cramped that they could neither sit, stand, nor lie down. I recall only magnified fragments of my few minutes in that room, but that I was rooted to the clay floor, unable to move either toward or away from the cages. I turned from the room toward Miguel, who pivoted on his crutch and with his eyes on the ground said in a low voice, “La Oscura, ” the dark place; “sometimes a man is kept in there a year, and cannot move when he comes out.” We caught up with Ricardo, who leaned toward me and whispered, “Tie your sweater sleeves around your neck. You are covered with hives.” In the cab of the truck I braced my feet against the dashboard and through the half-cracked window shook hands with the young soldiers, smiling and nodding. A hundred meters from the prison I lifted Ricardo’s spare shirt in my hands and vomited. We were late for yet another meeting, the sun had dropped behind the volcanoes, my eyes ached. When I was empty, the dry heaves began, and after the sobbing a convulsive shudder. Miguel was serving his third consecutive sentence, this time for organizing a hunger strike against prison conditions. In that moment I saw him turn back to his supper, his crutch stamping circles of piss and mud beside him as he walked. I heard the screams of a woman giving birth by Caesarean without anesthesia in Ana’s hospital. I saw the flies fastened to the walls in her operating room, the gnats on the eyes of the starving woman, the reflection of flies on Ana’s eyes in the hospital kitchen window. The shit, I imagined, was inside my nostrils and I would smell it the rest of my life, as it is for a man who in battle tastes a piece of flesh or gets the blood under his fingernails. The smell never comes out; it was something Ricardo explained once as he was falling asleep. “Feel this,” he said, maneuvering the truck down the hill road. “This is what oppression feels like. Now you have begun to learn something. When you get back to the States, what you do with this is up to you.” ■Between 1978 and 1981, I traveled ^^between the United States and Salvador, writing reports on the war waiting to happen, drawing blueprints of prisons from memory, naming the dead. I filled soup bowls with cigarette butts, grocery boxes with files on American involvement in the rural labor movement, and each week I took a stool sample to the parasite clinic. A priest I knew was gang- raped by soldiers; another was hauled off and beaten nearly to death. On one trip, a woman friend and I were chased by the death squad for five minutes on the narrow backroads that circle the city — her evasive driving and considerable luck saved us. One night a year ago I was interviewing a defecting member of the Christian Democratic Party. As we started out of the drive to go back to my hotel, we encountered three plain- clothesmen hunched over the roof of a taxicab, their machine guns pointed at our windshield. We escaped through a grove of avocado trees. The bodies of friends have turned up disemboweled and decapitated, their teeth punched into broken points, their faces sliced off with machetes. On the final trip to the airport we swerved to avoid a corpse, a man spread-eagled, his stomach hacked open, his entrails stretched from one side of the road to the other. We drove over them like a garden hose. My friend looked at me. Just another dead man, he said. And by then it had become true for me as well; the unthinkable, the sense of death within life before death. Il I he country called by Gabriel * Mistral “the Tom Thumb of the Americas” would necessarily be described to North Americans as “about the size of Massachusetts.” We could begin with its location on the Pacific south of Guatemala and west of Honduras with Ariadne’s thread of statistics: 4.5 million people, 400 per square kilometer (a country without silence or privacy), a population growth rate of 3.5 percent (such a population would double in two decades). But what does “90 percent malnutrition” mean? Or that There were wooden boxes stacked against one wall, each a meter by a meter with barred openings the size of a book, and within them there was breathing, raspy and half “80 percent of the population has no running water, electricity or sanitary services”? I watched women push pails to the water and carry it home to wash their clothes, their spoons and plates, themselves, their infant children. The chief cause of death has been amoebic dysentery. One out of four children dies before the age of 5; the average human life span is 46 years. What does it mean when a man says, “it is better to die quickly fighting than slowly of starvation”? And that such a man suffers toward that decision in what is now being called “North America’s backyard”? How is the language used to draw battle lines, to identify the enemy? What are the current euphemisms for empire, public defense of private wealth, extermination of human beings? If the lethal weapon is the soldier, what is meant by “non-lethal military aid”? And what determined the shift to helicopter gunships, M-16s, M-79 grenade launchers? The State Department’s white paper entitled Communist Interference in El Salvador argues that it is a “case of indirect armed aggression against a small Third World country by Communist powers acting through Cuba.” James Petras (The Nation) has argued that the report’s “evidence is flimsy, circumstantial or nonexistent; the reasoning and logic is slipshod and internally inconsistent; it assumes what needs to be proven; and finally, what facts are presented refute the very case the State Department is attempting to demonstrate.” On the basis of this report, the popular press sounded an alarm over the “flow of arms.” But from where have the arms “flowed,” to whom and for what? In terms of language, we could begin by asking why North American arms are weighed in dollar-value and those reaching the opposition measured in tonnage. Or we could point conscious. It was a few moments before I realized that men were kept in those cages, their movement so cramped that they could neither sit, stand, nor lie down. out the nature of the international arms market, a complex global network in which it is possible to buy almost anything for the right price, no matter the country or origin of destination. The State Department conveniently ignores its own intelligence on arms flow to the civilian right, its own escalation of military assistance to the right-wing military, and even the discrepancies in its final analysis. But what does all this tell us about who is fighting whom for what? Americans have been told that there is a “fundamental difference” between “advisors” and military “trainers.” Could it simply be that the euphemism for American military personnel must be changed so as not to serve as a mnemonic device for the longest war in our failing public memory? A year ago I asked the American military attache in Salvador what would happen if one of these already proposed advisors returned to the U.S. in a flag-draped coffin. He did not argue semantics. “That,” he said, smiling, “would be up to the American press, wouldn’t it?” Most of that press had held with striking fidelity to the State Department text: a vulnerable and worthy “centrist” government besieged by left- and right-wing extremists, the former characterized by their unacceptable political ideology, the latter, rendered non-ideologically unacceptable, that is, only in their extremity. The familiar ring of this portrayal has not escaped U.S. apologists, who must explain why El Salvador is not “another Vietnam.” Their argument hinges, it seems, on the rapidity with which the U.S. could assist the Salvadorean military in the task of “defeating the enemy.” Tactically, this means sealing the country off, warning all other nations to “cease and desist” supplying arms, using violations of that warning as a pretext for blockades and interventions, but excepting ourselves in our continual armament of what we are calling “the government” of El Salvador. Ignoring the institutional self-interest of the Salvadorean army, we blame the presumably “civilian” right for the murder of thousands of campesinos, students, doctors, teachers, journalists, nuns, priests and children. This requires that we ignore the deposed and retired military men who command the activities of the death squads with impunity, and that the security forces responsible for the killings are under the command of the army, which is under the command of the so-called “centrist” government and is in fact the government itself. There are other differences between the conflicts of El Salvador and Vietnam. There is no People’s Republic of China to the north to arm and ally itself with a people engaged in a protracted war. The guerrillas are not second-generation Viet-minh, but young people who armed themselves after exhaustive and failed attempts at non-violent resistance and peaceful change. The popular organizations they defend were formed in the early seventies by catnpesinos who became socially conscious through the efforts of grass-roots clergymen teaching the Medellin doctrines of social justice; the precursors of these organizations were prayer and Bible study groups, rural labor organizations and urban trade unions. As the military government grew increasingly repressive, the opposition widened to include all other political parties, the Catholic majority, the university and professional communities, and the small business sector. Critics of U.S. policy accurately recognize parallels between the two conflicts in terms of involvement, escalation and justification. The latter demands a vigilant “euphemol- ogy” undertaken to protect language from distortions of military expedience and political convenience. Noam Chomsky has argued that “among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than terror and terrorism. These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused.” He goes on to say that “the question of proper usage is settled not merely by the official or unofficial status of the perpetrators of violence but also by their political affiliations.” State violence is excused as “reactive,” and the “turmoil” or “conflict” is viewed ahistorically. It is true that there have long been voices of peaceful change and social reform in El Salvador — the so-called centrists — but the U.S. has never supported them. We backed one fraudulently elected military regime after another, giving them what they wanted and still want: a steady infusion of massive economic-aid with which high-ranking officers can ensure their personal futures and the loyalty of their subordinates. In 40 Clinton St. Quarterly Drawing by Isaac Shamsud-Din
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