When Reporting on a Nation's Civil War Erases the Truth of a Beautiful People
News reports of unidentified men in camouflage bearing semiautomatic weapons shooting at BLM protesters or shoving them into unmarked government vans elicit a predictable response in me: My eyes, arms and other body parts sometimes shake involuntarily. The triggers and twitches of El Salvador’s terror taking their toll. Still.
Such memories from my experiences in the Salvadoran Civil War of the ’80s and early ’90s are the reason why, nearly three decades after I first read the phrase “terror is the given of the place,” from Joan Didion’s book “Salvador,” I can still relate to her words.
My tremors come from the dubious distinction of having been pursued by semiautomatic-bearing Salvadoran escuadrónes de la muerte in El Salvador during the civil war, and in Los Angeles after the war. These paramilitary death squads hunted down those of us fighting the fascist military dictatorship that slaughtered entire towns of women, children and elderly people. I, a curly-haired Salvadoran kid born in San Francisco, had grown fed up with stories of astonishing terror in my parents’ homeland. So I decided to go there and fight the source of the terror: the escuadrónes who, along with the Salvadoran military, were responsible for 85% of the estimated 75,000 to 80,000 deaths during the war, according to the U.N. Truth Commission. I survived, but the terror quakes in me with unpredictable frequency.
At the time of its publication in 1983, the book by my fellow Cal Bear Didion signaled that we Salvadorans had made it: The private world of my parents’ homeland finally entered the public realm of my classrooms. I spent hours in my Berkeley apartment searching for, but not really finding, the deeper meaning of Didion’s using “Exterminate all the brutes!” and other Joseph Conrad quotes, but they sounded deep. “Tattered” didn’t begin to describe my heavily highlighted copy of a book that the Atlantic magazine credited (in bold caps) with telling the world that “EL SALVADOR HAS TRULY BECOME THE HEART OF DARKNESS.” And even though it felt weird doing so, I tried to fit my own Salvadoran experience to the elegant contours of Didion’s words. My efforts failed.
Today, when I read that “terror” phrase — the most oft-quoted phrase about my parents’ homeland (and about Salvadorans, generally) — the writer in me marvels before the luminescent power of words to carry and generate new meaning from, during and beyond the darkest of times.
Sometimes, however, the electricity of words can have a Frankenstein effect, making monsters of an entire people. Sadly, Didion’s writings about us forgot a foundational fact of Salvadoran life: our humanity.
It took me a few years, but I eventually shook off the hypnotic effect of Didion’s prose. Today, I see her Salvadoran writing as an older, more liberal version of the exoticism informing both news conferences by President Trump and news reports featuring pictures of tattoo-faced Salvadoran mareros, even though these gangs stopped tattooing their faces long ago.