Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (23 page)

But the one real insight I had at the market was the crowd, not
its appearance or its behavior but its fact. This country is full,
stuffed, gorged with people.

The next day I drove into the central valley which is formed by
the Lempa River. People were living everywhere. El Salvador has
more people per square mile than Haiti, and only twenty percent of
the land would be used by U.S. farmers for anything but dumping
wrecked cars.

The crowding, like the poverty, is a subtle, bucolic thing. I
didn't really understand it until I tried to find a half-private place to take a leak. Anywhere I went I'd get an audience of little camp-
esino-ettes-who'd never seen a norteamericano trouser snake before. (I may say none of them looked very impressed.)

In El Salvador, there are no Ethiopian concentrations of
starving masses to advertise for a rock concert, no skeletal infants
to act as poster children for the professional lovers of misery. The
malnutrition is what's called first degree, which means the kids are
10 to 24 percent underweight. They're still cute. Small, but cute.
Dead sometimes, but cute. This is the kind of nearly invisible
poverty that, in fact, most of the world is mired in. It looks quaint
from inside a car.

What feeds this countryside is not the truck produce I saw in
Mercado Central but labor-intensive cash crops-coffee, sugar,
cotton. But to get land for cash crops, landlords have been evicting
tenant farmers and squatters and stealing property from the Indians
for a hundred years. This is the same thing British landlords did to
the Irish in the nineteenth century, and it's had the same lively
results.

It was the issue of land reform that sparked the current civil
war. A semi-progressive military coup in 1979 brought in a government that tried to redistribute the big estates, the fincas, and to
raise the agricultural minimum wage. The terrified oligarchs took
to using death squads. The leftist advocates of these reforms took to
the hills.

But the conflict would have been no great shakes if there
hadn't been five generations of rural grudges and deprivations
behind it. And there won't be any tidy resolution, no matter what
ideology wins out. About half of El Salvador's people depend on
agriculture for their livelihood. To give each of these families nine
hectares (about twenty acres-the minimum acreage needed to
support life even as rural Salvadorans know it) would take six times
more crop land than the country has.

I was traveling with a translator-I'll call him Alberto-a
well-educated and strictly non-political young man. "Where does
the government get all its soldiers?" I asked Alberto. "Is there a
draft?"

Alberto looked to be about draft age. "Oh, yes," he said.
"There's a draft. In everyone's identity book there is a page where it's marked whether you have fulfilled your military obligation. The
army often goes to big dances and festivals and such things and
surrounds the places. When the young men come out, their identity
books are checked. If they have not done their service, they are
loaded immediately on buses and taken to the training camp."

"Were you drafted?" -l asked.

"Oh, no." He looked surprised. "They only do that out in the
country."

There were soldiers everywhere along the highway. Some
looked professional; others dragged their guns by the barrels like
rag dolls. In between the numerous military roadblocks we saw
dozens of burned produce trucks-victims of rebel economic sabotage. The government operates its roadblocks by day, and the
guerrillas operate theirs by night so that Salvadorans have twentyfour-hour roadblock service.

We drove on north to La Palma, in the mountains, almost to
the Honduran frontier. Until recently this was a rebel stronghold.
There were more bullet holes here than any place I've ever seen,
more per square foot than in an average Michigan stop sign. One
thing about adobe: it takes a bullet hole beautifully. The bullet
leaves a nice aureole of missing plaster around the impact point,
like in a Sgt. Rock comic, and not like bullet holes usually look,
which is as if somebody used a Black & Decker-drill.-

La Palma has no palms. It's too high and cool. But it has
handsome pine trees. To the north is the crest of the mountain
range, with cloud-diademed peaks. To the south, all El Salvador is
laid out like the Land of Counterpane. The town itself is the image
of that tile-roofed mountain fastness where we all think we'll spend
our meditative years. Or so it seemed until I stuck my head into the
corner cantina. In the El Salvador hinterland there's nothing to eat
but coarse tortillas, bad beans and worse rice. There's no clean
drinking water. And there's no place to shit but the yard. Nothing
except the grip of poverty is stronger than the smell.

A couple days later, Alberto and I drove west, to the far side
of the San Salvador volcano, where the esquadrones de muerte
dump their victims. I asked Alberto, "lust exactly what kind of
people do the death squads kill?"

This had never been clear to me. And the word leftist was no help. Depending on who's talking in Latin America, leftist can
mean anyone from Kim 11 Sung to George Shultz.

"It started with labor-union organizers," said Alberto, "and
then just sort of expanded."

We talked fora while about politics in the abstract, the only
way Alberto would talk about politics. I told him about my own
ventures into activist loudmouthing when I was in college.

"Oh, you'd be dead," said Alberto, and he gave me one of
those encyclopedic Latin shrugs. "It is an autocratic tradition of
government. There is no mechanism for dissent. What else can
they do?"

The people who perform the actual killings are, as far as I
could figure, militia members, low-ranking policemen and a few
plain bully boys. They hang precariously to lower-middle-class
status, a couple of steps down the social ladder from the students
and intellectuals they abduct, a step up from the campesinos they
slaughter. The esquadrones de muerte are cut from the same cloth as
the scared, fanatic lumps who, twenty-five years ago in our own
country, were dynamiting black Sunday schools and burning freedom-rider buses. In the U. S. today they're selling GOD, GUTS AND
GUNS MADE AMERICA GREAT bumper stickers at swap meets. In El
Salvador they have more career opportunities.

The dumping ground is called El Playon, "the Big Beach."
The name is a local drollery. El Playon is a huge cinder field
deposited by an eruption of the San Salvador volcano. The lava fell
in irregular, sharp-edged chunks, brittle and black, and covered
hundreds of acres. The flat color absorbs the light. The porous
stone absorbs the sound. Nothing grows or lives on El Playon
except vultures, which have the same angles and colors as the lava
and look like pieces of it made animate with horrid heads and
necks.

The cinders are piled like sea chop, in pointed crests-the
wide river Styx frozen in a moment of bad weather. El Play6n has
been used as a garbage dump for decades and smells no better than
it looks. But there's a more viscerally disturbing odor. I walked fifty
or sixty feet out into the cinders and saw a pair of skeletons, rib
cages intermingled. The skeletons had no skulls or finger bones.
This is to prevent identification, sometimes. Or sometimes the head goes on somebody's doorstep. "Haircut and a manicure" it's
called.

The bones weren't hard to look at. They were clean from the
birds and the sun-theatrical, really. But walking back to the car, I
saw matted clothes by the path, a sport shirt and jeans-teenage
clothes, slim fit and narrow in the hips. And then I was sick and
shocked.

And scared, too. I had to keep myself from running. I got us
out of there as fast as I could and off to look at some dumb Maya
pyramid. Alberto said, "The last time I was here there were bodies
in garbage sacks."

How can these things happen in a place that looks like Santa
Barbara? A place that's just a quick jaunt down the Pan American
Highway? A place that was settled by Christian Europeans a full
ninety-five years before the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

A social system like El Salvador's is not won on a TV game
show. It takes time and effort to create something like this. The first
thing the Spanish did when they arrived in the country was fightwith each other. Pedro de Alvarado, leading an expedition from
Guatemala, met up with Martin de Estete, leading another from
Nicaragua. And they blazed away.

The native city-states, mostly Pipil (cultural kin to the Aztecs)
and Maya, were already in decline. These city-states were based on
a huge underclass of landless serfs, and either the serfs had
rebelled or the topsoil had eroded until it couldn't feed them.
Whichever, the Pipils and Mayas were in a very modern condition
when the Spaniards found them in 1522.

Spain, in the early sixteenth century, was fresh from a messy
national unification. The Spanish crown was determined to maintain centralized control over its new American provinces. For more
than three hundred years, virtually every administrative post above
small-town mayor was held by a native Spaniard. Even the Creoles,
the locally born people of pure Spanish blood, were not eligible for
office, much less the mestizos or the Indians. So El Salvador, like
the rest of Spanish America, arrived at independence with an
experienced group of public administrators numbering none. And
Simon Bolivar died saying, "America is ungovernable. . . . He who
serves a revolution ploughs the sea."

Not that experienced administrators would have necessarily
helped. The historian C. H. Haring points out that there are two
kinds of colonies. He calls them farm colonies and exploitation
colonies. Farm colonies are refuges where Pilgrims, Quakers and
other fruitcakes can go chop down trees and stay out of everybody's
hair. But exploitation colonies are places for wastrel younger sons
and sleazed-out noblemen to get rich on gold or slave-labor plantations. Farm colonists are interested in forming their own permanent
institutions. Exploitation colonists are interested in getting home
and spending their money. For this reason New England, Canada,
Costa Rica and parts of Argentina are reasonably nice places,
while Mississippi, Jamaica, Mexico and most other sections of our
hemisphere are shit holes. El Salvador is a shit hole.

The 1821 Salvadoran Declaration of Independence reads, in
part, "If we do not issue a proclamation for independence, the
people themselves might, in fact, do it." The country didn't even
know it was independent for a couple of days, because independence had been declared up the road in Guatemala. Two political
parties promptly emerged: the Liberals, or Cacos ("Thieves'), and
the Conservatives, or Bacos ("Drunks').

El Salvador's first war was fought with Guatemala a few
months after independence. Guatemala wanted El Salvador to join
in a union with Mexico and so did El Salvador, but not on
Guatemala's say-so. Since then, El Salvador has been involved in
forty-two armed conflicts with its neighbors, culminating in a 1969
invasion of Honduras over a soccer match.

Changes in government have been frequent and confusing. In
1839, U.S. envoy John L. Stephens spent seven months looking for
someone to present his credentials to. And the changes in government have rarely meant improvement. From 1931 to 1944, El
Salvador had a dictator named General Martinez, who, among
other things, put colored cellophane over the San Salvador street
lamps to cure a smallpox epidemic.

Every now and then things get out of hand. Now, for instance,
or in 1932, when a secret communist rebellion screwed up so badly
that its schedule appeared in the daily paper. Only some Indians in
the western half of the country actually rebelled. In Juayua, they
cut the hands off a local policeman and killed the town's richest man, a liberal philanthropist. Then they got drunk. The air force
arrived two days later and bombed the town. Then the army
came-between eight thousand and ten thousand Indians were
killed, all the government troops had ammunition for.

President of the moment is Jose Napoleon Duarte, who was
installed in 1980 after the military forced out the semiprogressive
junta it had installed the year before. Duarte is a moderate, which,
in El Salvador, is like being in a game of tag where everyone is it
but you.

A British pilot working for TACA told me a story about
Duarte. The pilot made an unusually hard landing one time when
the president was aboard. The plane bounced several times. As
Duarte was getting off, the pilot apologized. "Don't worry," said
Duarte. "When people see I was on the plane, they'll blame me."

Or they'll blame the United States. The pilot and I were
having dinner at an outdoor cafe called Chili's. I happened to look
up from my food while the pilot was telling his story, and there was
a bullet hole in the iron grillwork by my head, right at eye level.
The pilot and I were sitting at the same table where four U. S.
embassy Marine guards had been sitting the previous summer
when they were shot by guerrillas from the Central American
Revolutionary Workers Party. The rest of the bullet holes had been
covered with neat squares of masking tape and painted over.

Are these guerrillas, "the Gs," as they're called, the good
guys? They make a point, I was told, of not harming the common
people (though they got quite a few besides the Marines that night
at Chili's). The Gs mostly sabotage the economy. I guess this is all
right if you're a common person who doesn't need money or food.
Also, the guerrillas seem to be better at killing embassy guards and
the like than at getting rid of the death squads. The death squads
are a powerful tool of right-wing terror. But they're also a powerful
tool of left-wing recruitment. In the ugly air of El Salvador, you
begin to wonder about things like that.

While I was there, the Gs were trying to disrupt the coffee
harvest in the eastern provinces, but they weren't keeping regular
hours. I never saw a guerrilla.