El Salvador FIRST PERSON By Carolyn Forche I he year Franco died, I spent several “ months on Mallorca translating the poetry of Claribel Alegria, a Salvadorean in voluntary exile. During those months the almond trees bloomed and lost flower, the olives and lemons ripened and we hauled baskets of apricots from Claribel’s small finca (farm). There was fresh squid under the palm-thatch and drunk Australian sailors to dance with at night. It was my first time in Europe and there was no better place at that time than Spain. I was there when Franco’s anniversary passed for the first time in 40 years without notice — and the lack of public celebration was a collective hush of relief. I traveled with Claribel’s daughter, Maya Flakoil, for 10 days through Andalusia by train visiting poetry shrines. The gitanos (gypsies) had finally pounded a cross into the earth to mark the grave of Federico Garcia Lorca, not where it had been presumed to be all this time, not beneath an olive tree, but in a bowl of land rimmed by pines. We hiked the 11 kilometers through the Sierra Nevada foothills to La Fuente Grande and held a book of poems open over the silenced poet. I was busy with Claribel’s poems, and with the horrific accounts of the survivors of repressive Latin American regimes. Claribel’s home was frequented by these wounded; writers who had been tortured and imprisoned, who had lost husbands, wives and closest friends. In the afternoon more than once I joined Claribel in her silent vigil near the window until the mail came, her “difficult time of day,” alone in a chair in the perfect light of thick-walled Mallorquin windows. These were her afternoons of despair, and they haunted me. In those hours I first learned of El Salvador, not from the springs of her nostalgia for “the fraternity of dipping a tortilla into a common pot of beans and meat,” but from the source of its pervasive brutality. My understanding of Latin American realities was confined then to the romantic devotion to Vietnam-era revolutionary pieties, the sainthood of Ernesto Che, rather than the debilitating effects of the cult of personality that arose in the collective memory of Guevara. I worked into the late hours on my poems and on translations, drinking “101” brandy and chain-smoking. When Cuban writer Mario Benedetti visited, I questioned him about what “an American” could do in the struggle against repression. “As a North American, you might try working to influence a profound change in your country’s foreign policy.” Over coffee in the mornings I studied reports from Amnesty International-London and learned of a plague on Latin exiles who had sought refuge in Spain following Franco’s death: a right-wing death squad known as the “AAA” — Anti- Communista Apostolica, founded in Argentina and exported to assassinate influential exiles from the southern cone. I returned to the United States and in the autumn of 1977 was invited to El Salvador by persons who knew Claribel. “How much do you know about Latin America?” I was asked. Then: “Good. At least you know that you know nothing.” A young writer, politically unaffiliated, ideologically vague, I was to be blessed with the rarity of a moral and political education — what at times would seem an unbearable immersion, what eventually would become a focused obsession. It would change my life and work, propel me toward engagement, test my endurance and find it wanting, and prevent me from ever viewing myself or my country again through precisely the same fog of unwitting connivance. I was sent for a briefing to Dr. Thomas P. Anderson, author of Matanza (Massacre), the definitive scholarly history of Salvador’s revolution of 1932, and to Ignacio Lozano, a California newspaper editor and former ambassador (under Gerald Ford) to El Salvador. It was suggested that I visit Salvador as a journalist, a role that would of necessity become real. In January 1978, I landed at Ilopango, the dingy centercity airport that is now Salvador’s largest military base. Arriving before me were the members of a human rights investigation team headed by then-Congressman John Drinan, S.J. (D-Mass.). I had been told that a black North American, Ronald James Richardson, had been killed while in the custody of the Salvadorean government and that a North American organization known as the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD, an organ of the AFL-CIO and an intelligence front) was manipulating the Salvadorean agricultural workers. Investigation of “The Richardson Case” exposed me to the sub rosa activities of the Salvadorean military, whose highest-ranking officers and governmental officials were engaged in cocaine smuggling, kidnapping, extortion and terrorism; through studying AIFLD’s work, I would learn of the spurious intentions of an organization destined .to become the architect of the present Agrarian Reform. I was delivered the promised exposure to the stratified life of Salvador and was welcomed “to Vietnam, circa 1959.” The “Golden Triangle” had moved to the isthmus of the Americas, “rural pacification” was in embryo, the seeds of rebellion had taken root in destitution and hunger. Later my companion and guide, “Ricardo,” changed his description from Vietnam to “a Nazi forced- labor camp.” “It is not hyperbole,” he said quietly, “you will come to see that.” In those first 20 days I was taken to clinics and hospitals, villages, farms, prisons, coffee mansions and processing plants, cane mills and the elegant homes of American foreign service bureaucrats, nudged into the hillsides overlooking the capital, where I was offered cocktails and platters of ocean shrimp; it was not yet known what I would write of my impressions or where I would print them, Fortuitously, I had published nationally in my own country, and in Salvador “only poetry” did not carry the pejorative connotation I might have ascribed to it then. I knew nothing of political journalism but was willing to learn — it seemed, at the time, an acceptable way for a poet to make a living. I lay on my belly in the campo (country) and was handed a pair of field glasses. The lens sharpened on a plastic tarp tacked to four maize stalks several hundred yards away, Ayoung writer, politically unaffiliated, I was to be blessed with the rarity of a moral and political education. beneath which a woman sat on the ground. She was gazing through the plastic roof of her “house” and hugging three naked, emaciated children. There was an aqua plastic dogfood bowl at her feet. “She’s watching for the plane,” my friend said, “we have to get out of here now or we’re going to get it too.” I trained the lens on the woman’s eye, gelled with disease and open to a swarm of gnats. We climbed back in the truck and rolled the windows up just as the duster plane swept back across the field, dumping a yellow cloud of pesticide over the woman and her children to protect the cotton crop around them. A t the time I was unaware of the ““pedagogical theories of Paulo Portland’s Community Radio Station presents Theateirscene: a weekly review of community theatrical productions 90.7 FM COMMUNITY RADIO For weekly listings see the KBOO Program Guide Sponsored by KBOO & The Metropolitan Arts Commission ^La GPatisserie | c4n Espresso Cafe | DewerU • Light Lunch • Soda Fountain Espresso Happy Hour: Mon-Thurs 6-8 p.m. Dan Perz, jazz guitar, Tues 8-10 John Stowell, solo guitar, Wed 8-10 9 a.m.-midnight Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. 208 NW Couch, Old Town Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), but found myself learning in situ the politics of cultural immersion. It was by Ricardo’s later admission “risky business,” but it was thought important that a few North Americans, particularly writers, be sensitized to Salvador prior to any military conflict. The lessons were simple and critical, the methods somewhat more difficult to detect. I was given a white lab jacket and, posing as a North American physician, was asked to work in a rural hospital at the side of a Salvadorean doctor who was paid $200 a month by the Salvadorean government to care for 100,000 campesinos (peasants). She had no lab, no X-ray, no whole blood, plasma or antibiotics, no anesthesia or medicines, no autoclave for sterilizing surgical equipment. Her forceps were rusted, the walls of her operating room were studded with flies; beside her hospital a coffee processing plant’s refuse heaps incubated the maggots, and she paid a campesina to swish the flies away with a newspaper while she delivered the newborn. She was forced to do Caesarean sections at times without much local anesthetic. Without supplies, she worked with only her hands and a cheap op- thalmascope. In her clinic I held children in my arms who died hours later for want of a manual suction device to remove the fluid from their lungs. Their peculiar skin rashes spread to my hands, arms and belly. I dug maggots from a child’s open wound with a teaspoon. I contracted four strains of dysentery and was treated by stomach antiseptics, effective and damaging enough to be banned by our own FDA. This doctor had worked in the campo for years, a lifetime of delivering the offspring of 13-year-old mothers who thought the Host Glennis Forster Tuesday mornings at 11 38 Clinton St. Quarterly
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