The model here is Dante. Author Forché’s Virgil is Leonel Gómez Vides. He came to her home in California whe“The horror, the horror.” —Joseph Conrad
The model here is Dante. Author Forché’s Virgil is Leonel Gómez Vides. He came to her home in California when she was in her twenties, accompanied by his two teenage daughters, on a mission he called the reverse Peace Corps. Though he was never so direct, he wanted Forché to bear witness to the forthcoming civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992). It hadn’t started yet, but it would very soon. Leonel foresaw it, and so felt it was important to have someone around afterward who could speak to what it was truly all about. The hard part though, she must survive it.
It was a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades—with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others. —Raymond Bonner, The Atlantic
Leonel and Forché visit the dirt poor peasants, campesinos, Indians almost entirely. One day she watches Monseñor Óscar Romero perform the Roman Catholic Mass. She sees him off and on after that, sometimes dining with him in a group, and she is present at what she believes to be his final interview before his assassination; and on one occasion before she is about to leave, for the coup d’état has occurred and the danger is great, they speak, quite memorably. She is shown a rural hospital by a woman doctor which has no equipment or medicines. She spends the night in a peasant’s home and learns how the men go to the mountains to sleep at night to avoid the death squads who naturally work exclusively under the cover of darkness.
She is a witness every bit as observant as Victor Klemperer in his two-volume I Will Bear Witness. But Klemperer was a Jew with an “Aryan” wife who suffered under the Nazis. Until the middle of the memoir, Forché is just a teacher in El Salvador on a fellowship grant. She’s compassionate but somehow not fully invested, if that’s the right word, in the crimes happening around her. Then Leonel sends her on a tour of a government-operated prison. Inside she’s shown to a special room by a trustee named Miguel
What I saw were wooden boxes, about the size of washing machines, maybe even a little smaller. I counted the boxes. There were six, and they had small openings cut into the fronts, with chicken-wire mesh over the openings. They were padlocked. As I stood there, some of the boxes started to wobble, and I realized that there were men inside them. Fingers came through one of the mesh openings. Blood rushed to my ears, as I stood, trying to orient myself so that I could know not only where the room was but also which wall the boxes were against, and then I walked slowly towards the light of the open door and into the hallway, where Miguel was standing against his crutch.
Miguel tells her:
’That’s the oscura, the darkness, solitary. Sometimes men are held in there for a year and can’t move when they come out because of the atrophy of their muscles. Some of them never recover their minds. Tell them on the outside, tell them,’ and then, raising his voice he said, ‘Carolina, it has been nice to see you again. Give my love to Anna and Carlos [his parents].’ (pp. 159-160)
This is a watershed experience. Not even finding dead bodies in the street one night moves her as the prison does. Leonel continues to introduce her to various Salvadoran military officers. He coaxes her to visit the American Embassy and meet the new ambassador, for whom she gets talking points. Foremost among the points is the name of one Richardson, an American killed by a Salvadoran death squad leader named Chacón. Then there is an incident of brazen chicanery when Forché and Leonel meet with one old Salvadoran honcho, also to discuss Richardson, who may think Forché is the next U.S. ambassador. You have to read it. This section is just through the roof brilliant in its pacing—as is the entire book. Then Forché returns to the U.S. to take care of her academic responsibilities. Some weeks later Leonel calls her there to say Chacón has been killed. Are the seeds she helped to plant with both the honcho and the ambassador in whole or in part responsible for this outcome?
Written in pencil: When someone joins a death squad he is in for life if you quit you might talk and no one wants to be fingered later for these crimes the first time such a man goes out on an operation he is tested by the others they tell him he must rape the victim in front of them and cut off certain pieces of the body they want to see if he has the stomach for this after that he is as guilty as the others and ... his reward is usually money why isn’t it enough to kill a victim why must each also suffer mutilation the death squad members must all be guilty of every murder so one rapes another strikes blows another uses the machete and so on until it would be impossible to determine which action had caused the death and the squad members are protected from each other by mutual guilt also when mere death no longer instills fear in the population the stakes must be raised the people must be made to see that not only will they die but die slowly and brutally. (p. 261)
Then comes an extraordinary moment. She’s in San Salvador with her friend Margarita who gets a call. The government’s cohesiveness has broken. “Several hundred campesinos had fled the army and had been given sanctuary by the church.” Forché’s presence is needed at the sanctuary for it is believed that if American journalists are present, the army will refrain from massacring the AWOL soldiers. She goes, posing as a journalist, which she clearly isn’t.
The people who had crowded into the courtyard were refugees from the combat areas of San Vincente and Cabañas, severing hundred of them.... I was giving a woman water when a child told me that someone was at the door and asked me to come. An American stood there, gaunt and exhausted, with two cameras hanging from his shoulders.... His Spanish was fluent, almost natively so. He was with Time magazine, was all he said, but “never mind that.” We had been told that as soon as the people were given refuge, a rumor flew around that the soldiers were coming and they were going to kill everyone.... I don’t remember that we exchanged another word. As one by one we heard the trucks pulling up near the entrance, engines thrumming, a seminarian who had been trying to calm someone down told me that it was time. I left the water and stepped outside, as did the photographer, until we were visible to the open trucks which the soldiers rode standing, pointing their rifles at the clouds, engines idling. I heard a whir and click, whir and click. Click click click. The American was taking photographs, so I opened my notebook and started to write nonsense, looking at the soldiers as if I were taking down names. You could hear the din of the courtyard from the street: crying, shouting. The soldiers seemed all to have mastered a certain demeanor: set mouths, hard eyes, helmet straps over their chins. The photographer was still photographing. I didn’t want to go any closer, but they could plainly see me writing in the notebook. And then, just like that, one after another, the trucks wheezed into the road and drove away. ‘Well, that was close,’ I heard the photographer say under his breath. (p. 306)
Here she thwarts multiple live weapons, a small army, with her pen—and the tired photographer, whom she later marries. The danger Forché puts herself in will set your hair on fire. Her simple style minimizes it, or seeks to. But she is permeated by the overwhelming selflessness of her fellows. So many people so willing to die. The US’s culpability—as it is also depicted in Thomas Hauser’s Missing (Chile) and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (Vietnam) and elsewhere—is sickening.
It’s clear to me that I have never really understood the Salvadoran civil war before. My new grasp of the truth is the gift of this fine book....more
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