I met Rufina Amaya Marquez, mentioned in journalist Mark Danner's article called 'The Truth of El Mazote', (1) in the Colomoncagua refugee camp on the Honduran/Salvadoran border in 1989. Steve Levy and I interviewed her, listened to her story, the same story she told over and over, always in tears. We were making a documentary on the refugees existence in exile, almost ten years had passed, forced out of their own country by war and repeated bombings from the US backed Salvadoran military, now living in well-run, organized refugee camps in Honduras. I was twenty two years old then.
But Rufina's story is different than the rest of the survivors of the war. She was the sole survivor of the now-famous Masote Massacre, where almost one-thousand civilians were slaughtered; like those random stories you hear about from bizarre places around the world - like Cambodia, Rawanda, Darfur - but this one at the hands of the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran military, trained and hardened killers - supported and trained by the United States of America, in our own back yard. They annihilated her entire village while she hid in a ditch and watched the slaughter, the innocent men, women and children being riddled with bullets, chopped at with machetes - her entire family killed right before her very own eyes.
Now the town sounds like a make-shift monument to the massacre. There is also a museum dedicated to the struggles of the FMLN in Perquin, Morazán where we also visited back in 1991, accompanied by the guerrillas themselves when it was just another bombed out town in Morazán, under their control. El Salvador was a hard experience for me, one that significantly transformed my life, and continues to do so, even to this day - but not as hard as it was for the people living there, fighting on both sides of the conflict. And Carolyn's right about 'no tourists go to El Salvador', (2)their problems only grew with the end of the war.(Photo Courtesy of the PerquÃn Municipal website)
But today, El Salvador - lit. The Saviour - marches onward. And for the rest of the world that ever votes, supports or even sympathizes with ANY tyrannical government, including our own, never forget about our brothers and sisters in El Salvador, including a stop-over next time you're in Central America.
(1) - a highly detailed moment by moment account on the facts of what 'really' happened leading up to and duringmassacacrel massacacre. Link also available on Carolyn's blog above.
(2) - very recent article on CNN.com about the guerrillas current fight for tourism.
4 comments:
Having travelled to a number of third world countries, there was something that I learned - the police, the armies, the militia are made up of uneducated impoverished men corrupted by suddenly having power for the first time in their life. They get quite a kick of abusing that power by giving people who were better off than them a bad time by way of revenge. My mother told me a story of when a police officer stopped her, demanded her papers which he then read upside down, revealing his illiteracy. Then he started screaming at her in Arabic and telling her to get out of the car. Fortunately, my mother spoke fluent Arabic and thus was able to talk herself out of what could have been a bad situation. If she hadn't been a diplomat's wife, I dont think she would have been as lucky.
I've also been to a number of very third-world countries, but nothing like what I saw in El Salvador and Nicaragua back then. The thing that really stands out for me was the division of the countries, sometimes right between families, depending on where you were at the time.
Political ideologies are just those - something for first world ideologues to debate. But when they are forced down your throat, by either the government or the guerrillas, its do or die. I think that's what most bleeding-heart liberals (like myself back then) didn't understand, maybe never will. It’s not our war, its their country, their own struggle for basic daily existence - without war and foreign military aid.
You're absolutely correct - third world wars, when funded by first world governments, it absolutely amplifies the horror and corruption such as I had seen in Iraq back in the eighties. It's pretty intense and scary.
I had been to Iraq back in the early to mid '80's several times.
My father took us for drives all over the country, every single place we went to, every stown, every single public building, no matter if there were only 20 people living in a village, a gas station located in the middle of nowhere or a lowly little factory in the middle of a desert, there was always a gigantic billboard of Saddam smiling as though he was a kind and benign leader. People were terrifed to protest knowing that if they did, not only would they be killed, so would their families, friends and neighbours. Saddam was infamous for wiping out entire villages just because one man who came from that village had displeased him. The populace never knew who they could trust hence making it far easier for the government to keep control over them. It's the whole divide and conquer tactic. In Baghdad, on nearly ever street corner, there was the militia armed with machine guns. They were given permission to shoot to kill.
My father had said it was terrifying to sit in the same conference room with Saddam where he witnessed one of the dictator's henchmen men being dragged out of the room and heard the gunshots outside. If you were to ask him to describe what living in Iraq was like, he would tell you, it's literally living inside a world created and controlled by a mad man.
He and other diplomats tried very very hard to bring about awareness of Saddam's insanity but they were more or less dismissed because the American government were financing Saddam and didn't want such information to be publicized. My father couldn't believe anyone culd supply a man who was clearly so clearly and blatantly evil with guns, money, and biochemical weapons. To put it another way, if you knew your next door neighbour was clearly insane with a propensity to commit inhumane acts against men, women and children alike, would you readily supply him with machine guns and mustard gas, would you send him for CIA training? Most likely you would not but the elected president of your free and democractic country, the best country in the world, that's exactly what he did.
When George W. Bush made that speech about eradicating evil after the events of 9/11, I stared at his face on the televison screen with utter disbelief at his hypocrisy. His own father, as well as Reagan, illegally supplied arms and chemical weapons to Saddam.
And look what happened, mass gassing of Iranians, invasion of Kuwait, mass genocide of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The latter was personally heartbreaking for me because on our drives, we had experienced their famed hospitality as we were invited to share tea with them in their houses made of reeds built upon manmade islands, also made of reeds where children would canoe to school and where water buffaloes would wander among us. They have all been killed. Homes cannot be rebuilt for Saddam had poisoned the waters that once hosted a way of life that was thousands of years old.
I bristle when I watch the news of how the American government were
patting themselves on the back for bringing down the Saddam administration when they were the ones who created it in the first place. It's common knowledge now that Saddam was trained by the C.I.A. just as Osama bin Laden was also trained by the C.I.A. It's no secret by now that the CIA gets involved in helping to overthrow any government that pose a threat to American corporations' controlling interests.
When First World countries get involved in third world wars, they compound devastation and divisiveness to the nth degree. And it's usually the populace who were not involved in the fighting that suffered the most.
Not that this is new - it's been like that for centuries, ever since white europeans started colonizing.
I had a couple of friends who were from El Salvador - just hearing their stories were horrifying and gut wrenching, so I can't imagine what it would have been like to actually live through such circumstances. And I think first world governments use that to their advantage - knowing that it would
be so unimaginable that people would assume the media was exaggerating or
blowing things out of proportion. It's the same thing as what had happened during WW2, nobody could believe the Holocaust existed until the war was nearly over because it was so unimaginable that such a thing could happen.
So, I'm glad that you're posting about El Salvador because when awareness is brought to the forefront, it makes it harder for governments to get away with covert and illegal financing of wars, dictators and terrorists. Next time you hear of a war happening in a far away country, don't assume it has nothing to do with you. Chances are, it probably does. American presidents are not elected by themselves.
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