Portraits of the Salvadoran Resistance By Daniel Santiago Illustration by Terri Potter Additional Drawings by Benjamin Canas, Roberto Huezo, Fernando Llort and Miguel Orellana had him stretched over a barbed wire fence. Laura promised to tell the National Guard anything they wanted to know. She promised to work as an informer. But Laura’s potential worth as an informer was finished. The captain nodded to the two men holding Oscar. They dragged Oscar over the barbed wire. He called out for his mother and then, mercifully, lost consciousness. The soldiers continued to drag Oscar over the wire until the flesh fell from his bones and his entrails became twisted in the coils. They did not ask Laura any more questions or hurt her further. What horror could match a mother’s pain as she unravelled her son’s viscera from the coils of a barbed wire fence? Laura buried Oscar in a ditch by the road. She packed her small medicine bag with penicillin and joined the guerrillas on Guazapa, where she now works as a medic. Not all FMLN—Farabundo Marti Liberation Front-the guerrilla resistance— supporters are from the poor classes. Carlotta Martinez y Lopez is a literacy teacher who works with the FMLN civilian administration in the Department of Morazan. Carlotta grew up in a middle-class family in San Salvador that was sympathetic to reform, but which regarded the plight of the poor as the problem of the poor. Carlotta’s father, Pepe Martinez, worked as an electrician in Guatemala. Upon returning to El Salvador, he was hired by a firm that installs electrical wiring on government construction projects. Carlotta’s mother is a teacher in the government school system. With both parents working, Carlotta grew up in comfortable circumstances. She shared her father’s interest in electrical engineering and was intent on applying to the engineering school at the National University when she graduated from Divine Providence High School in 1986. The nuns who teach at Divine Providence are members of the Passionist Order. Like many Catholic religious , groups, the Passionists made a “preferential option for the poor” after the Second Vatican Council. They continued to staff middle-class schools like Divine Providence, but also assumed responsibility for three poor “relocation settlements” north of the city. They integrated both ministries by involving their middle-class high school students in various projects in these resettlements. On such a project Carlotta Martinez first encountered the face of El Salvador’s poor. She volunteered to work one day a week with a community health worker at the clinic on Calle Real, a canton north of the city. This health worker, Adela Casteneda, had been trained by Laura Gonzalez y Santiago. Adela was intelligent but could not read. This made her apprehensive about distributing medicines whose labels she couldn’t understand. Carlotta taught Adela to read. She did this by creating word games that associated printed words with rhymes. Soon, everything in the clinic had a small card attached with its name carefully printed in block letters. Two months after Carlotta had started working at Calle Real, the clinic was visited by Laura Gonzalez y Santiago. Carlotta had heard about Laura, but was surprised by her youth. Laura spent the morning working with Carlotta and Adela, watching carefully as the two women played their word game. That afternoon, Laura asked Carlotta where she had learned to teach. Carlotta explained that her mother was a teacher and that these games were variations on learning rhymes her mother had taught her. Laura looked long and hard at CarClinton St.—Spring 1990 39
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