All the lonely people

So we’re back to Children of Cain territory. I’ve been too tired to post and I could not think of stories, but this one is one I keep under my hat.

My aunt used to work for the U.S. Embassy. She had a job which anyone who has read Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures (known from here on as EXAODM) will recognise. It is a bit romanticised in EXAODM. It is probably no news for anyone working for the UN or the Red Cross or any NGO that requires this sort of macabre bookkeeping.

These were the 80’s, after all. Ronald Reagan had to show Congress tangible evidence of guerrilla activity in El Salvador to continue to fund a losing war at the tune of $2 million US Dollars a day. Paltry sum these days, but quite a lot in the early 80’s.

They [the CIA, the Department of Defence, the Pentagon and of course the office of the US President] needed some numbers. One of the figures required was the number of people dying from terrorist activity. This was a difficult thing to obtain, considering that by 1983, half of El Salvador had been completely “liberated” by the FMLN, or was under “guerrilla occupation”, depending on whose rhetoric you wanted to listen to.

So, instead of sending my dear, sweet, flirtatious and incredibly beautiful aunt out to San Miguel, Usulutan, or La Union, which were no go zones, the U.S. Embassy chose a much closer target.

Every town in El Salvador is built on the side of a volcano. Stupid but true. There is very few arable land that is not covered in volcanoes. So there is no alternative, really. On the other side of the Boqueron, the huge volcano outside San Salvador, there was a slope where all the bodies of the desaparecidos were deposited.

These desaparecidos reappeared headless on the side of the volcano. My aunt’s job was to count the bodies and if she could find the heads, count them as well. She wrote reports for the U.S. Embassy to justify the military support given to the Salvadorean army.

Things did not stop there. Wherever headless bodies appeared, my aunt went, armed with a clipboard and a blindada, a bullet proof 4WD owned by the U.S. Embassy, complete with escort.

You would think this would cause her years of trauma, but human beings can get used to anything. After 12 years of living in a civil war, and 16 of enduring a physically abusive relationship with a former corporal, the only indication of trauma is her slowly deteriorating health. She has Parkinson’ s disease.

The hands that held a clipboard as she stood in a field of bodies can no longer be trusted to write. The hands which later painted beautiful craters of active volcanoes can barely draw now with the skill of a child. Yet, she’s still there, enduring and living.

Children of Cain continues to obsess me. It is dredging things up that shouldn’t be. John Pilger’s documentary “The War on Democracy” is doing the same thing. I didn’t realize he used archival footage of Monseñor Romero’s assassination. Here I was, thinking I was going to be treated to an indictment on U.S. warmongering in the Middle East, when lo and behold, footage I recognised popped up. Some of these images I had seen in person.

The 12 year old soldiers perched on the back of Utes I had seen with my own eyes.

The jungle some of the Guatemalan soldiers were shown in, I had also seen with my own eyes, chewed on its dust, sweltered in its heat.

Here I was, thinking I was going to see new footage of Pinochet, or even Fujimori. But I could barely believe it when an image filled the screen that I remembered from watching it as a child, before censorship kicked in. John Pilger’s voiceover was a few seconds late, but it confirmed what I knew already. The static image of men and women felled by sharpshooters on the steps of San Salvador’s main Cathedral crept on the screen as I watched. Something inside me stirred and trembled. Something that lies dormant within me, but rears its ugly head when childhood memories are prodded.

I was 8 years old. The television was on. There was only the maid and me in a house so large, she wouldn’t have known what I was doing if she didn’t walk around the several rooms. I was perched on my parents’ bed watching the only colour television set we had back then. Shots rang out on the screen. Then, inexplicably, there was a fire. I still don’t understand where that memory belongs, nor how I came by it. But the next day, life had changed.

My mum and dad took us aside. They told each of us, in language appropriate to our ages, that we were now in the midst of a civil war. I was to be in charge of the little ones, if we became separated from my parents. They taught us what to do when a bomb went off, where to hide, how to protect ourselves from shrapnel. They taught us how to drop to the ground during a shoot out. My father stressed that we were to remember several phone numbers, among them those of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. Just in case.

They told me who I was to trust and to what extent. The little ones were to only trust my grandparents and I. My role was to protect and lead them to safety. The little ones were 6, 5 and 4. They didn’t really understand what was happening. I understood it had something to do with the assassination, but not the issues at stake. I didn’t need to. I only needed to know how to seek refuge.

I had the opportunity to do so the following year. The FMLN targeted power plants, water mains and supermarkets. Particularly in upper class areas. Two blocks away from my home was a large supermarket. It stocked luxury items, which meant my parents rarely frequented it. It was early evening on a weekday. The only adult at home with me was our cook/cleaner. She was in the kitchen. My mum was picking up the little ones from a friend’s house. My dad was still at work. He usually arrived home at 8 pm, like most Salvadoran fathers. We would eat dinner around 8:30.

It must have been around 6 pm, because it was dark already. I was watching telly in the dining room, it probably was a telenovela for kids. I can’t remember anymore. Suddenly, the ground shook, a massive sound rocked the house and I dove under the dining table. I stayed there until my mum came home. The maid had fled. The house was dark. The bomb had taken out the entire supermarket. Another bomb had taken care of the electricity tower further down the road.

It was the beginning of what we called apagones, sudden blackouts caused by bombing utilities. It also marked the beginning of martial law. The curfew imposed by the ruling party started at 7 pm and ended at 7 am. Anyone found circulating the streets between those hours was to be shot, no questions asked. The civil war was in full swing.

I’m now reading The Triumph, the chapter on Nicaragua that Rosenberg wrote in Children of Cain. It’s kind of strange to read about a country I’m very familiar with and with which I have close ties, but in which I’ve never been, from the perspective of a North American. I’ve read two different accounts about the Sandinistas, one of them by P.J. O’Rourke, the other one by Salman Rushdie. I now am left with only one last resort, to read Nica writers and go visit Managua, the capital.

In 1972, Managua was flattened by an earthquake. At the time, my aunt on my dad’s side was living there with her second husband, whom we all considered our real uncle, even though he had not sired my cousins. He had definitely fathered them, even if they didn’t carry his DNA. Shortly after the earthquake, the revolution started. Unlike other revolutions in Central America, this one had the support of all the classes. My aunt sent my cousins to live with us, three gangly boys with funny accents. They spoke slowly, with a Caribbean drawl that amused the more choppy accents of Guanacos.

I was 6 when they came to live in the sprawling colonial house my dad and my aunt had inherited. These tall skinny boys, who spoke in funny accents took up the upstairs rooms above the servants’ area. Like all salvadoran homes, our house had a separate section for the maids to live in. The laundry, the maid’s bathroom and the tendedero were the province of the maids. Above these areas, were two bedrooms, only one of which had previously been occupied, as my mum didn’t like to have live-in servants. You had to provide them with breakfast and dinner if they lived in, plus bedding. She saved money by getting them to come in for the day, giving them only late brekky and lunch.

Those upstairs rooms were at one stage our playrooms, so when the boys came to live with us, we still visited their rooms frequently. My one female cousin, the eldest was never home, so we never saw her. At 12, she lived the highlife of a spoiled rich upper class girl whose parents are outside the country. She was a flower power girl taking advantage of the new free love and easy drug era of the 70’s.

My aunt and uncle would send her money directly so she could buy herself clothing and pay for her school fees. My younger cousins received their allowance via my grandmother, a strict disciplinarian who never agreed with a 12 year old having thousands of dollars at her disposal.

In a funny kind of way, Nicaragua brought our families together.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry about the Jesuit Fathers it all becomes very clear. Unless you can’t read Spanish.

The initial Ofensiva began inside a building called Torre Democracia, built by my uncle, whose construction company at the time RJC, was booming. It was built to withstand bombs and earthquakes. Battles began as well in front of the supermarket Santa Clara, which fronted my school Escuela Alemana San Salvador/ Deutsche Schule San Salvador. This was my local supermarket. So small it only had 3 types of butter, all of them Danish.

Torre Democracia was being used as a surveillance tower, because it was the tallest building on a highway called Autopista Sur and afforded a clear view of both Jardines de Guadalupe and Colonia San Francisco, a wealthy suburb bordering on the Autopista Sur.

I will be translating bits into English from the Spanish posting on Wikipedia to illustrate the historical facts as I go on.

Don’t go away. Same place, same time, same channel.

Rosenberg talks about the Jesuit priests who were gunned down in San Salvador in 1989 in Children of Cain. She says they were in the middle of a demonstration at the Jesuit University in San Salvador. She got it wrong. It is now 19 years since it happened.

Fathers Ignacio Ellacuria and Ignacio Martin Baro lived four houses away from my childhood home in Jardines de Guadalupe. In November 1989, San Salvador saw the final great battle between the government forces and the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Marti Para La Liberacion Nacional). It also saw the murder of six Jesuit priests. These two Fathers worked at the Catholic University in Jardines de Gualupe, San Salvador. They were gentle, learned men.

On the 16th of November 1989, just before the sun came up, before even the maids had made their way to their places of work, the armed forces broke into the house of these priests, in a quiet residential street backing onto the Catholic University. They took the priests from their beds, pushed and prodded them down the street until they reach a grassy clearing, where they made them lie face down. The machine gun fire which took their lives went unnoticed in the middle of the biggest urban battle San Salvador had known until then, known as La Ofensiva.

The same street where these men had lived was a battlefield. Cars were taken from the cramped little driveways and used as barricades. My cousin and her family were living in my childhood home at the time, four doors down from the Jesuit Fathers. Their car was lifted, wheels and all by guerrilla forces, to serve as a shield against machine gun and rocket fire. My cousin and her family took cover in the maid’s bedroom, the safest place in the house. In the middle of that bedlam, the shots that killed the Jesuit Fathers had no chance of being heard.

I am not a religious person. Not anymore. But I knew these kind, gentle men from birth. I still have photos of them when I was one year old, watching over me while I ran down what used to be a friendly, safe street, with my nanny in tow. Their crime was teaching at a University known for “harboring” guerrilla forces. One of them was the equivalent of the Chancellor and the other the Vice Chancellor of the University.

They were not in the middle of a student protest as Rosenberg claims. They were not instigating violence. They were not preaching marxism-leninism. They were peacefully asleep. Sure, they preached liberation theology in their waking hours, but never through the use of violence.

Their deaths prompted the ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista) government at the time to initiate negotiations with the FMLN to bring about a peace accord, which finally took place in 1992, ending 14 years of a war that took 70,000 lives.