I think I'm finally ready to reveal what I've been experiencing.
El Salvador does have a very violent history, and even in modern day, there is a lot of gang violence. Travelers should definitely be cautious, but it isn't as though there are thieves and rapists and murderers lurking around every corner. The people of El Salvador are making many efforts to work toward a country of peace and respect.
Let me recap some events from my first week here, the week I spent with the CCLP group from CWU. On our first day in San Salvador, we were taken to visit a memorial wall that commemorated the assassination of hundreds of thousands of people during the 70's and 80's.
During the rest of the week, we learned a lot about the Civil war here in El Salvador. The war technically began in 1980, but there was a lot of violence leading up to it. For example, in 1932, here in the small town of Izalco, there was a peasant uprising that resulted in ethnocide, meaning that only indigenous people were targeted. The government militaries executed about 25,000 people of Mayan descent. Over the next 50 years, more government-lead assassinations occurred. For whatever reason, during the 70s and 80s, it was illegal to be a university student, and to be Catholic. People were arrested and beaten and/or killed for such acts as attending universities or even carrying a Bible in public. Francisco, the brother of my host mom Conny, was one such person who was arrested and beaten for attending a university in the 70s. Conny told us how she remembered getting the phone call from the police to come pick him up. He was so beaten that he couldn't talk. He's alive and well today, but not everyone was so lucky.
In 1980, Monseñor Oscar Romero was assassinated while he was in the middle of giving a sermon. There are photographs of that day: nuns rushing to his side, blood splattered all over his face and robes. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, as the bullet had ruptured his heart. Our group visited the church where he was killed. There were still blood stains on the floor where he was standing.
We also visited the site at the Central American University where, in 1989, six Jesuit priests, the caretaker, and his wife were all assassinated by military soldiers. The Jesuit priests were assassinated because apparently anyone affiliated with a church was "against the government." They were woken up in the middle of the night and ordered to march outside. One of the priests had suspected that his life was in danger, so he was fully clothed and tried to hide in his closet, but he was found and shot, just like the others. This all took place in a rose garden. The gardener and his wife, who slept in a room a few doors down, were also shot that night because the soldiers had orders not to leave any witnesses or survivors.
The place where Monseñor Romero was killed. He was standing on the right side.
Monseñor Romero, shortly after being shot.
Drawings from photos of the torture victims during the Civil War
The garden where 5 of the priests were killed
The clothes of the Jesuit priests, still covered with brown blood.
Map showing where the victims (blue bodies) and assassins (red dots) were.
Learning about the incredible injustices of the tortures and assassinations during the 70's and 80's wasn't enough. Guess who financed El Salvador's civil war? That's right, the U.S. secretary of defense. Every time we visited a new site of civil war violence, I felt a knot of guilt grip my stomach. This is what happens when the U.S. blindly meddles in foreign affairs. Country-wide, hundreds of thousands of peasants, innocent victims, were massacred by the government with weapons and bombs that were courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Alvaro, our guide, made it a point to tell us that the people of El Salvador don't hold all American citizens accountable for that fact. It was the government, not the people, who enabled such wide-spread violence. Alvaro said that it's true that many of the American people helped many El Salvadorans into the U.S. to escape the violence. Many indigenous people fled the country, since it was often the indigenous who were targeted. He also said that the fact that we're even here to learn about the history of El Salvador and to work to help people improve their lives gives the people here hope for peace.
This recent history is, unfortunately, not the end of the violent story of El Salvador. Even today, there are many gangs all around the country. In fact, Conny's nephew, Moises, works for an ice cream company. His job? He pays off the gangs so that people can safely push little ice cream carts in gang-territory neighborhoods. On our 5th day here, we met a woman in Las Trincheras who was too poor to even have food every day. She had to beg from her neighbors. She was mourning the loss of her son, and I say loss literally because he had been missing for several weeks. She didn't know if he was dead or alive, and she was crying, saying that she just wanted his body to bury. Our group had a police escort who talked to her, and I found out later that her son had been a gang member and had been kidnapped from work by a rival gang. He was almost certainly dead. There's definitely a reason that Conny won't let me out of the house without an escort.
Intentional violence isn't even the only cause of death here. Poverty also is a huge factor. I heard that many people, mostly elderly, die just from exposure and heat this time of year.
There are also a lot of car accidents. There is a distinct lack of consideration by drivers here. Pedestrians do not have the right of way. In just a month of being here, I've seen two people hit by cars.
On our second night here, I was sitting in the front of our bus as we were driving back to the hostel. Suddenly, I see at the stopsign up ahead that a car had hit a motorcyclist. Our police escort flashed on the lights and stopped to help. All I saw next to the fallen motorcycle was a crumpled body and a pair of legs soaked in red, fresh blood. So much blood... It was dripping off of her legs onto the road. I must have been the only one on the bus to see this accident, too, because as I'm shocked at the scene in front of us, I'm hearing kids laughing and talking about weddings and flowers and such behind me. Even when life is draining out of the woman in the road, life is going on behind me, and life is good. I felt such a strange schism at that moment. I didn't know what to feel. I felt angry and annoyed at the people laughing behind me, and sad and sick for this woman. Our bus pulled ahead into a parking lot and I saw the lights of the ambulance as it came to collect the woman. Back at the hostel, I asked the police officers about the woman. She was still alive when she was taken to the hospital. I asked if they thought she'd be okay, and they said maybe; I guess her legs were pretty messed up. That night, I had trouble concentrating on anything else at the hostel. I kept seeing that scene over and over in my head. Had no one else really seen that? Did they really have no idea that a life was almost lost that night? A few days later, I did ask some other people in the group about it. No one else had seen it, and only a couple of people even knew that there was an accident. I was surprised at how upset I was about this woman that I didn't even know. Death is a tricky subject; it's somehow so taboo in the United States, but many other countries, especially Latin American countries, think of death differently. Everyone's going to die eventually. That's no secret. Yes, it's sad when someone we know dies, but life goes on. Celebrate the life that was lived, and celebrate the soul that's gone on.
A week ago, on my way to church, I saw another body in the road. Alex, my driver, calmly said, "Oh, look, there's a dead guy in the road. Do you see him?" and pointed across the highway. Sure enough, there was a dead man in the road. It looked like he'd been hit by the big truck that was pulled over. There were two cops at the scene and a handful of bystanders milling about at the trinket vendors at the side of the road. I wasn't as affected this time, although the apparent calmness of all the onlookers was different to me. Almost a month had passed between the two car accidents I saw. This time, I wasn't upset. I didn't cry that night. In fact, I forgot about it by the time we got to San Salvador. I did remember the scene when I got home that night, though, and said a prayer for that man's family.
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