El Salvador Stories: The Colonel and Carolyn Forhche.

 

El Salvador. War Peace and Poetry Notes. 1988

The El Salvadoran poet and revolutionary, Roque Dalton produced a landmark biography of Miguel Mármol, a prominent Salvadoran communist who participated in the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising and was living in exile in Prague.

The Matazna, the massacre of 1932. Its memory is still branded deep on the memory of El Salvador. And the stench of the squadrons of death still fecund and foul in the land.

Miguel Marmol is a small Indian looking man and he wears a gray fedora. He is at least eighty years old when we meet at a book signing in Manhattan. He was a shoemaker, a trade union leader a revolutionary. He was left for dead after a mass execution called the Matanza of 32. He crawled out from beneath the stiffening bodies and the Latin American historian, Eduardo Guiliano wrote: “…the lives of Miguel Marmol, maestro of the art of resurrection, are the most perfect metaphor for the history of Latin America. 

Marmol’s thick book of testimony was written by Salvadoran poet, Roque Dalton. Dalton recorded the testimony in a three week long interview in Prague, scribbling the story into his notebook.

In Salvador, Death.

Pablo Neruda

In Salvador, death still patrols.

The blood of the dead peasants

Has not dried, time does not dry it,

Rain does not erase it from the roads.

Fifteen-hundred were machine-gunned.

Martinez was the assassin’s name.

Since then a bloody flavor soaks

The land, the bread and wine in Salvador

On Death Squads

From Carolyn Forche’s “El Salvador”

When someone joins a death squad he’s in for life. If he quits he might talk and nobody wants to be fingered for these crimes.

The first time such a man goes on an operation he is tested by the others. They tell him he must rape a victim in front of them and then cut off certain pieces of the body. They want to ensure he has the stomach for it. Afterwards he is as guilty as the others and he becomes part of his peer group and his reward is usually money.

Why isn’t it enough to simply kill the victim? Why must there be mutilations?

Death squad members must all be guilty of every murder so one rapes, another strikes blows, another uses a machete and so on until it is impossible to determine which action caused the death and the squad members are protected from each other by mutual guilt.

And when mere death no longer instill fear in the population the stakes must be raised. The people must be made to see that not only will they die, but die slowly and brutally.

The Colonel

From the collection: The Country Between Us. 

Carolyn Forche 

What you have heard is true.

I was in his house.

His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. 

His son went our for the night.

There were daily papers, pet dogs and a pistol

on the cushion beside him.

The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.

On the television was a cop show. It was in English.

Broken bottles were imbedded in the wall around the house

to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.

On the windows were gratings like those in liquor stores.

We had dinner – rack of lamb, good wine.

A gold bell was on the table for calling the maid.

The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread.

I was asked how I enjoyed the country.

There was a brief commercial in Spanish.

His wife took everything away.

There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern.

The parrot said hello on the terrace. 

The colonel told it to shut-up and pushed himself from the table.

My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.

The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home.

He spilled many human on the table.

They were like dried peach halves.

There is no other way to say this:

He took one of them in his hand and shook it in our faces, 

dropped it into a water glass.

It came alive there.

I am tired of fooling around he said.

As for the rights of anyone,

Tell your people they can go fuck themselves.

He swept the ears to the floor with his arm

And held the last of his wine in the air.

Something for your poetry no?, he said.

Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.

Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

_____

The Camino Real Hotel

Two blocks from El Salvador’s Camino Real Hotel mariachi musicians in tight yellow pants and jackets that are cinched around the waist. They carry their instruments, violins and guitars and curvaceous bass fiddles and they stand on the roadside as the traffic roars past on the Boulevard los Heroes soliciting work on a Saturday night. 

In the hotel entrance a uniformed attendant bows and opens the door of a shining Mercedes Benz and a dark skinned, Indian maid carrying a small Caucasian child in a ruffled white shirt, climbs into the back of the car. An elegantly dressed couple slide in and the door clicks shut and they drive off into the night. 

The affluent elite is cloistered from the war. They live in high-walled mansions with full-time, heavily armed body guards. There are said to be fourteen families that run El Salvador and this is the pattern throughout the Americas. If you have money and influence it is unlikely you’ll be drafted into the army. 

La Libertad

That afternoon at the seaside town of La Liberdad we find a restaurant with a few tables outside overlooking the ocean. It is a relief to leave the oppressiveness of the capital. The air by the sea is cooler and there are families in small groups, laying on the gray sand and on the edge of the sea. 

As we order a drink, three musicians approach us and smiling broadly stand in a semi-circle and begin to play. The guitar is scratched and worn but the melody is sweet and he sings from his chest in a loud baritone and his teeth glint with the gold in his mouth and his dark eyes shine. The bass fiddle is as worn as the guitar and the musician pulls and plucks at the thick, amber colored gut strings. And the man with the fiddle sways with the rhythm of the music.

The sea is brown like weak milky coffee and its as warm as bath water. It slaps on the coarse gray sand and the volcanic rocks at the base of a cliff. I can smell raw sewage sometimes and the brine of the sea and lobster that now rests on my plate.  And white gulls are floating overhead and the palm trees bend gracefully and there are green nylon nets drying in the sun. Three black pelicans stand in a shallow pool amid the rocks and a black and tan dog is running through the waves as they crash on the beach and there is a man climbing high on the cliff face.

We leave the restaurant and find a taxi back to the capital. It’s a half hour drive. It is dusk and we climb the steep incline back from the coast towards the inland. We pass a dirty dented bus that strains up the hill belching stinking blue diesel smoke. The surrounding hills are dry as dead bones and black leafless branches are twisted and skeletal. Birds float like ashes in the sky.

Looking back we can see the Pacific Ocean stretching like a purple sheet behind us as the sun goes down. We pass a man sprawled unconscious on the roadside in the gravel. He has no shirt.  There is a bird for sale in a cage beside him. And now the sky is turning green like a wound and it smells of rain. And the clouds sag and seep across the mountains and one leaden drops explodes on the windscreen, a mercury hole in the dust and then a torrent and suddenly its dark. 

As we approach the capital, San Salvador in the steaming night, blazing blue lights ignite the darkness, a line of them behind the razor wire that rolls in silver coils along the high concrete wall of a military compound. A soldier in tight camouflage pants with a black, silver-studded pouch, the handle of his machete sticking out, black leather leggings and an M16 is standing at the entrance gate.