The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Suddenly I understand that all day I have seen an open university. They have bridged the generation gap, obliterated class, surmounted nationality; everyone here is learning. I leave the camps with admiration for their courage, knowing that I haven't the stamina to last one night on Greenham Common. I can only praise these famous women. Though when, at some half-frozen moment by a fire, I announced that they were a fact in history, a jolly girl wearing sweaters and long tin earrings said, “Yeah, I read things like that and I think why it's just me and Debbie and Jean and all. Just us lot.”

  On Torture

  GRANTA, April 1984

  The following document was given to me in San Salvador, in the dusty yard behind the offices of the Archdiocese. There are a few shade trees in the yard, a couple of wooden benches, and a green corrugated tin shack, the headquarters of the Commission of Human Rights of El Salvador. The shack is filled with shelves of box files, odd-lot tables for desks, chairs, an old typewriter, an old mimeograph machine and people. Wherever power resides in San Salvador, it is protected by armed guards, high walls and steel doors. This place is open; nobody is afraid to talk; the air is different. In that diseased city, the yard and the shack are beautiful.

  The Commission of Human Rights is a company of volunteers determined to record for the world, if the world will listen, ceaseless violations of human rights by Salvadoran Security Forces. The volunteers are young, probably not long ago students at the university which is now closed, looted and occupied by soldiers. They are a band of heroes, nothing less, and their life expectancy is uncertain. Human rights in El Salvador are reduced to one: the right to live. Two people, who originally set up the commission, are dead in their thirties: a woman lawyer, assassinated, which means her body was found; a gifted doctor, universally loved, disappeared, which means his body will never be found. Everyone working for the commission is marked. The witnesses themselves are in danger; it is “subversive” to testify to the crimes of the state. The Security Forces can do what they like to anyone they choose: none of them has ever been punished for kidnapping, torture and murder. They are invulnerable against the defenseless.

  In 1982, the Human Rights Commission recorded the fate of 6,952 Salvadorans, men, women, boys, girls, who were seized (capturados), disappeared or assassinated. Torture is not recorded as a separate violation of human rights because it is automatic. The Security Forces and the Death Squads, their unofficial colleagues, do not even kill cleanly with a bullet as proved by the mutilated bodies found at random anywhere in El Salvador. Of 6,952 human beings, only 325 survived to be sent, after torture, to the political prisons.

  One of these was the young man whose testimony is printed here. It is a unique document, not because his anguish was exceptional, but because he lived to tell the story from beginning to end. Had it not been for a fluke rescue, he would have died and disappeared, like thousands before and since. “Torture in El Salvador,” the Human Rights Commission explains, “has become routine, as a method of work, considered natural and necessary by those who practice it.” For twelve days, this young man was tortured as routine and for his torturers’ pleasure. Diseased imaginations invented these tortures, designed to unhinge the mind while ruining the body. They are an abominable advance on Gestapo techniques. After twelve days, he was interrogated briefly and absurdly. Knowing nothing, he confessed nothing. He was tortured again. Near death, he was revived by doctors. After nineteen days he was taken to court, charged by the Security Forces with concocted “subversion.” He still had the unbroken nerve and clarity of mind to deny the charges, denounce his torturers and insist that the International Red Cross hear his testimony and examine the marks on his body.

  Torture has spread from the Gestapo, the disease carrier, worldwide—increasing in virulence over the years. Before the Second World War, for the first time in modern history, torture was integral state policy in Nazi Germany. It was less systematic but no less vicious in Fascist Italy. The Lubianka was a synonym for torture in Stalinist Russia. Torture returned to Spain, like a memory of the Inquisition, in Franco's prisons. If torture was practiced elsewhere in the world, then, it was sporadic and secret, not part of the state bureaucracy. Now, Amnesty has evidence of the practice of torture in ninety countries: it is updating its list this year. The earth is covered by one hundred and sixty-four nations, including such miniatures as Andorra and St. Lucia. In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.

  Once we thought that Germany was peculiarly diseased since it produced an abundance of torturers. Now we know that torturers appear wherever they're wanted. Shortage of labor is not a problem. Previous experience is helpful but unnecessary, learn on the job, regular eight-hour shifts, good wages from a grateful government. In ninety countries, torturers are on the state payroll, like postmen. What is their work; how do they talk; where do they operate: who are they? It is all here to read, not a fictional horror but a fact of barbarity now. And though the machinery and manner may vary according to nationality—variations from Chile to South Africa to Russia, for instance—the purpose is the same: the purpose is to silence those who disagree.

  All member states of the United Nations are obligated to honor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. El Salvador is a member of the United Nations; so are eighty-five other countries where torture is practiced. The majority of the torturers’ regimes belong in the Free World, friendly clients or allies. I don't know exactly what “Free World” means except as a politician's phrase. If it means the total of nations not under communist control, it is a misnomer; we should speak of the Partially Free World, or the Free Enterprise World. Our leaders, especially the present leaders of the two great English-speaking democracies, denounce the Soviet Union for its abuse of human rights. The abuse of human rights, culminating in torture as the final and worst abuse, should always be denounced everywhere. But our freedom-loving leaders condone or—unforgivably—assist the torturers’ regimes on our side. El Salvador is only one example. There are too many. Lop-sided morality is not morality at all; it is fraud.

  Dr. Henry Kissinger is widely regarded by decision-makers and governments as a champion geopolitical thinker. Dr. Kissinger believes in power and is believed by the powerful. He talks their language, telling them what they like to hear. He was the natural choice for chairman of President Reagan's advisory committee on Central America. Concluding that task, he said: “If we cannot manage Central America, it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and other places that we know how to manage the Global Equilibrium.”

  The arrogance is matched by the moral idiocy. The people of Central America do not count; they have no individual existence, let alone rights. Nor do the people around the Persian Gulf matter; the oil matters. The Global Equilibrium to which Dr. Kissinger refers is a world-wide dread of insane nuclear war coming closer and closer. To balance on a tightrope over an abyss is not the ordinary man's idea of equilibrium.

  Geopolitics tend to fail, after causing immeasurable misery. You might say that Hitler was the top geopolitical failure. The bombing of Laos and Cambodia, a geopolitical action guided by Dr. Kissinger, did not give the planned results but destroyed two countries and millions of lives. Never mind, if it doesn't work in Southeast Asia, try again in Central America. There must be a Kissinger clone in the Kremlin offices, advising that “If we cannot manage Afghanistan, it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in Eastern Europe and other places that we know how to manage the Global Equilibrium.”

  Governments think big; they think geopolitically. Human rights are irrelevant to geopolitics. This may kill us all in the end.

  SAN SALVADOR, April 4-22, 1982

  On April 4, 1982 at around 4:30 in the afternoon I was waiting at a bus stop, just opposite the petrol station on San Antonio Abad Street. A military convoy appeared, a white Ford van
with eight policemen carrying M16 rifles, followed by two radio patrol cars from the National Police and two military jeeps. The men got out and surrounded the area, blocking off traffic. Plainclothes police, without explanation, tied me up. There were witnesses around, so I said, “What's happening, Señores?” An army officer came up and hit me in the lower stomach with his rifle butt, saying, “You think I don't know who you are?” His soldiers began to beat me, knocking me to the ground. A sergeant pulled me up and pushed me in a patrol car, the white Ford van followed. We stopped at the Vieytez Cinema; inside, in a sort of bar, they blindfolded and handcuffed me and took me back and threw me on the floor of the van.

  When they took me out of the van, they led me up and down stairs for about five minutes, left: me in an intensely cold room for another fifteen minutes, then led me out where someone, I assumed the chief, put his hand on my shoulder and said in a friendly way, “I think I know you. You're from San Miguel, aren't you?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Do you know why you're here or haven't the boys told you?”

  I said, “No.”

  “Take him away and give him the most comfortable bed and the best food.”

  Another man said, “The Guardia are looking for him.”

  “No problem,” another said. “If he doesn't collaborate we'll turn him over to them.”

  Another man hit me in the stomach and said, “Not only the Guardia but the Treasury Police are looking for this son of a whore! Take him away!”

  Someone grabbed my hair and like that they led me again up and down stairs and I figured I was in the Barracks of the National Police from what they had said. They stopped and took off my clothes and handcuffs and blindfold and said, “Don't look back,” and shoved so that I slipped and fell on a floor covered with excrement and urine in a completely black room.

  Three or four hours passed before a man, looking like a peasant, opened the door and gave me a blindfold and told me to tie it tightly. In the hall, someone tied a long cord around my testicles and pulled me by this to a room where loud music was playing. Someone said, “Do you like the Bee Gees or would you prefer something of Mejia Godoy?” I said it was their business and he grabbed my hair and said, “Answer my question.” “Then the Bee Gees,” I said. “You'll see how nice it is to take a beating to musical accompaniment.” They tied the cord around my testicles to something, then tied my feet and hands, and then all of them began to beat me with truncheons. I fell down from being hit in the stomach, they beat on the back of the neck, the ankles, and the head, someone else punched me under the ribs and in the thorax. Someone clapped his hands repeatedly over my ears. They pulled me to my knees with the cord on my testicles. I don't know how long it lasted but it seemed interminable. I said, “Stop, don't go on, man,” and one said, “This is the way to shut up this whore asshole.” He pulled the corners of my mouth to open it and put in something that filled my mouth into the cheeks while another held me up and someone gave me a karate chop behind the knee, he did this six times and the pain in the kneecap was intense. Then a man straddled my shoulders and put two fingers in each nostril, pulling my head back. I thought I was going to choke, my nose bled heavily. Someone jumped on my tied feet and another hit me in the back; when I fell, they pulled me up again by the cord around my testicles.

  They ordered me to sit down. They took out the thing they had put in my mouth and my cheeks had an uncontrollable movement, like a nervous tic, when they placed the hood over my head. This instrument of torture is rubber specially made so that it clings to your nostril when you breathe. I panicked, I couldn't breathe and my heartbeat went wild. Someone said, “Now,” which I soon understood meant the order to take off the hood. They gave me just enough time to gulp air then put it on again. On, off; about the ninth time I felt a total faintness of the body and a kind of amnesia so that I wondered Who am I? and forgot what was happening. I passed out.

  When I came to, someone with big hands was squeezing my neck in the region of the tonsils, I was dizzy, without strength, with difficulty in breathing. A voice said, “Get up,” and I tried but fell, hitting my head on the concrete floor. I did not feel my body, which alarmed me, but they threw buckets of ice water on me and sensation returned. I was lying on my stomach and pushed up my blindfold a little to see around me. They put two round metal objects on the sole of my left foot, then rolled me over, put a sticky ointment on my forehead and attached another round metal object there. I could see that wires went from these to a black metal industrial box with three colored buttons, red, green, yellow; the box was placed on a metal table and a man beside it pressed the buttons. Suddenly an electric shock went through my body, my whole body writhed, my eyes rolled around in terrible pain, my hands were stiff, my neck was twisted. I did not lose consciousness but I felt terror of another shock. They threw another bucket of ice water on me and another shock made my whole body arch up and I lost consciousness, my last sensation was agony in the head.

  When I came to, I said, “No more, man, I’m epileptic, you can give me convulsions, if you want to question me at least leave me some consciousness.” As I stopped talking, I felt another shock, equal to the first, of a kind that tears up the whole body. They threw water on me again. The pain in my eyes and forehead was intense and I felt something like needles in my brain.

  Some time elapsed. I don't know how much, perhaps ten minutes. I heard a voice.

  “Get up,” it said. “Do you want to have a bath?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He took me out of the room. “I want to help you,” he said.

  ‘No,” I said.

  “I'll run the bath for you. And just to prove that I mean to help you, I'll take off the blindfold. No one ever does that here.”

  The bathroom in which I found myself was spacious and clean and had one fairly large mirror. It was painted the same colors as the National Police uniform, the lower part a dark coffee-brown and the upper a pale yellow. The policeman left, and I began my bath.

  Very little time passed before two men entered. They were both tall and heavily built and had Afro hairstyles. One had a full beard. The other was shaven but with a heavy blue-green shadow on his chin. They were angry to find me without my blindfold, and they immediately put it back on, very tightly. They did not look like they were from El Salvador, and they spoke with Argentine accents.

  “Put the bolt on the door,” one of them said.

  “What do you say,” I heard next, “shall we screw him?”

  The other began to fondle me and I pushed his hand away. He put his hand over my mouth and asked: “Haven't you ever sucked cock?” I didn't answer, and I was knocked down and made to kneel. One grabbed me by the hair from behind, while the other forced his erect penis into my mouth.

  When I left the bathroom, I heard the sounds of dawn. They gave me my clothes but not shoes. Leading me by holding my right wrist, I got the impression that now we were in the upper part of the building. They put me in a room and closed the door. I took off the blindfold and saw it was a small clean room with a metal desk and two chairs and a polarized mirror, so I put back the blindfold. Not by any fixed plan, an agent would open the door and say, “Stand up,” then later another would come and say, “Sit down.” This was the day after my capture, April 5, and I stayed here the 5th, 6th, and 7th, being given water and a tortilla, sometimes twice, sometimes three times a day. The floors up here were wood and I could hear other prisoners being brought in and out of these rooms.

  On the third day here, April 7, I had to relieve myself and asked the agent when he opened the door to let me go to the toilet. He said, “You're not in your house here, son of a whore,” and locked the door. My bladder was full and I felt terrible unease and cold sweats from not being able to defecate or urinate. The next day I asked again and he said, “If you piss here, you'll swallow it. Wait, I'll fix you up.” About ten minutes later, he came back with other men. I was stripped and a strong adhesive tape was bound around my p
enis, closing it. The pain was bad and got worse. The next morning, they came and made me drink water and splashed water on my stomach, making the need to urinate and the pain always worse. On April 10, they came and said, “Don't you want to urinate?” and took me to the toilet where I urinated blood, with pain.

  They took me back to the same room where I stayed three days. They cared for my wounds and fed me decently and I thought they were trying to soften me up, but I recuperated some strength. An agent came in and found me without the blindfold. I explained that the blindfold made me see flashing lights and I feared this would bring on an epileptic attack. He locked the door and said I could keep it off with him. He was white, tall, with light brown eyes, reddish hair, aquiline nose, he wore an Arrow shirt and had an Omega watch. He gave me a cigarette and talked amiably, asking if I spoke English, what countries I had visited, what type of woman I liked. I said, “You're not from here.” By his accent he was somewhere between Guatemalan and Colombian. He smiled and said, “You're very intelligent and observant and here that's a death penalty, so keep your mouth shut.”

  On April 12, the interrogation began; this was the “good” man who said he wanted to help me after the electric shocks. By his accent he was Panamanian. He told me to sit on a chair, let me take off the blindfold, gave me a cigarette and said, “Our ideology is not to kill, we want to make you into a new man. That is what society wants. But to become a new man you must co-operate. We treat well everyone who co-operates.” Then he asked endless questions. I answered all the personal ones about my family, my mother and brother were in the United States, two other brothers lived in Holland; I lived on an allowance from my mother and had come to San Salvador to visit the Psychiatric Clinic. I said my profession was writer, though not published. The name of my unfinished book was A Comical Word Called Justice. He had my passport and asked specially about Nicaragua; the dates were all from 1979. I explained that I had gone to Nicaragua with my Nicaraguan girlfriend who had to see her parents but was afraid to go alone because Nicaragua was very disturbed. I was in and out of Nicaragua for a couple of days only. Then he asked about organizations I belonged to and what was my pseudonym in the Communist Party and he said I was a leader in the CP and had been sent for training to Cuba and Nicaragua. I told him I studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Colombia at Medellin and if he knew anything he would know that Kierkegaard had nothing to do with Marxist-Leninism. I said I am an Existentialist and I don't know anything about organizations or politics and I don't give a damn about them. This went on a long time because he said he had to fill 70 pages with answers on the orders of his chiefs. He kept saying he was the kindest man I would meet and must answer his questions. I said how can I answer things I don't know? He put his papers in a folder, put back my blindfold and said, ‘This is the way you've helped me,” and punched me on the back of the neck. He said, “Stand up” and hit me so hard in the stomach that he knocked out my breath. He called to someone outside and said, “He thinks he's the boss of San Salvador, he won't collaborate for shit.”