ONLY AN IMBECILE WORRIES
NOBODY BEATS HONDURAS
OR:
PICK UP YOUR GUNS AND LET’S GO GUYS
CUT THOSE SALVADORANS DOWN TO SIZE
WE SHALL AVENGE THREE-NIL
PORFIRIO RAMOS SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF HIMSELF FOR LIVING WITH A SALVADORAN WOMAN
ANYONE SEEING RAIMUNDO GRANADOS CALL THE POLICE HE’S A SALVADORAN SPY
Latins are obsessed with spies, intelligence conspiracies and plots. In war, everyone is a fifth-columnist. I was not in a particularly comfortable situation: official propaganda on both sides blamed communists for every misfortune, and I was the only correspondent in the region from a socialist country. Even so, I wanted to see the war through to the end.
I went to the post office and asked the telex operator to join me for a beer. He was terrified, because, although he had a Honduran father, his mother was a citizen of El Salvador. He was a mixed national and thus among the suspects. He did not know what would happen next. All morning the police had been herding Salvadorans into provisional camps, most often set up in stadiums. Throughout Latin America, stadiums play a double role: in peacetime they are sports venues; in war they turn into concentration camps.
His name was José Malaga, and we had a drink in a restaurant near the post office. Our uncertain status had made brothers of us. Every so often José phoned his mother, who was sitting locked in her house, and said, ‘Mama, everything’s OK. They haven’t come for me; I’m still working.’
By the afternoon the other correspondents arrived from Mexico, forty of them, my colleagues. They had flown into Guatemala and then hired a bus, because the airport in Tegucigalpa was closed. They all wanted to drive to the front. We went to the Presidential Palace, an ugly, bright blue turn-of-the-century building in the centre of the town, to arrange permission. There were machine-gun nests and sandbags around the palace, and anti-aircraft guns in the courtyard. In the corridors inside, soldiers were dozing or lolling around in full battledress.
People have been making war for thousands of years, but each time it is as if it is the first war ever waged, as if everyone has started from scratch.
A captain appeared and said he was the army press spokesman. He was asked to describe the situation and he stated that they were winning all along the front and that the enemy was suffering heavy casualties.
‘OK,’ said the AP correspondent. ‘Let’s see the front.’
The Americans, the captain explained, were already there. They always go first because of their influence — and because they commanded obedience and could arrange all sorts of things. The captain said we could go the next day, and that everyone should bring two photographs.
We drove to a place where two artillery pieces stood under some trees. Cannons were firing and stacks of ordnance were lying around. Ahead of us we could see the road that led to El Salvador. Swamp stretched along both sides of the road, and dense green bush began past the belt of swamp.
The sweaty, unshaven major charged with holding the road said we could go no further. Beyond this point both armies were in action, and it was hard to tell who was who or what belonged to which side. The bush was too thick to see anything. Two opposing units often noticed each other only at the last moment, when, wandering through the overgrowth, they met face to face. In addition, since both armies wore the same uniforms, carried the same equipment, and spoke the same language, it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe.
The major advised us to return to Tegucigalpa, because advancing might mean getting killed without even knowing who had done it. (As if that mattered, I thought.) But the television cameramen said they had to push forward, to the front line, to film soldiers in action, firing, dying. Gregor Straub of NBC said he had to have a close-up of a soldier’s face dripping sweat. Rodolfo Carillo of CBS said he had to catch a despondent commander sitting under a bush and weeping because he had lost his whole unit. A French cameraman wanted a panorama shot with a Salvadoran unit charging a Honduran unit from one side, or vice versa. Somebody else wanted to capture the image of a soldier carrying his dead comrade. The radio reporters sided with the cameramen. One wanted to record the cries of a casualty summoning help, growing weaker and weaker, until he breathed his last breath. Charles Meadows of Radio Canada wanted the voice of a soldier cursing war amid a hellish racket of gunfire. Naotake Mochida of Radio Japan wanted the bark of an officer shouting to his commander over the roar of artillery — using a Japanese field telephone.
Many others also decided to go forward. Competition is a powerful incentive. Since American television was going, the American wire services had to go as well. Since the Americans were going, Reuters had to go. Excited by patriotic ambition, I decided, as the only Pole on the scene, to attach myself to the group that intended to make the desperate march. Those who said they had bad hearts, or professed to be uninterested in particulars since they were writing general commentaries, we left behind, under a tree.
There might have been twenty of us who set out along an empty road bathed in intense sunlight. The risk, or even the madness, of the march lay in the fact that the road ran along the top of an embankment: we were perfectly visible to both of the armies hiding in the bush that began about a hundred yards away. One good burst of machine-gun fire in our direction would be enough.
At the beginning everything went well. We heard intense gunfire and the detonation of artillery shells but it was a mile or so away. To keep our spirits up we were all talking (nervously and without necessarily making sense). But soon fear began to take its toll. It is, indeed, a rather unpleasant feeling to walk with the awareness that at any moment a bullet can find you. No one, however, acknowledged fear openly. First, somebody simply proposed we take a rest. So we sat down and caught our breath. Then, when we started again, two began lagging behind — apparently immersed in conversation. Then somebody spotted an especially interesting group of trees that deserved long, careful inspection. Then two others announced that they had to go back because they had forgotten the filters they needed for their cameras. We took another rest. We rested more and more often, and the pauses grew longer. There were ten of us left.
In the meantime, nothing was happening in our vicinity. We were walking along an empty road in the direction of El Salvador. The air was wonderful. The sun was setting. That very sun helped us extricate ourselves. The television men suddenly pulled out their light metres and declared that it was already too dark to film. Nothing could be done — not long shots, or close-ups, or action-shots, or stills. And it was a long way to the front line yet. By the time we got there it would be night.
The whole group started back. The ones who had heart trouble, who were going to write general commentaries, who had turned back earlier because they had been talking or had forgotten their filters, were waiting for us under the tree beside the two artillery pieces.
The sweaty, unshaven major had organized an army truck to carry us to our billets for the night, at a village behind the line called Nacaome. There we held a conference and decided that the Americans would phone the president immediately to request an order for us to see the whole front, to have us transported into the very midst of the fighting, into the hell of gunfire, on to ground soaked with blood.
In the morning an airplane arrived to take us to the far end of the front, where heavy fighting was in progress. Overnight rain had turned the grass airstrip at Nacaome into a quagmire, and the dilapidated old DC-3, black with exhaust smoke, stuck up out of the water like a hydroplane. It had been shot up the day before by a Salvadoran fighter; the holes in its fuselage were patched with rough boards. The sight of these ordinary, simple boards of wood frightened those who said they had bad hearts. They stayed behind and returned later to Tegucigalpa.