That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained. In this light all arguments tended to trail off. Pros and cons seemed equally off the point. At the heart of the American effort there was something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but “sick,” a temporarily fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy needed only to be encouraged, in which words had stable meanings north and south (“election,” say, and “Marxist”) and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will. A few days before I arrived in El Salvador there appeared in Diario de Hoy a full-page advertisement placed by leaders of the Women’s Crusade for Peace and Work. This advertisement accused the United States, in the person of its ambassador, Deane Hinton, of “blackmailing us with your miserable aid, which only keeps us subjugated in underdevelopment so that powerful countries like yours can continue exploiting our few riches and having us under your boot.” The Women’s Crusade for Peace and Work is an organization of the right, with links to ARENA, which may suggest how latent that good will remains.
This “blackmail” motif, and its arresting assumption that trying to keep Salvadorans from killing one another constituted a new and particularly crushing imperialism, began turning up more and more frequently. By October of 1982 advertisements were appearing in the San Salvador papers alleging that the blackmail was resulting in a “betrayal” of El Salvador by the military, who were seen as “lackeys” of the United States. At a San Salvador Chamber of Commerce meeting in late October, Deane Hinton said that “in the first two weeks of this month at least sixty-eight human beings were murdered in El Salvador under circumstances which are familiar to everyone here,” stressed that American aid was dependent upon “progress” in this area, and fielded some fifty written questions, largely hostile, one of which read, “Are you trying to blackmail us?”
I was read this speech over the telephone by an embassy officer, who described it as “the ambassador’s strongest statement yet.” I was puzzled by this, since the ambassador had made most of the same points, at a somewhat lower pitch, in a speech on February 11, 1982; it was hard to discern a substantive advance between, in February, “If there is one issue which could force our Congress to withdraw or seriously reduce its support for El Salvador, it is the issue of human rights,” and, in October: “If not, the United States — in spite of our other interests, in spite of our commitment to the struggle against communism, could be forced to deny assistance to El Salvador.” In fact the speeches seemed almost cyclical, seasonal events keyed to the particular rhythm of the six-month certification process; midway in the certification cycle things appear “bad,” and are then made, at least rhetorically, to appear “better,” “improvement” being the key to certification.
I mentioned the February speech on the telephone, but the embassy officer to whom I was speaking did not see the similarity; this was, he said, a “stronger” statement, and would be “front-page” in both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. In fact the story did appear on the front pages of both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, suggesting that every six months the news is born anew in El Salvador.
Whenever I hear someone speak now of one or another solución for El Salvador I think of particular Americans who have spent time there, each in his or her own way inexorably altered by the fact of having been in a certain place at a certain time. Some of these Americans have since moved on and others remain in Salvador, but, like survivors of a common natural disaster, they are equally marked by the place.
“There are a lot of options that aren’t playable. We could come in militarily and shape the place up. That’s an option, but it’s not playable, because of public opinion. If it weren’t for public opinion, however, El Salvador would be the ideal laboratory for a full-scale military operation. It’s small. It’s self-contained. There are hemispheric cultural similarities.”
— A United States embassy officer in San Salvador.
“June 15th was not only a great day for El Salvador, receiving $5 million in additional U.S. aid for the private sector and a fleet of fighter planes and their corresponding observation units, but also a great day for me. Ray Bonner [of The New York Times] actually spoke to me at Ilopango airport and took my hand and shook it when I offered it to him.… Also, another correspondent pulled me aside and said that if I was such a punctilious journalist why the hell had I written something about him that wasn’t true. Here I made no attempt to defend myself but only quoted my source. Later we talked and ironed out some wrinkles. It is a great day when journalists with opposing points of view can get together and learn something from each other, after all, we are all on the same side. I even wrote a note to Robert E. White (which he ignored) not long ago after he protested that I had not published his Letter to the Editor (which I had) suggesting that we be friendly enemies. The only enemy is totalitarianism, in any guise: communistic, socialistic, capitalistic or militaristic. Man is unique because he has free will and the capacity to choose. When this is suppressed he is no longer a man but an animal. That is why I say that despite differing points of view, we are none of us enemies.”
— Mario Rosenthal, editor of the El Salvador News Gazette, in his June 14–20 1982 column, “A Great Day.”
“You would have had the last interview with an obscure Salvadoran.”
— An American reporter to whom I had mentioned that I had been trying to see Colonel Salvador Beltrán Luna on the day he died in a helicopter crash.
“It’s not as bad as it could be. I was talking to the political risk people at one of the New York banks and in 1980 they gave El Salvador only a ten percent chance of as much stability in 1982 as we have now. So you see.”
— The same embassy officer.
“Normally I wouldn’t have a guard at my level, but there were death threats against my predecessor, he was on a list. I’m living in his old house. In fact something kind of peculiar happened today. Someone telephoned and wanted to know, very urgent, how to reach the Salvadoran woman with whom my predecessor lived. This person on the phone claimed that the woman’s family needed to reach her, a death, or illness, and she had left no address. This might have been true and it might not have been true. Naturally I gave no information.”