruit like Brazilian nightclub-dancer hats. And everywhere were young country girls with breasts as beautiful as little melons and baskets on their heads full of melons as beautiful as little breasts.
One stall had trussed-up armadillos and a basket of iguanas, lips sewn shut, foreclaws tied behind their backs-minor deathsquad victims in the food-chain civil war. On the steps down to the street, an old peasant woman squatted with dozens of little handmade clay figurines, like creche figures. They were all soldiers.
But the one real insight I had at the market was the crowd, not its appearance or its behavior but its fact. This country is full, stuffed, gorged with people.
The next day I drove into the central valley which is formed by the Lempa River. People were living everywhere. El Salvador has more people per square mile than Haiti, and only twenty percent of the land would be used by U.S. farmers for anything but dumping wrecked cars.
The crowding, like the poverty, is a subtle, bucolic thing. I didn't really understand it until I tried to find a half-private place to take a leak. Anywhere I went I'd get an audience of little camp- esino-ettes-who'd never seen a norteamericano trouser snake before. (I may say none of them looked very impressed.)
In El Salvador, there are no Ethiopian concentrations of starving masses to advertise for a rock concert, no skeletal infants to act as poster children for the professional lovers of misery. The malnutrition is what's called first degree, which means the kids are 10 to 24 percent underweight. They're still cute. Small, but cute. Dead sometimes, but cute. This is the kind of nearly invisible poverty that, in fact, most of the world is mired in. It looks quaint from inside a car.
What feeds this countryside is not the truck produce I saw in Mercado Central but labor-intensive cash crops-coffee, sugar, cotton. But to get land for cash crops, landlords have been evicting tenant farmers and squatters and stealing property from the Indians for a hundred years. This is the same thing British landlords did to the Irish in the nineteenth century, and it's had the same lively results.
It was the issue of land reform that sparked the current civil war. A semi-progressive military coup in 1979 brought in a government that tried to redistribute the big estates, the fincas, and to raise the agricultural minimum wage. The terrified oligarchs took to using death squads. The leftist advocates of these reforms took to the hills.
But the conflict would have been no great shakes if there hadn't been five generations of rural grudges and deprivations behind it. And there won't be any tidy resolution, no matter what ideology wins out. About half of El Salvador's people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. To give each of these families nine hectares (about twenty acres-the minimum acreage needed to support life even as rural Salvadorans know it) would take six times more crop land than the country has.
I was traveling with a translator-I'll call him Alberto-a well-educated and strictly non-political young man. "Where does the government get all its soldiers?" I asked Alberto. "Is there a draft?"
Alberto looked to be about draft age. "Oh, yes," he said. "There's a draft. In everyone's identity book there is a page where it's marked whether you have fulfilled your military obligation. The army often goes to big dances and festivals and such things and surrounds the places. When the young men come out, their identity books are checked. If they have not done their service, they are loaded immediately on buses and taken to the training camp."
"Were you drafted?" -l asked.
"Oh, no." He looked surprised. "They only do that out in the country."
There were soldiers everywhere along the highway. Some looked professional; others dragged their guns by the barrels like rag dolls. In between the numerous military roadblocks we saw dozens of burned produce trucks-victims of rebel economic sabotage. The government operates its roadblocks by day, and the guerrillas operate theirs by night so that Salvadorans have twentyfour-hour roadblock service.
We drove on north to La Palma, in the mountains, almost to the Honduran frontier. Until recently this was a rebel stronghold. There were more bullet holes here than any place I've ever seen, more per square foot than in an average Michigan stop sign. One thing about adobe: it takes a bullet hole beautifully. The bullet leaves a nice aureole of missing plaster around the impact point, like in a Sgt. Rock comic, and not like bullet holes usually look, which is as if somebody used a Black & Decker-drill.-
La Palma has no palms. It's too high and cool. But it has handsome pine trees. To the north is the cres
t of the mountain range, with cloud-diademed peaks. To the south, all El Salvador is laid out like the Land of Counterpane. The town itself is the image of that tile-roofed mountain fastness where we all think we'll spend our meditative years. Or so it seemed until I stuck my head into the corner cantina. In the El Salvador hinterland there's nothing to eat but coarse tortillas, bad beans and worse rice. There's no clean drinking water. And there's no place to shit but the yard. Nothing except the grip of poverty is stronger than the smell.
A couple days later, Alberto and I drove west, to the far side of the San Salvador volcano, where the esquadrones de muerte dump their victims. I asked Alberto, "lust exactly what kind of people do the death squads kill?"
This had never been clear to me. And the word leftist was no help. Depending on who's talking in Latin America, leftist can mean anyone from Kim 11 Sung to George Shultz.
"It started with labor-union organizers," said Alberto, "and then just sort of expanded."
We talked fora while about politics in the abstract, the only way Alberto would talk about politics. I told him about my own ventures into activist loudmouthing when I was in college.
"Oh, you'd be dead," said Alberto, and he gave me one of those encyclopedic Latin shrugs. "It is an autocratic tradition of government. There is no mechanism for dissent. What else can they do?"
The people who perform the actual killings are, as far as I could figure, militia members, low-ranking policemen and a few plain bully boys. They hang precariously to lower-middle-class status, a couple of steps down the social ladder from the students and intellectuals they abduct, a step up from the campesinos they slaughter. The esquadrones de muerte are cut from the same cloth as the scared, fanatic lumps who, twenty-five years ago in our own country, were dynamiting black Sunday schools and burning freedom-rider buses. In the U. S. today they're selling GOD, GUTS AND GUNS MADE AMERICA GREAT bumper stickers at swap meets. In El Salvador they have more career opportunities.
The dumping ground is called El Playon, "the Big Beach." The name is a local drollery. El Playon is a huge cinder field deposited by an eruption of the San Salvador volcano. The lava fell in irregular, sharp-edged chunks, brittle and black, and covered hundreds of acres. The flat color absorbs the light. The porous stone absorbs the sound. Nothing grows or lives on El Playon except vultures, which have the same angles and colors as the lava and look like pieces of it made animate with horrid heads and necks.
The cinders are piled like sea chop, in pointed crests-the wide river Styx frozen in a moment of bad weather. El Play6n has been used as a garbage dump for decades and smells no better than it looks. But there's a more viscerally disturbing odor. I walked fifty or sixty feet out into the cinders and saw a pair of skeletons, rib cages intermingled. The skeletons had no skulls or finger bones. This is to prevent identification, sometimes. Or sometimes the head goes on somebody's doorstep. "Haircut and a manicure" it's called.
The bones weren't hard to look at. They were clean from the birds and the sun-theatrical, really. But walking back to the car, I saw matted clothes by the path, a sport shirt and jeans-teenage clothes, slim fit and narrow in the hips. And then I was sick and shocked.
And scared, too. I had to keep myself from running. I got us out of there as fast as I could and off to look at some dumb Maya pyramid. Alberto said, "The last time I was here there were bodies in garbage sacks."
How can these things happen in a place that looks like Santa Barbara? A place that's just a quick jaunt down the Pan American Highway? A place that was settled by Christian Europeans a full ninety-five years before the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
A social system like El Salvador's is not won on a TV game show. It takes time and effort to create something like this. The first thing the Spanish did when they arrived in the country was fightwith each other. Pedro de Alvarado, leading an expedition from Guatemala, met up with Martin de Estete, leading another from Nicaragua. And they blazed away.
The native city-states, mostly Pipil (cultural kin to the Aztecs) and Maya, were already in decline. These city-states were based on a huge underclass of landless serfs, and either the serfs had rebelled or the topsoil had eroded until it couldn't feed them. Whichever, the Pipils and Mayas were in a very modern condition when the Spaniards found them in 1522.
Spain, in the early sixteenth century, was fresh from a messy national unification. The Spanish crown was determined to maintain centralized control over its new American provinces. For more than three hundred years, virtually every administrative post above small-town mayor was held by a native Spaniard. Even the Creoles, the locally born people of pure Spanish blood, were not eligible for office, much less the mestizos or the Indians. So El Salvador, like the rest of Spanish America, arrived at independence with an experienced group of public administrators numbering none. And Simon Bolivar died saying, "America is ungovernable. . . . He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea."
Not that experienced administrators would have necessarily helped. The historian C. H. Haring points out that there are two kinds of colonies. He calls them farm colonies and exploitation colonies. Farm colonies are refuges where Pilgrims, Quakers and other fruitcakes can go chop down trees and stay out of everybody's hair. But exploitation colonies are places for wastrel younger sons and sleazed-out noblemen to get rich on gold or slave-labor plantations. Farm colonists are interested in forming their own permanent institutions. Exploitation colonists are interested in getting home and spending their money. For this reason New England, Canada, Costa Rica and parts of Argentina are reasonably nice places, while Mississippi, Jamaica, Mexico and most other sections of our hemisphere are shit holes. El Salvador is a shit hole.
The 1821 Salvadoran Declaration of Independence reads, in part, "If we do not issue a proclamation for independence, the people themselves might, in fact, do it." The country didn't even know it was independent for a couple of days, because independence had been declared up the road in Guatemala. Two political parties promptly emerged: the Liberals, or Cacos ("Thieves'), and the Conservatives, or Bacos ("Drunks').
El Salvador's first war was fought with Guatemala a few months after independence. Guatemala wanted El Salvador to join in a union with Mexico and so did El Salvador, but not on Guatemala's say-so. Since then, El Salvador has been involved in forty-two armed conflicts with its neighbors, culminating in a 1969 invasion of Honduras over a soccer match.
Changes in government have been frequent and confusing. In 1839, U.S. envoy John L. Stephens spent seven months looking for someone to present his credentials to. And the changes in government have rarely meant improvement. From 1931 to 1944, El Salvador had a dictator named General Martinez, who, among other things, put colored cellophane over the San Salvador street lamps to cure a smallpox epidemic.
Every now and then things get out of hand. Now, for instance, or in 1932, when a secret communist rebellion screwed up so badly that its schedule appeared in the daily paper. Only some Indians in the western half of the country actually rebelled. In Juayua, they cut the hands off a local policeman and killed the town's richest man, a liberal philanthropist. Then they got drunk. The air force arrived two days later and bombed the town. Then the army came-between eight thousand and ten thousand Indians were killed, all the government troops had ammunition for.
President of the moment is Jose Napoleon Duarte, who was installed in 1980 after the military forced out the semiprogressive junta it had installed the year before. Duarte is a moderate, which, in El Salvador, is like being in a game of tag where everyone is it but you.
A British pilot working for TACA told me a story about Duarte. The pilot made an unusually hard landing one time when the president was aboard. The plane bounced several times. As Duarte was getting off, the pilot apologized. "Don't worry," said Duarte. "When people see I was on the plane, they'll blame me."
Or they'll blame the United States. The pilot and I were having dinner at an outdoor cafe called Chili's. I happened to look up from my food while the pi
lot was telling his story, and there was a bullet hole in the iron grillwork by my head, right at eye level. The pilot and I were sitting at the same table where four U. S. embassy Marine guards had been sitting the previous summer when they were shot by guerrillas from the Central American Revolutionary Workers Party. The rest of the bullet holes had been covered with neat squares of masking tape and painted over.
Are these guerrillas, "the Gs," as they're called, the good guys? They make a point, I was told, of not harming the common people (though they got quite a few besides the Marines that night at Chili's). The Gs mostly sabotage the economy. I guess this is all right if you're a common person who doesn't need money or food. Also, the guerrillas seem to be better at killing embassy guards and the like than at getting rid of the death squads. The death squads are a powerful tool of right-wing terror. But they're also a powerful tool of left-wing recruitment. In the ugly air of El Salvador, you begin to wonder about things like that.
While I was there, the Gs were trying to disrupt the coffee harvest in the eastern provinces, but they weren't keeping regular hours. I never saw a guerrilla.
I did, however, see their press agent. I'm making a joke, actually. David Fenton, head of Fenton Communications, is a New York-based public-relations executive specializing in efforts to make the world-especially the Third World-a better place. His firm is a sort of grown-up version of the mimeograph machine in the old Vietnam Moratorium office. I talked to Fenton after I got back to the United States. He emphasized that he is hired by U.S. citizens and U. S. foundations, not by the rebels, to "tell the other side of the story in Central America."
"I don't think the rebels are entirely Marxists," Fenton said. "Personally, I'm a social democrat." I asked him what he could tell me about El Salvador. He said, "There are two things people have to understand about El Salvador: One is the culture of violence. Two is what average daily poverty is really like. Poverty and violence."
"Violence and poverty: those are the two things you have to understand about the country," the briefing officer at the American embassy in El Salvador told me. The embassy officer did not think the Gs were social democrats. He noted they weren't getting their guns from Sweden or the British Labor party. He gave me a threepage list of attacks on the U. S. Embassy, apparently a routine handout, like a communion card. But not all the attacks had been launched by the left.
Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This? Page 15
