Other such words are “improvement,” “perfection” (reforms are never abandoned or ignored, only “perfected” or “improved”), and that favorite from other fronts, “pacification.” Language has always been used a little differently in this part of the world (an apparent statement of fact often expresses something only wished for, or something that might be true, a story, as in García Márquez’s many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice), but “improvement” and “perfection” and “pacification” derive from another tradition. Language as it is now used in El Salvador is the language of advertising, of persuasion, the product being one or another of the soluciones crafted in Washington or Panama or Mexico, which is part of the place’s pervasive obscenity.
This language is shared by Salvadorans and Americans, as if a linguistic deal had been cut. “Perhaps the most striking measure of progress [in El Salvador],” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders was able to say in August of 1982 in a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, “is the transformation of the military from an institution dedicated to the status quo to one that spearheads land reform and supports constitutional democracy.” Thomas Enders was able to say this precisely because the Salvadoran minister of defense, General José Guillermo García, had so superior a dedication to his own status quo that he played the American card as Roberto D’Aubuisson did not, played the game, played ball, understood the importance to Americans of symbolic action: the importance of letting the Americans have their land reform program, the importance of letting the Americans pretend that while “democracy in El Salvador” may remain “a slender reed” (that was Elliott Abrams in The New York Times), the situation is one in which “progress” is measurable (“the minister of defense has ordered that all violations of citizens’ rights be stopped immediately,” the State Department noted on the occasion of the July 1982 certification, a happy ending); the importance of giving the Americans an acceptable president, Alvaro Magaña, and of pretending that this acceptable president was in fact commander-in-chief of the armed forces, el generalísimo as la solución.
La solución changed with the market. Pacification, although those places pacified turned out to be in need of repeated pacification, was la solución. The use of the word “negotiations,” however abstract that use may have been, was la solución. The election, although it ended with the ascension of a man, Roberto D’Aubuisson, essentially hostile to American policy, was la solución for Americans. The land reform program, grounded as it was in political rather than economic reality, was la solución as symbol. “It has not been a total economic success,” Peter Askin, the AID director working with the government on the program, told The New York Times in August 1981, “but up to this point it has been a political success. I’m firm on that. There does seem to be a direct correlation between the agrarian reforms and the peasants not having become more radicalized.” The land reform program, in other words, was based on the principle of buying off, buying time, giving a little to gain a lot, mini-fundismo in support of latifundismo, which, in a country where the left had no interest in keeping the peasants less “radicalized” and the right remained unconvinced that these peasants could not simply be eliminated, rendered it a program about which only Americans could be truly enthusiastic, less a “reform” than an exercise in public relations.
Even la verdad, the truth, was a degenerated phrase in El Salvador: on my first evening in the country I was asked by a Salvadoran woman at an embassy party what I hoped to find out in El Salvador. I said that ideally I hoped to find out la verdad, and she beamed approvingly. Other journalists, she said, did not want la verdad. She called over two friends, who also approved: no one told la verdad. If I wrote la verdad it would be good for El Salvador. I realized that I had stumbled into a code, that these women used la verdad as it was used on the bumper stickers favored that spring and summer by ARENA people. “JOURNALISTS, TELL THE TRUTH!” the bumper stickers warned in Spanish, and they meant the truth according to Roberto D’Aubuisson.
In the absence of information (and the presence, often, of disinformation) even the most apparently straightforward event takes on, in El Salvador, elusive shadows, like a fragment of retrieved legend. On the afternoon that I was in San Francisco Gotera trying to see the commander of the garrison there, this comandante, Colonel Salvador Beltrán Luna, was killed, or was generally believed to have been killed, in the crash of a Hughes 500-D helicopter. The crash of a helicopter in a war zone would seem to lend itself to only a limited number of interpretations (the helicopter was shot down, or the helicopter suffered mechanical failure, are the two that come to mind), but the crash of this particular helicopter became, like everything else in Salvador, an occasion of rumor, doubt, suspicion, conflicting reports, and finally a kind of listless uneasiness.
The crash occurred either near the Honduran border in Morazán or, the speculation went, actually in Honduras. There were or were not four people aboard the helicopter: the pilot, a bodyguard, Colonel Beltrán Luna, and the assistant secretary of defense, Colonel Francisco Adolfo Castillo. At first all four were dead. A day later only three were dead: Radio Venceremos broadcast news of Colonel Castillo (followed a few days later by a voice resembling that of Colonel Castillo), not dead but a prisoner, or said to be a prisoner, or perhaps only claiming to be a prisoner. A day or so later another of the dead materialized, or appeared to: the pilot was, it seemed, neither dead nor a prisoner but hospitalized, incommunicado.
Questions about what actually happened to (or on, or after the crash of, or after the clandestine landing of) this helicopter provided table talk for days (one morning the newspapers emphasized that the Hughes 500-D had been comprado en Guatemala, bought in Guatemala, a detail so solid in this otherwise vaporous story that it suggested rumors yet unheard, intrigues yet unimagined), and remained unresolved at the time I left. At one point I asked President Magaña, who had talked to the pilot, what had happened. “They don’t say,” he said. Was Colonel Castillo a prisoner? “I read that in the paper, yes.” Was Colonel Beltrán Luna dead? “I have that impression.” Was the bodyguard dead? “Well, the pilot said he saw someone lying on the ground, either dead or unconscious, he doesn’t know, but he believes it may have been Castillo’s security man, yes.” Where exactly had the helicopter crashed? “I didn’t ask him.” I looked at President Magaña, and he shrugged. “This is very delicate,” he said. “I have a problem there. I’m supposed to be the commander-in-chief, so if I ask him, he should tell me. But he might say he’s not going to tell me, then I would have to arrest him. So I don’t ask.” This is in many ways the standard development of a story in El Salvador, and is also illustrative of the position of the provisional president of El Salvador.