El Salvador: Conflicting Narratives

“I wouldn’t call it a civil war,” said Congressman Mario Valiente in our meeting with the National Republican Alliance (ARENA party) of El Salvador[i]. I sat there, my mouth hanging open in surprise, as he framed the twelve years of full-scale fighting and tens of thousands of deaths that El Salvador struggled though in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The war, he said, was more an altercation between El Salvador’s government and military, backed with only “basic” funding from the United States, and “on the other side, Russia and Cuba, of course.” He continued: “In order to have a civil war, civilians need to be involved.”

The boat ride to Copapayo

How am I to reconcile this with the accounts we heard the next day at Copapayo, the sight of a major 1983 massacre, in which 160 civilians were murdered by a battalion trained all too close to home, in Fort Benning, Georgia? We sat in a circle in a corn field, hearing the testimony of Rojelio Miranda[ii], who was only 9 at the time; how he had to stay in line as he heard the screams of girls being raped and murdered; how the soldiers told the mothers to shut up their infants, some of whom were eventually suffocated by the cloths over their mouths; how he hid behind a tree and watched the vultures swarm towards the flesh of his family. We sat and listened - there is nothing to do but listen - and then held hands in a circle, joined in prayer: “No queremos más guerra.” A very different historical narrative.

And how can I sit at the US Embassy the next day, silently listening to the accounts of the “positive view” Salvadorans have of the US, how the military is a “friendly face,” and that our main cultural exchange has been a happy recognition that “We all like pizza hut!”[iii]? And as I sat there, I imagined how hard it would be for someone who lost family in the war – as did most of the people we interact with – to hear this framing of the story – perhaps someone who was tortured for union organizing, or for being found with a bible (a subversive text), or, yes, for taking up arms with the leftist revolutionary forces of the FMLN. But, I reminded myself, those Salvadorans aren’t privileged enough to get a meeting with ARENA congressmen or the State Department.

Our readings are jam-packed with these discrepancies; From Greg Grandin’s damning accusations in Empire’s Workshop, to Ronald Reagan’s very different claims in his televised address to the nation in May of 1984. While Grandin characterizes the US’s funding of the military dictatorship as a move to “farm out its imperial violence”[iv] with a “laboratory of repression,”[v] Reagan describes how the Soviet Union is extending their sphere of influence, and how the US has a moral duty to intervene: “It would be profoundly immoral to let peace-loving friends depending on our help be overwhelmed by brute force.”[vi]

This week in San Salvador has been filled with conflicting narratives around the conflict. And among all of these stories, I’m struggling to find a truth, and to understand the perspectives of those who I perceive as diminishing the struggle, the pain, the oppression of others. How do you find truth in a tangle of histories, and humanize those who reject your narrative?

The town of Nueva Esperanza

By Chloe Zelkha

---

[i] Mario Valiente, Congressman from the ARENA (Republican National Alliance) party; conversation on September, 14^th, 2011 in San Salvador, El Salvador.

[ii] Rogelio Miranda, survivor of the1983 Copapayo Massacre; conversation on September 15^th, 2011 in Suchitoto, El Salvador.

[iii] Representatives of the US Embassy in San Salvador; conversation on September 16^th, 2011 in San Salvador, El Salvador.

[iv] Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (NY: Holt Paperbacks, 2006), 88.

[v] Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (NY: Holt Paperbacks, 2006), 109.

[vi] Ronald Reagan, U.S. Interests in Central America. Televised address to the nation. Washington, D.C., May 9^th, 1984.