Salvador

..DIDION'S

FACT.STREWN NOTEBOOK BLURS FROM TERROR.INDUCED SWEAT . . a tourist guide manque; a surrealist docudrama; a withering indictment of American foreign policy; and apoetic explorationinfear . . . A CONSUMMATE POLITICAL ARTWORK . . . EX. CELLENT.'' -Chicago Ti,ibuneBook World ..THE

SALVADORANS ASSUME MOST POLIT: ICAL MURDERS ARE COMMITTED BY GOVERNMENT SECURITY FORCES-NEARLY 7,000IN ONE YEAR . . . Joan Didion writes with a muted outrage that appalls the mind and stiffens the spine." -Boston Globe "Bodies are found everywhere-in vacant lots, in garbage,in'rest rooms, in bus stations. . . bodies, bodies-and vultures to feed on them wherever they lie. . . ACHILLINGACCOUNT." John Barkham Reviews

" SALVADORshineswith enlighteningobservation. No one has interpreted the place better . . . Its languageis lean and precise, in short what we have come to expectfrom Miss Didion." -The New YorkTimesBook Review

"HORRIFYING . . . the daily appearanceof unexplained corpses,the constantpresenceof weapons in the handsof unidentifiablemen . . . EL SALVADOR HAS TRULY BECOME THE HEART OF DARKNESS.'' -Atlantic Monthly

Booksby Joan Didion Run River SlouchingTowards Bethlehem Play It as It Lays A Book of Common PraYer The White Album Salvador Publishedby WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

Most washington square PressBooksare availableat specialquantity discountsfortulk purchasesfor salespromotions,premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can dso be created to fit specific needs. For details write the office oI'the Vice Presidentol' SpecialMarkets, Pocket Books, l23O Avenue ol'the Americas,New York' New York 10020.

J

u WSP lt WASHINGTONSQUAREPRESS PUBLISHEDBY POCKETBOOKSNEW YORK

Portions of this book were publishedin The New YorkReviewof Books in October 1982. The author wishes to thank the following

for their permission

to reprint lines from:

The song "American Pie," written by Don McLean, published by Mayday Music and Benny Bird Company, A I97l . Used by permission. All rights resemed' The specified abridged excerpt from pp. 58-59 in The Autumn of the Patriarch Dy Translatedfrom the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. Copyright @ 1975 by Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez. English translation copyright @ 1976 by Harper &

Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez. Row, Publishers,

Inc. Reprinted

The excerpt from "Heart of Doubleday

permission

by permission

of Darkness" from & Company, Inc.

of the publisher. Youth by Joseph Conrad. Reprinted

by

The lines from the poem by Roque Dalton Garcfufrom the book El Salvador: The Face ofthe Revolutionby Robert Armstong and Janet Shenk. Copyright A 1982, South End Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

A WashingtonSquarePresspublication of POCKET BOOKS, a divisionof Simon & Schuster,Inc' 1230Avenueof the Americas,New York, N'Y. 10020 Copyright @ 1983by Joan Didion Publishedby arrangementwith Simon and Schuster Library of CongressCatalogCard Number: 83-3?7 All rights reseryed,includingthe right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information addressSimon and Schuster,1230Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020 ISBN: 0-671-50174-7 First Washington Square Pressprinting November, 1983 10987654321 WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS,WSP and colophonare registeredtrademarksof Simon & Schuster,Inc. Printedin the U.S.A.

I am indebted for generalbackgroundparticularly to ThomasP. Anderson'sMatanza: EI Salvador'sCommunist Revolt of 1932(University of NebraskaPress: Lincoln, l97l) and The War of the Dispossessed: Honduras and El Salvador, 1969(University of NebraskaPress:Lincoln, 1981);to David Browning'sE/ Salvador: Landscape and Society (Clarendon Press: Oxford, l97l): and to the ofrcers and staff of the United Statesembassyin San Salvador.I am indebted most of all to my husband,John Gregory Dunne, who was with me in El Salvador and whose notes on. memories about, and interpretationsof events there enlarged and informed my own perception of the place.

This book is for Robert Silvers and for Christopher Dickey

"All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-byI learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppressionof SavageCustoms had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance.And he hadwritten it, too. I've seenit. I've readit. It was eloquent,vibrating with eloquence.. . . 'By the simple exerciseof our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,'etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, althoughdifficult to remember,you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm.This was the unbounded power of eloquence-of words-of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteadyhand, may be regardedas the exposition of a method. It was very simple,and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentimentit blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminateall the brutes!' " -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

/-n three-vear-old El Salvador InternaI"" tional Airport is glassyand white and splendidly isolated, conceived during the waning of the Molina "National Transformation" as convenientlessto the capital (San Salvador is forry miles awlft until recently a drive of severalhours) than to a central hallucination of the Molina and Romero regimes, the proiectedbeachresorts,the Hyatt, the PacificParadise, tennis, golf, water-skiing, condos,Costa del Sol; the visionaryinvention of a tourist industry in yet another republic where the leading natural causeof death is gastrointestinalinfection. In the general absenceof touriits thesehotels havesincebeenabandoned,ghost and to land at this resortson the empty Pacific beaches, to to them is airport built service plunge directly into a statein which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolveinto its reverse. Immigration The only logic is that of acquiescence. is negotiatedin a thicket of eutomaticweapons,but by whoseauthoriry the weaponsare brandished(Army or National Guard or National Police or Customs Policeor Treasury Policeor one of a continuing proliferadonof other shadowyand overlappingforces) is J

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JOAN DIDION

a blurred point, Eye contactis avoided.Documentsare scrutinizedupsidedown. Once clearof the airport, on the new highway that slicesthrough green hills renby the cloud cover of the tropideredphosphorescent cal rainy season,one seesmainly underfedcattle and mongrel dogsand armoredvehicles,vans and trucks and CherokeeChiefs fitted with reinforcedsteel and bulletproofPlexiglesan inch thick. Suchvehiclesaree, fixed featureof local life, and are popularly associated and death.There wasthe Cherokee with disappearance the Dutch televisioncrew killed seen following Chief in Chalatenango provincein March of t982.There was the red Toyota three-quafter-tonpickup sighted near the van driven by the four AmericanCatholic workers on the night they were killed in 1980.There were, in the late springand summerof 1982,the three Toyota paneltrucks,oneyellow, oneblue,andonegreen'none bearingplates,reportedpresentat eachof the massdetendons (a "detention" is anotherfixed featureof local life, and often precedesa "disappearance")in the Amatepecdistrict of San Salvador.These are the details-the modelsand colors of armored vehicles,the makesand calibersof weepons,the particularmethods and decapitationusedin particular of dismemberment instances-on which the visitor to Salvadorlearnsimmediately to concentrate,to the exclusionof past or future concerns,asin a prolongedamnesiacfugue.

Terror is the given of the place. Black-and-white police carscruisein pairs,eachwith the barrel of a rifle r+

SALVADOR

extruding from an openwindow. Roadblocksmaterialize tt random, soldien fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, saferies clicking on and off. Aim is teken asif to passthe time. Every morning El Didrio de Hoy end La Prensd Grtfca c$ry czutionary stories. "UnA madre y flis dos hijos faeron dsesinados con drma cortcnte (corao) por ocho sujetosdesconocidosel lunes en la noche": A mother and her two sonshacked to death in their bedsby eight descanocidos, unknown men. The same morning's paper: the unidentified body of a young man,strangled,found on the shoulderof a road.Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyedby bayoners,one faced cerved to rePresente cross. It is largely from theserepor$ in the newspepers that the United Statesembassycompilesits body counts, which are transmittedto Washington in a weekly dispatch referred to by embasy people as "the grimgrem." Thesecountserepresentedin a kind of torrured codethat fails to obscurewhat is taken for grantedin El Salvador,that government forces do most of the killing. In a January I 5 1982 memo to Washington, for example,the embassyisued a "guarded" breakdown on its count of. 6,909 "reported" political murders betweenSeptember16 1980and Septemberlf 1981.Of these6,909,according to the memo,922were "believed committed by security forces," 952 "beIieved committedby leftist terrorists," 136"believed committed by rightist terrorists," and 4,g9g "comt5

JOAN DIDION

mitted by unknown assailents,"the famous desconocidos favored by those San Salvador newspapers still publishing. (The figures actually add up not to 6,909 but to 6,899,leaving ten in a kind of official limbo.) The memo continued: "The uncertainty involved here can be seenin the fact that responsibility cannot be fixed in the majority of cases.We note, however, that it is generally believed in El Salvador that a large number of the unexplained killings are carried out by the security forces, officially or unofficially. The Embassy is aware of dramatic claims that have been made by one interest group or another in which the security forces figure as the primary agents of murder here. El Salvador'stangled web of attack and vengeance, traditional criminal violence and political mayhem make this an impossible charge to sustain. In saying this, however, we make no attempt to lighten the responsibility for the deaths of many hundreds, and perhaps thousands,which can be attributed to the security forces. . . ." The body count kept by what is generally referred to in San Salvador as "the Human Rights Commission" is higher than the embassy's,and documented periodically by a photographer who goes out looking for bodies. These bodies he photographs are often broken into unnatural positions, and the faces to which the bodies are attached (when they are attached) ere equally unnatural, somedmesunrecognizable ashuman faces, obliterated by acid or beaten to a mash of misplaced ears and teeth or slashedear to ear and invaded l6

SALVADOR

by insects."Encontddo en Antiguo Cuscatldnel dia 2J de Marzo 1982:camisonde dormir celester"the typed caption reads on one photograph: found in Antiguo CuscatldnMarch 2t 1982wearing a sky-blue nightshin. The captionsare laconic. Found in SoyapangoMry 21 1982,Foundin Meiic*anos Junell 1982. Found at El Play6n Mry 30 1982,white shirt, purple pants,black shoes. The photograph accompanying that last caption showsa body with no eyes,becausethe vultures got to it before the photographerdid. There is a special kind of practicalinformation that the visitor to El Salvador acquiresimmediately,the way visitors to other placesacquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums.In El Salvadorone learns that vulturesgo first for the soft tissue,for the eyes,the exposedgenitalia,the open mouth. One learnsthat an openmouth canbe usedto makea specificpoint, can be stuffed with somethingemblematic;stuffed, sx/, with a penis,or, if the point hasto do with land title, stuffed with someof the dirt in question.One learnsthat hair deteriorateslessrapidly than flesh,and that a skull surroundedby a perfectcoronaof hair is a not uncommon sightin the body dumps. All forensicphotographsinducein the viewer a certain protective numbness,but dissociationis more difficult here.In the first placetheseare not, technically, "forensic" photographs,sincethe evidencethey document will neverbe presentedin a court of law. In the secondplacethe disfigurementis too routine. The locationsere too near,the datestoo recent.There is the of the relativesof the diseppeared: the women presence

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JOAN DIDION

who sit every day in this crampedoffice on the grounds of the archdiocese,waiting to look at the spiral-bound photo albumsin which the photographsarekept. These albums have plastic covers bearing soft-focus color photographsof young Americansin dating situations (strolling through autumn foliage on one album, recumbent in a field of daisieson another), and the womeq looking for the bodiesof their husbendsand brothersand sistersand children,pessthem from hand to handwithout commentor expression. "One of the moreshadowyelementsof the violent scenehere [is] the deathsquad.Existenceof these groupshaslong beendisputed,but not by many Salvadorens.. . . Who consdtutesthe deathsquads is yet enotherdifficult question.We do not believe that these squadsexist as permanentformations but rather asad hoc vigilantegroupsthat coalesce according to perceivedneed.Membershipis also uncertain, but in addition to civilians we believe that both on- andoff-dury membersof the security forces ere participants.This was unofficially confirmed by right-wing spokesmanMai. Robeno D'Aubuisson who statedin an interview in early l98l that securiqyforce membersutilize the guise of the death sguadwhen a potentially embarrassing or odioustaskneedsto be performed." -From

the confidntial but later declassified fanuary 15, 1982 memo preaiously cited, drafted for tbe StateDeparttnentby the political sectionat the embassyin SanSalaador.

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SALVADOR

The dead and piecesof the dead rurn up in EI Salvadoreverywhere,every day, astaken for granted asin a nightmare,or a horror movie.Vultures of course suggestthe presenceof a body. A knot of children on the street suggeststhe presenceof a body. Bodiesturn up in the brush of vacantlots, in the garbagethrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stetions. Some are dropped in Lake Ilopango,a few mileseastof the city, and washup near the lakesidecottagesand clubsfrequentedby what remainsin SanSalvadorof the sportingbourgeoisie.Some still turn up at El Play6n,the lunar lava field of rotting human flesh visible at one time or another on every televisionscreenin Americabut characterized in June of tggz in the El SalaadorNeussGazette,an Englishlanguageweekly editedby an American namedMario Rosenthal,as an "uncorroboratedstory . . . dredged up from the filesof leftist propaganda."Othersrurn up at Puerta del Diablo, aboveParqueBalboa,a national Turicenna describedas recently as the April-July 1982issueoI Aboard TACA, the magezineprovided on the national airline of Et Salvador,as passengers "offering excellentsubiectsfor color photography." I drove up to Puertadel Diablo one morning in June of 1982,pastthe CasaPresidencial andthe camouflaged watch towers and heavyconcentrations of troopsand arrnssouth of town, on up e narrow road narrowed further by landslidesand deepcrevicesin the roadbed, a drive so insistentlypremonitory that after a while I beganto hopethat I would passPuertadel Diablo without knowing it, iust missit, write it off, turn around t9

JOAN DIDION

and go back.There washoweverno way of missingit. Puerta del Diablo is a "view site" in an older and distinctly literary tradition, nature aslesson,an immense cleft rock through which half of El Salvadorse€ms framed, a site so romantic and "mystical," so theatrically sacrificial in aspect,that it might be a cosmic landscape painting.The parody of nineteenth-century plece presentsitself as pathetic fallacy: the sky t'broodsot'the stones"we€p," a constantseepageof weter weighting the ferns and moss.The foliage is thick and slick with moisture. The only sound is a steadybuzz,,Ibelieveof cicadas. Body dumps are seenin El Salvadoras a kind of visitors' must-do,difficult but worth the detour. "Of courseyou haveseenEl Play6n," an aideto President Alvaro Magafiasaidto me one day, and proceededt