El Salvador´s Revolution

We´ve been pretty busy since our last post. Our last stop in El Salvador was the tiny mountain village of Perquin, headquarters of the FMLN during the revolution-cum-civil war in El Salvador. We got quite the history lesson at the Musuem of the Revolution in Perquin, as well as at the guerrilla base camp (open for tours) and at nearby El Mozote.

The musuem was tiny but powerful. It was hard to remember that we were really getting only getting the FMLN´s side of the story because sympathizing with the government in this war means you´re probably evil. The revolution in El Salvador began in a familiar way. The social system was highly stratified, with the legendary ¨14 Families¨owning practically all land and all businesses in the country while the vast majority of persons could barely practice subsistence farming. As always, student groups reading Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and the rest of those radical old white guys, got uppity, protested, and thus were shot. The FMLN, a political party turned communist guerrilla group, got organized in the mountains to avenge the students, fight the army, liberate the people...you know the drill.

The thing that distinguishes El Salvador´s war from most others are its duration and brutality. The war raged until peace accords were signed in 1992, and even then it wasn´t all over. The guides that led us through the museum were former guerillas, the pictures of martyrs on the walls were their friends. The Salvadorean Army - US trained and supplied, but of course - blatantly disregarded human rights, and any other sense of basic moral decency. This was really brought home to us at El Mozote. Today a monument, El Mozote was a small mountain town populated by religous, evangelical peasants who found themselves caught up in the middle of a war they wanted no part in. The army wrongly suspected these peasants of organizing a guerilla force and supplying existing FMLN forces. Instead of doing their research, soldiers came into the town, separated the entire population by age and gender, and then killed them all in incredibly gruesome ways. This includes babies of only a few months, pregant women, teenagers, grown men -- everyone. One pregnant woman was crushed to death by a massive stone placed on her stomach, which made the unborn baby´s bones penetrate her organs. Every girl over the age was taken to a nearby mountain and raped before they were murdered. They justified killng the children because ¨one day they will become guerrillas.¨Only one woman managed to flee to the mountains, where she survived for 8 days in the woods. She is the only reason any one knows this massacre happened, and no one knows how many more like it might have occurred but lacked surivors.

Learning about this kind of history made the two of us feel incredibly guilty for what our government has done, for what our tax dollars have paid for. Without the funding and training from the US, none of the violence of El Salvador´s revolution could possible have been so severe. Though the war had already begun, it took a dramatic turn with Reagan´s election. Indeed, it is only inthe 1980s that massacres like El Mozote began to occur.

Strangely enough, in a place that some might consider one of the most dangerous areas of El Salvador in the fairly recent past, we felt safer than anywhere else -- safer than you might feel in Washington, DC. The people welcomed us, they were eager to share their stories and asked that we spread the word such that something like this would never occur again.