| But everyone I met in El Salvador
has lived through such circumstances. The Salvadoran war began
in 1979 and ensued for 13 years, with an offensive between guerillas
defending the poor and a U.S.-supported military exerting wealth,
power, and control. People my age recount spending the first
half of their lives in refugee camps or sleeping next to an
AK-47, prisoners of circumstance juxtaposed to my adolescent
privilege of choice.
I met several such young adults while visiting the rehearsal
space of Grupo Morazan, a band with lyrics as politically charged
as any hardcore act in the United States. Sharing vocals between
women and men, the band writes original songs about AIDS, gender
equality, and the environment. Most of the members grew up in
a refugee camp across the border in Honduras, and returned to
El Salvador at the end of the war in 1992. Since then Grupo
Morazan has toured the U.S. and Europe to raise money for their
music school, which struggles for support. Watching them perform
in a concrete shack plastered with political posters, illumined
by a single light bulb swinging from the ceiling, I could not
ignore the happiness swirling in the room.
I encountered another group of Salvadoran hipsters at Photocafé
, the only fair-trade coffee shop in Central America. Young
photojournalists collectively run the café, which features
progressive art as well as quality coffee grown by local cooperatives.
My favorite hours were spent flipping through periodicals with
fotos of Iraq you will not see in the U.S., sipping espresso
and listening to people who understand what it means to resist
corporate interest and the dehumanization of their peers.
Collectives like Photocafé, which would have been illegal
before the war, create a fledgling alternate economy that resists
the influx of U.S. corporations and the impending Free Trade
Area of the Americas (FTAA). Outside San Salvador, we drove
by the U.S. embassy — a multi-block military compound
surrounded by posh gated neighborhoods reminiscent of US suburbs.
Seven families control all the wealth in El Salvador, and the
cities gurgle with Texacos, KFC, Wendy's and Blockbusters. Only
on the outskirts will you find most of the population, living
in shantytowns hastily constructed after various earthquakes
and volcano eruptions. The scorched earth teems with sweatshops
(large, concrete prison-like structures) and scraggly dogs and
chickens. The waft of diesel fumes and cooking fires darkens
otherwise magenta air, and a steady Pacific breeze drifts across
one of the most deforested countries in the hemisphere.
Before the arrival of European explorers, El Salvador was
called Cuscatlan — land of happiness. Now ironically bearing
the name of The Savior, the country's sharp divide between wealth
and poverty spurs many of the people to seek their own redemption,
implementing their vision of God's realm against the power of
a domineering government and military who massacred their own
people during the war.
Our delegation visited the site of the worst massacre, El
Mozote. In 1981, the U.S.-trained Atacatl Batallion systematically
assasinated over 750 unarmed women, men, and children in El
Mozote, the surrounding rural area, and neighboring villages.
Buildings still stand blackened with smoke, the walls exhibiting
more bullet holes than I thought possible. We spoke with Rufina
Amaya, the only survivor, who lost four children but managed
to escape by crawling through a field of thorns. She promised
God to repay this miracle by always telling the story. We also
hiked to nearby Los Toriles, where forensic anthropologists
exhume mass graves to identify victims. As I watched the team
unearth incomplete skeletons wrapped in tattered clothing, buried
the year after I was born, the horrors of war began to feel
tangible.
Back in San Salvador, I stayed at a guesthouse owned by Carolina
and Damian Alegria, both former guerillas. Damian is fluent
in English. His grey eyes saddened as he explained, "We
didn't want to be guerrillas. We didn't want to be fighting
with guns, because we really hated the army when we saw how
the army uses the weapons against people." But like many
of the people, including Carolina who was then training to be
a nun, they had no choice. Both were arrested while working
on behalf of the poor, and as their stories of torture — of
electrical shocks, ten days of sleep deprivation, sexual molestation,
and cells with blood-smeared walls — became real
to me, I envisioned how I too might one day be called to fight.
After partaking in the reality of my Salvadoran sisters and
brothers, I emerge with confidence in God's realm unfolding
here and now-with hope born of suffering. Perhaps the road to
peace, like the haphazard cobblestones paving the way to El
Mozote, is a lot more muddled than my relatively secure middle
class imagination could have previously understood. I pray I
will not be called to engage in violent resistance, but also
that I will not yield when confronting systems of power which
replace fullness of life with profit margins and military control.
My life is not at risk in the U.S. — all the more reason
to yell louder and write messages of justice and peace in capital
letters: BLESSED ARE THE POOR, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF
HEAVEN. |
