by Lynda Hills

It was our last day in El Salvador, March 2003. Simone Stothers and I sat in the cafeteria of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador. The other members of the group had gone to eat at Pollo Campero, fast food chicken, but I was sticking to rice and beans.

We sat at picnic tables under a cover in the open air and chose our food from steaming trays set into a long counter. We paid with American money. It was a clear, sunny day and students talked, rested or moved from class to class much as they do at UVic.

Just up the hill, the Monseñor Romero Centre Museum displayed a grim contrast to our quiet lunch: the bloody clothes and belongings of six Jesuit priests, professors on campus, who were murdered in 1989 during the Salvadoran civil war. The priests believed in social justice and human rights, and encouraged students to speak out against government corruption and atrocities. Their strong beliefs made them a target for assassination.

Despite the peaceful surface, an undercurrent of violent history runs through everything that happens in El Salvador today. With two former civil war enemies now battling on the political stage, the country’s bloody past is playing a vital role in determining its future.


Roots of conflict

I went to El Salvador, the smallest and most populated country in Central America, as an observer for the 2003 municipal elections with a group from Victoria called CommonBorders.

When we arrived in the capital, San Salvador, the busy, congested city was full of colour and movement. The doctors there had been on strike for seven months to protest the privatization of healthcare, and large demonstrations were taking place in support of the strike and against the imminent war on Iraq.

As election observers we were mandated only to watch and report, not intervene. The municipal elections were seen as a test-water for how Salvadorans might vote in the upcoming 2004 presidential election, when they will choose between the ruling National Republican Alliance (ARENA) party and the opposition Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), an outgrowth of the guerillas who fought a vicious civil war against the United States backed Salvadoran government in the 1980s.

The roots of the current conflict go back to the mid 19th century, when coffee became the nation’s most lucrative crop. As the country fell under the control of a small, powerful group of families, president after president supported the seizure of farmland from individuals and communal owners. La Matanza, a peasant uprising in 1932 led by Augustín Farabundo Martí, was brutally suppressed by the military.

Over the next half-century, discontent over the repressive and corrupt military government grew among workers and the Catholic clergy. Government-led paramilitary groups began to target suspected communists and union organizers in the late 1960s, and a military coup d’etat in 1979 brought in a new era of political violence.

Then on March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated. The priest had been an outspoken critic of civil rights abuses, and his death gave new fire to guerrilla organizations such as the FMLN, named after the earlier revolutionary folk hero.

The FMLN launched its armed struggle against government forces on Jan. 10, 1981. The guerrillas destroyed bridges and coffee plantations, cut power lines and killed livestock. They also kidnapped and held for ransom members of the ruling families. The military retaliated by attacking villages and murdering inhabitants. The most infamous attack was in El Mozote, where 900 people, including children, were massacred.

Later that year, a coalition of military officers, wealthy landowners and paramilitary leaders formed the extreme right ARENA party, which quickly gained power within the Salvadoran government. Party leader Major Roberto D’Aubuisson expanded the death squads which had been growing since the coup three years earlier; in the course of the war they murdered thousands of people. It is now known that D’Aubuisson himself signed the order for Archbishop Romero’s assassination.

Throughout the war, the government received financial support from the United States, who were concerned about communism spreading in Central America. At the height of the conflict, then-president Ronald Reagan’s administration was pumping over a million dollars a day into the country.

Peace talks began in 1989, after a major offensive by the guerrillas persuaded the government that there would be no military victory. In 1992, a formal ceasefire came into effect.

The 12-year civil war had claimed the lives of over 75,000 people.


Battle for control

Despite the peace accords, inequality of wealth and human rights abuses are still present in El Salvador. While the FMLN has grown from a guerrilla organization into a legitimate political party, U.S. influence has shifted from military to economic.

Much of the controversy in El Salvador today swirls around CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which the ARENA government signed with the U.S. last December. Similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA will reduce trade barriers and open the door to multi-national companies.

Critics of the agreement charge that this will mean a decrease in the availability of generic drugs, privatization of services such as education, health care, energy and water utilities and an increase in corporate domination of manufacturing and agriculture. The fear is that it will also give companies the right to sue governments over public-interest laws that may limit their profits and to privately challenge labour laws like those that protect workers’ safety.

With the FMLN campaigning against CAFTA, it’s clear that what’s at stake in these elections is control. Presidents set agendas, and whatever party gains power will decide how El Salvador’s human and natural resources will be managed.

And Salvadorans take their politics seriously. While we were there in March 2003, there were massive protests against issues relating to CAFTA. A huge demonstration took place one hot morning as doctors, nurses and medical personnel, along with their supporters, jammed the streets of the capital. Hordes of people rolled like a wave through downtown San Salvador. Dressed in white, some with painted faces, they brandished hand-painted placards and carried effigies of El Salvador’s President Flores and Uncle Sam.


A mirror to the past

Police and government surveillance is still strong in El Salvador. Consider the case of Simone Stothers, delegations coordinator for the Centre of Interchange and Solidarity (CIS), which helped organize our trip. CIS remains critical of the ARENA push for free trade agreements with the U.S., which has placed Stothers, a Canadian who studied at the University of Toronto, in a challenging position.

After the election last May, Stothers helped organize respiratory tests for women who work in El Salvador’s maquilas—textile or garment factories often called sweatshops. The companies who own these factories are mostly foreign, and have been contracted by clothing labels such as The Gap and Liz Claiborne.

"The work is low-paid, working conditions are usually poor, and most union-organizing efforts are squashed,” Stothers says.

Maquila rights workers are a sore point in El Salvador. Stothers and the other organizers, a university delegation from Milwaukee and a Salvadoran women’s organization, hoped the test results might be used to demand improvements in working conditions for the mostly female maquila workforce.

The study consisted of three sessions of simple breathing tests, with 40 female participants. On the day of the second session, Stothers arrived to find the Salvadoran immigration police waiting at the office where the tests were being held. They took down the passport numbers and full names of all delegation members.

It turned out Stothers was already well known to the police. In July 2003, she left El Salvador to spend a month with friends and family in Canada. When she returned in August, her entry was barred at the Salvadoran airport and she was deported to Guatemala.

After a months-long international letter writing campaign and pressure from human rights groups and the German and U.S. Embassies, Stothers was allowed to apply for a limited visa. During this process she was initially denied assistance from the Canadian consulate in El Salvador. It wasn’t until other countries became involved that the Canadian government agreed to help.

Stothers is still waiting in Guatemala for an answer.


War on campus

Under the guidance of members of the ARENA party, the death squads wreaked havoc on the Salvadoran people. Suppressing criticism of the government in any form, men like Major D’Aubuisson made El Salvador another land of the disappeared.

Eugenio Alvarado, one of El Salvador’s FMLN representatives in Canada, experienced the brutality of wartime El Salvador first hand. Alvarado emigrated to Canada in 1984, but the days of the civil conflict are still fresh in his mind.

“We are the aftermath of a civil war sponsored by the United States that, until the early ’90s, they tried to cover up,” he says. “That is not something that is new, it has been our history since the Spanish conquistadores showed up on our shores. The Spanish forced the Indians to work as slaves for them and that tradition has continued. It just changed into the American hands.”

Alvarado and I met at his house in a quiet neighbourhood in Victoria. A cheerful man with dark brown eyes, he shared his account of his time during the civil war. As a young man, Alvarado started studies at the National University in San Salvador in 1976.

“It was hell,” he says. “Just the fact that you were a university student, meant you were considered a subversive. There was a building on campus that held the death squad. It was a daily occurrence to find girls with their breasts cut and bottles in their vaginas. With the males they would cut off their genitals and put them in their mouths.”

When U.S. President Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 and American funding to the Salvadoran army increased, the death squad didn’t make any secret that they would step up the repression. The army launched a campaign to crush every bit of resistance in El Salvador. Official estimates of the number of deaths that resulted go to 75,000, but Alvarado figures in reality the death count is higher. During the conflict, relatives would not speak out against disappearances in their families, or claim their bodies, for fear of reprisal.

“You just forget about it because if you go and say, ‘that’s my son, that’s my uncle,’ they are going to come after you,” he says. “If you identified a body, you would be compromised.”

In 1979, Alvarado transferred to José Matías Delgado University, a private university in San Salvador where he studied business administration.

“My classmates and I wrote a paper for our economics class about the problem of unequal distribution of wealth and the high poverty level,” he says.

The paper was passed on to government security forces and Alvarado and his friends were labelled as communists. A few days after handing the paper in, Alvarado sat in the cafeteria talking with six of his classmates and having coffee. When it came time to leave, there were three cars waiting for them on the street. Alvarado and his friends were taken to the police station where they were beaten and thrown in jail.

“You could hear the screams of women being raped in the cells and guys being tortured with electrical shocks to their genitals,” he says. “They used to take out a guy from my cell, pull the nails out on his hands and then bring him back after two hours and say, ‘You will be next.’”

Alvarado believes he was lucky because he attended a private university and therefore was perceived to know people with some political influence. He was finally released.

“If we had been at the National University, they would probably have just taken us for a trip, dumped us somewhere and nobody would have known,” Alvarado says. “I don’t even know how people went to school with that. There were deaths every day, everywhere.”

Alvarado is still working and committed to social justice in his country, keeping informed, communicating with friends and family back in El Salvador and telling his story whenever he can.

“We feel it is our duty to tell Canadians, our children and anybody we come across what happened there,” he says. “That is really our history. A country or society without a past or history doesn’t exist.

“You can’t go anywhere if you don’t know where you are coming from.”


What happens next

We spent election day touring polling stations around the small country, meeting political candidates and reporting on what we saw. The election was fairly peaceful, and the FMLN made significant gains in representation. The presidential election, scheduled for March 21, 2004, will decide what happens next.

I still remember the day I spent at UCA and the Romero Centre Museum. The bloody clothes and the textbooks riddled with bullet holes are displayed behind glass with a map of where the bodies were found. The museum also has graphic photos of the priests’ bodies after they were discovered.

For a North American like myself, it seemed strange to keep these violent images in a photo album for all to see, but given the history of El Salvador, it makes perfect sense. The veneer of civility and law that we take for granted in Canada, and on campus at UVic, is a luxury the Salvadoran people don’t have. We assume that violent events won’t take place on campus, that a student or professor would never be brutally slain in front of the Student Union Building.

Though these pictures, with their twisted poses and splattered brains, are hard to look at, they are a clear way for the world to remember what happened during the war. With continued U.S. intervention in Salvadoran domestic policy, it is also a reminder of what could happen again.

The most poignant picture for me in the photo album was the bodies of the housekeeper, Julia Elba Ramos, and her daughter Celina Mariset Ramos. In the photo, they lie on the floor next to a plain couch, cradling each other.

Our guide, a student at UCA, told us that on that day in 1989, a soldier told the women to wait in the lounge while they searched for the six priests throughout the residence. As they waited in the room, they listened to the noise, gun shots and perhaps the cries of the men they worked for. When the soldier returned, he told Julia and Celina to lie on the floor together.

Then he shot them.