by Rick Steves
The City Built Upon a Garbage Dump
San Salvador’s poorest neighborhood—a place that makes Beatriz’s neighborhood seem almost posh—is built upon a garbage dump. We wandered for an hour around this “city” of 50,000 inhabitants, dusty frills of garbage blowing like old dandelion spores in the wind.
It was a ramshackle world of corrugated tin, broken concrete, and tattered laundry. I’ll never forget the piles of scrap metal, the ripped and shredded sofas, tire parts, and filthy plastic bowls I saw stacked neatly at one point. This was a store entirely stocked by junk scavenged from the city dump. Even the store’s chairs, tables, walls, and roof were scavenged—made of battered tin.
Overlooking the shacks was a slap-in-your-face billboard from a local bank, advertising home loans for the wealthy. It read, “With every day that passes, your house is closer to being yours.”
We passed through a “suburb” of tin shacks housing people who lived off the dump, passing yards where they sorted out saleable garbage, stacked broken glass, and pounded rusty metal barrels into cooking pots and pans. The people had done what they could to make their slum livable. There was greenery, cute children bringing home huge jugs of water (two cents each), and lots of mud, bamboo, and corrugated tin buildings. As we approached the ridge overlooking the main dump, I started thinking that this really wasn’t all that awful.
Older kids watch younger kids while dads scavenge and moms walk for water.
Then we entered a kind of living hell. We’d heard of the people living off garbage dumps, and now we were in for a firsthand look: huge bulldozers, circling black birds, and a literal mountain of garbage ten stories high with people picking through it. It was a vast urban fruit rind covered with human ants.
A policeman with a machine gun kept the people away from one half of the garbage mountain. That was where aid items that the government figured would cost them too much to disperse were being buried under the garbage. About thirty people gathered. Our guide said they were waiting for the guard to leave. I couldn’t believe him. Then the guard left, and all thirty scavengers broke into a run and dashed into the best part of the dump. The smell was sweet and sickening.
Overwhelmed by the uncomfortable realities I was confronted with, I retreated to a strip mall in a wealthy part of town. I was just settling into a nice, peaceful, comforting latte, like I get each morning back home, when a US military helicopter surged over the horizon. It hovered above for a moment and then clumsily landed. A jolly Santa Claus hopped out to the delight of the children wealthy enough to have moms shopping here.
Looking at those kids and thinking of their dump-dwelling cousins, I realized that, even if you’re motivated only by greed, if you know what’s good for you, you don’t want to be filthy rich in a desperately poor world.
Feeling the breeze of the chopper as Santa climbed back in and it flew away, I took another sip of the drink I just paid half a day’s local wages for. Pulling out my little notebook, I added a few more observations, and continued my education.
In 1492, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue…
Our Salvadoran hosts gave us a history lesson unlike any I got in school. In 1524, the Spaniards arrived in El Salvador. They killed the indigenous people, burned villages, and named the place “The Savior” after Christ. Enslaving the locals—branding them with hot irons like cattle—those first conquistadors established a persistent pattern. Fields of local staples were replaced by more profitable cash crops (indigo, then coffee), as locals were repeatedly displaced from desirable farmland. Rebellion after rebellion was put down as the land was Christianized. Making religion the opiate of the masses, the priests preached, “Don’t question authority. Heaven awaits those who suffer quietly.”
While political murals are dangerous these days, indigenous Salvadorans—who call themselves “people of corn”—celebrate their ethnicity instead.
El Salvador finally won its independence from Spain in 1821. The local victors were not the indigenous people, but the descendants of those first Spanish conquistadors. They wanted to continue harvesting El Salvador…but without giving Spain its cut. Indigenous Salvadorans gained nothing from “independence.”
After the popular uprisings and massacres of 1932, indigenous culture was outlawed, the left wing was decimated, and a military dictatorship was established. Those who spoke the indigenous language were killed. Traditional dress was prohibited. After 1932, when a white person looked at an Indian, the Indian’s head would drop. To be indigenous was to be subversive. And today, the word indígena still comes with negative connotations: illiterate, ignorant, savage. If a Mestizo (mixed-race Latin American) loses his temper or does something violent, rather than say, “The devil made me do it,” he’ll say, “Se me salió el indio” (The Indian came out of me).
The Jubilee Year
In the Bible, God calls for a Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25:10)—every fifty years, the land is to be redistributed and debts are to be forgiven. Perhaps God figured that, given the greedy nature of humankind, it takes about fifty years for economic injustice to build to a point that drives a society to violence.
Rich Christians can’t imagine God was serious. But the sad modern history of El Salvador shows the wisdom in the Biblical Jubilee year. There’s a pattern that I think of as Jubilee massacres: a dramatic spike in violence every fifty years. Twice a century, landless peasants rise up…and are crushed. In the 1830s, an insurrection and its charismatic leader were put down. In 1881, peasants suffered a big and bloody land grab. In 1932, after the great global depression and communist influence made landless peasants both hungry and bold, an estimated 30,000 were massacred following an insurrection. In the 1980s, the people rose up and were repressed so cruelly that a 12-year civil war followed. The 1830s, 1881, 1932, the 1980s—during the last two centuries, El Salvador has endured a slaughter every fifty years.
Interested to connect with this important facet of Central American culture, I drove deep into the countryside, to a village where 90 percent of the people are indigenous and the economy is based on pottery. I spent some time with Valentín López, a potter who’s passionate about keeping the pre-Colombian local art alive in his craft.
At his wheel, he demonstrated the traditional way pottery is made, painted, and burnished. It’s all organic: clay pounded by bare feet, brushes made of a woman’s hair, and giant seeds as burnishers. He explained how important it is for indigenous potters to be in tune with nature. In the US, a potter orders clay on the phone. Here, they hike to the clay pit and gather it themselves. As his son kick-started the potter’s wheel, Valentín pointed out that there’s no electricity involved—“People power…our gas is rice and beans.” Watching the boy getting the wheel really ramped up with his muscular leg, he added, “This town produces very good soccer players.”
The chance for the tourist to be humiliated followed, and I jumped at the opportunity. Climbing into the potter’s chair felt like saddling a strange animal. I pushed the heavy stone wheel with my feet. It was awkward. With images of Fred Flintstone trying to start his car, I struggled to get it going. My foot nearly got pinched and dragged by the rough wheel under the brace of the table—which would have made me, quite likely, the first person to lose a leg to a potter’s wheel.
The potter’s son helped me get the wheel turning full-steam, and then slammed a blob of clay onto my spinning work table. I cupped it, and it wobbled. He showed me how to be gentle with the clay. As he trickled on some water and guided my fingers and thumbs, the clay came to life. But my creation was still a clumsy little baby…eventually made elegant, effortlessly, by my teenaged teacher.
Glancing down the row of eight stations like the one I was sitting at, all under the shade of a corrugated tin roof, I imagined this cottage industry in full swing. And I appreciated the timelessness of the technology. While the advent of plastic must have done to pottery what the advent of cars did to blacksmithing, indigenous people want vessels that are of the earth, made by hand
, and ornamented with the iconography of their ancestors. And, as long as there are indigenous people—even if there are no tourists seeking souvenirs—there will be potters in Latin America.
I grew up fascinated by Pancho Villa, but always considered him a “Mexican bandit.” Indigenous Latin Americans view him as a hero who stood up against white dominance. As long as indigenous Latin Americans are kept down, my hunch is that the headlines will be filled with the Pancho Villas of the 21st century as they stand up for their rights in an aggressive and often uncompromising modern world.
A monument much like America’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands in San Salvador, remembering people killed in its most recent popular uprising.
As I watched Valentín and his son turn, polish, and bake their pottery with a stronger spiritual connection to their ancestors than the connection I have with my ancestors, I gained a new respect for the strength of indigenous culture in our hemisphere.
El Salvador’s Civil War and Bonsai Democracy
There’s a popular saying in the poor world: Feed the hungry and you’re a saint. Ask why they are hungry and you’re a communist. In the 1970s, some Central American priests started asking why. These Liberation Theologians threatened the powerful… and were killed.
When Oscar Romero was made archbishop in 1977, wealthy Salvadorans breathed a sigh of relief. If his reputation as a fairly conservative priest was any indication of how he would run the Church here, they believed the right wing had nothing to fear. But the growing violence against the poor and the assassinations of church leaders who grappled with economic injustice drove Romero to speak out. Eventually this mild-mannered priest became the charismatic spokesperson of his people.
As a Liberation Theologian, Romero invited his followers to see Christmas as the story of a poor, homeless mother with a hungry baby. Romero taught that the lessons and inspiration offered by the Bible were tools for the faithful as they dealt with the struggles of their day-to-day lives.
Because Archbishop Oscar Romero asked why, he was gunned down in 1980 in front of his congregation. Then, dozens of worshippers were murdered at his funeral.
Liberation Theology
If economic elites use religion as the “opiate of the masses,” Liberation Theology is the opposite. Liberation Theology is a politicized view of Christianity popular among those trying to inspire the poor to fight for economic justice. Liberation Theologians preach that every person is created in God’s image, and God intended them to have dignity. They believe that economic injustice and structural poverty are an affront to God, and it is right for the downtrodden to mobilize and fight for their God-given rights now rather than docilely wait for heavenly rewards. In short, Liberation Theologians believe that the Church should be about justice, not rituals.
“Escape theology”—the apolitical yin to Liberation Theology’s yang—is fundamentalism imported from the USA. This “suffer now, enjoy later” theology keeps the opiate in religion.
While it has given hope to millions of previously hopeless people, Liberation Theology has also had many critics. Mingling religious authority with social, political, and even military power, the movement could lead to armed revolution. And it had a potentially corrupting influence on local charismatic priests, who created a cult of personality to empower themselves and their followers. Still, many people see Liberation Theology as the only viable option for those dissatisfied with what they consider a social and economic structure that keeps them poor.
As Liberation Theology took hold in Latin America in the 1970s, many Americans thought it smelled like communism. President Nixon established an American Cold War stance that considered this politicization of Christianity a direct challenge to American interests in Central America. From this point on, the story of El Salvador’s struggle became a story of martyrs. First, politically active peasants were killed. From the 1970s on, Church leaders were targeted. “Be a patriot… kill a priest” was a bumper sticker-like slogan popular among El Salvador’s national guard.
Liberation Theology surged through the warfare of the 1980s. But since the peace accords and (marginal) reforms of the 1990s, it seems to have gone dormant as a political force. Once-activist Christians are spent. They have accepted peace without as much justice as they once demanded. These days, in many El Salvador churches, it’s taboo to talk politics.
Traveling—whether in Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist lands—I’ve seen how religion injects passion into local politics…and I’ve developed a healthy respect for the importance of separation of religion and state. And yet, when a politicized Church (such as the one that stood by the revolutionaries of Central America in the 1980s) fights for economic justice, I find myself rooting for the politicization of religion. My heart makes my politics inconsistent.
After the killing of Romero, the poor—emboldened by their Liberation Theology—rebelled, plunging El Salvador into their long and bloody Civil War. The united guerilla front (FMLN) expected a quick victory, but the US under President Reagan spent $1.5 million a day to keep that from happening. With the success of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in July 1979, Reagan was determined to stop the spread of what he considered a communist threat.
El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Salvadoran forces assumed, because the guerillas were maintaining their strength, that innocent civilians in leftist-controlled territory were no longer innocent. Civilian women and children were considered combatants—fair game—in order for the popular revolt to become less popular. As if draining the sea to kill the fish, right-wing forces targeted and terrorized civilians with a brutal vengeance. Notorious “death squads” wrought havoc on El Salvador’s poor.
For example, the University of Central America’s six leading Jesuit professors were the intellectual leaders of Liberation Theology—and, therefore, they were considered leaders of the revolution. Early one morning in 1989, government death squads came into the Jesuits’ humble quarters and dragged them into the garden. One by one, they were shot in the brains with exploding bullets (because they were the “brains of the people’s movement”). Before the death squad left, they took time to shoot a bullet through the heart of a photo of Romero hanging on the wall…still trying to kill him nine years after his death.
My visit to the university grounds where those six Jesuit priests were shot was poignant. Reading about events in faraway lands in the newspaper, you learn what happened. Then you can flip to the sports pages or comics. But hearing the story of an event from people who lived through it, you feel what happened. Right there behind the bedrooms of those professors, the smell of the flowers, the hard labor of the hunched-over gardener, the quiet focus of students whose parents lost a revolution, the knowledge that my country provided those exploding bullets… all combined to make this experience both vivid and enduring.
While the FMLN could have fought on, the toll on their country was too great. Eight years of negotiations finally led to a 1992 peace accord. Suddenly, the guerillas shaved, washed, and found themselves members of parliament representing a now-peaceful FMLN party. For many years, the FMLN played a role in government, but was effectively marginalized. They were welcome…as long as they didn’t get too powerful.
Democracy in these countries reminds me of a bonsai tree: You keep it in the window for others to see, and when it grows too big, you cut it back. And who does the cutting? It has traditionally been the USA—first through active military involvement, and later through strong-arm political pressure, including (in 2004) outright threats to deport El Salvador guest workers if ARENA didn’t win. You can argue whether American meddling in Latin American politics is justified. Either way, it makes me uncomfortable to think that a nation founded on the principles of liberty and freedom wields such a strong influence over fledgling democracies. I asked Father Jon Sobrino (a leading Jesuit priest and scholar at the University of Central America) about America’s influence on Salvadoran politics. He said, “These days, when I hear the word
‘democracy,’ my bowels move.”
When asked “Who really runs El Salvador?,” most Salvadorans would say simply, “The Embassy” (as the American Embassy is called here). You can’t miss it: It’s just above San Salvador, built upon the ruins of the old pre-Columbian Indian capital.
Romero, Martyrdom, and Resurrection
The primary reason for my 2005 visit to El Salvador was to remember Oscar Romero on the 25th anniversary of his assassination. Marching with thousands of his followers through the streets of San Salvador, it was clear to me: Just as Romero prophesized, they killed him, yet he lives through his people.
This bus tour is filled with Americans eager to learn and hungry for inspiration.
I’ll never forget the parade that day. Everyone in our group crayoned Romero Vive (“Romero lives”) on our white T-shirts. We piled into the repainted but obviously recycled circa 1960s American school bus (the standard public transport in Central America today), drove as close as we could, and then spilled into the streets. Joining masses of Salvadorans, we funneled through their capital city and to the cathedral, which held the body of their national hero. Entrepreneurs sold bananas from woven bins and drinks in clear plastic bags pierced by paper straws. Parents packed along children born long after Romero’s day. Prune-faced old ladies who couldn’t handle the long march filled the backs of beat-up pickup trucks, adding slow-rolling “granny floats” to the parade of people. Banks, Western Union offices, strip malls, and fast-food joints seemed to stand still and observe as the marchers shut down the city. Soldiers looking on appeared humbled by the crowd.
People fill the streets in honor of their beloved archbishop, Romero.
