BY SUSANNE RAMIREZ DE ARELLANO
El Salvador and Murrieta
Sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, I read
with sadness and anger the news
coming out of Murrieta, California. I
watch the raw video—the
contorted grimaces of hate, the chants
of “USA, USA,” the misspelt
racism aimed at a busload of
undocumented immigrants from Central
America, mainly women and children. My
thoughts drift back 26 years
ago, when I first arrived in El
Salvador. I was taking up a position
as the Salvador Bureau Chief of United
Press International, at the
tail end of a vicious civil war.
Walking through the arrival area of the
airport, the first thing I saw
were posters everywhere of children in
crutches, children that had
lost limbs to landmines supplied by the
United States to the
Salvadoran government. Welcome to El
Salvador. I was a naive young
journalist stepping into hell.
The scorching heat that hit me like a
closed fist when I walked
outside made everything stand out in
high definition, a prelude to how
vivid the images of this war would
remain tattooed to the back of my
skull. El Salvador was a strange place
during that time – with a
stench of pure evil covering everything
like the fine mist of dust
that was ever present. A cold paranoid
fear serenaded by the slicing
sound of helicopter blades.
El Salvador is now the United States
forgotten war. The Americans came
to this small Central American nation
to correct the mistakes of
Vietnam and hold the “rojos” at bay.
They helped the Salvadoran
military wage a bloody low intensity
war against the guerrillas of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Army (FMLN). The real victims in
this were and still are the Salvadoran
people. More than 40,000
Salvadorans would die or disappear in
this nasty Cold War fiasco.
A Vietnam War veteran I encountered
deep in the countryside one day,
out of the blue, a Coppola vision in
the midst of horror, put it best.
Dressed all in black, classic Ray Bans
shading his eyes, unshaven,
cigarette dangling from his mouth. He
was sitting in the middle of a
dirt road, a case of beer by his side.
Walkie takie in hand, he was
directing the chopper traffic that was
ferrying wounded Salvadoran
soldiers, caught in the combat of the
day. When I asked what he
thought of the war, he smiled and in a
voice best suited to Lieutenant
Colonel Bill Kilgore, said: “Ah, best
little war in town.”
The legacy of that “little war” is
sitting on buses in Murrieta. The
violent street gangs that now plague
Central America, especially El
Salvador, were conceived during this
dark period. Modern day death
squads that now visit terror on their
own people, trained in the
streets of Los Angeles.
There is one instance that, for me, is
a snapshot of what happened
there, the farce that mirrored the true
horror of this cruel war
funded by Washington. An exhumation.
Gathered in the back of a church, in a
dusty, hot town in El Salvador,
where the Devil screamed three times
and no one heard him. We, the
small group that was the international
press, had been called to cover
yet another God awful story.
A representative from the Salvadoran
human rights group Tutela Legal,
founded by the Archdiocese of El
Salvador, had arrived at my apartment
at 8 a.m. and knocked loudly on the
door. Bleary-eyed and hung over
after a night of dominos, tequila and
various chemicals, I opened it
and stood there as she told me that all
the foreign press was invited
to an exhumation. Most of the foreign
media had been at my house all
night – we were not many – and we were
really in no condition to
witness anything.
We piled into taxis and began the long
journey to the town, which was
on the outskirts of the capital. The
story was this—10 people had been
executed in an attack. The FMLN claimed
that the military had done it
‚that they had rounded them all up,
tied them together, and opened
fire and lobbed hand grenades at them—
until they all died. The
military claimed that the rebels had
done it—in much the same way. The
dead had been interred for more than
one week. Tutela Legal had
secured permission to exhume the bodies
to try and ascertain what had
really happened.
This is where the Fellini part starts.
The exhumation was being done
by two of the town drunks – bottles in
hand as they dug the bodies
out. The smell was overpowering. It was
a sickly, sweet smell that
attacked the nostrils and permeated
your clothes. The drunks tried to
place the bodies in an old wheelbarrow
– but because they were so
inebriated they kept on tipping the
barrow and the bodies would flop
out. It was worse than the Keystone
Cops. They kept on slipping on the
wet ground and falling all over the
cadavers. The latter were wrapped
up in bed covers of bright colors. As
they fell to the ground, the
covers would open and reveal grotesque
death masks – many missing
limbs and part of their faces.
As the bodies were placed one next to
another —in a single file— the
“forensic experts” where called in.
These “experts” came dressed in
semi-medical green garb, armed with
scissors and kitchen knives in
order to butcher the delicate operation
that would determine how these
poor people died. As they began their
work, I could hear a veteran
journalist vomiting in the back of the
church.
This process took hours under the
sweltering Salvadoran sun. The
townspeople that were there refused to
say what had happened. If they
blamed the military, the soldiers would
extract revenge. If they
blamed the rebels, they could expect
the same kind of treatment. They
were trapped between the two—the real
victims of the conflict.
Among them was a woman who is stamped
in my memory. To this day she
represents in my eyes the strength and
dignity of the Salvadoran
people. She looked quite old, with a
lined, tight face. A thin
kerchief covering her hair. She sat at
in the same spot for hours –
smoking a thin cigar, never taking her
eyes off the grave site. Not
batting an eyelid, no expression on her
face. I went to her and asked
why she had not moved since the
exhumation began. Slowly, she turned
her head and with the saddest
expression I have ever seen, said to me,
“My husband and my two sons are in
there. I am not leaving until they
are out and I can bury them as God
would want me to.”
This is the legacy sitting on those
buses in Murrieta. We who
witnessed this terrible war need to go
back and tell the world what
happened. Let the bones finally have
their say. The reasons why we
need to let those on those buses in.
Susanne Ramirez de Arellano is the
former News Director for Univision
Puerto Rico and a writer and journalist
living in New York City. She
has a blog in El Nuevo Día called
Susanne en la Ciudad. Comments can
Twitter @DurgaOne.
Posted on Latino Rebels.com
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