Salvadoran peasants settled in Honduras, established villages, and grew accustomed to a better life than the one they had left behind. They numbered about 300,000.
In the 1960s, unrest began among the Honduran peasantry, which was demanding land, and the Honduras government passed a decree on agricultural reform. But since this was an oligarchical government, dependent on the United States, the decree did not break up the land of either the oligarchy or the large banana plantations belonging to the United Fruit Company. The government wanted to re-distribute the land occupied by the Salvadoran squatters, meaning that the 300,000 Salvadorans would have to return to their own country, where they had nothing, and where, in any event, they would be refused by the Salvadoran government, fearing a peasant revolution.
Relations between the two countries were tense. Newspapers on both sides waged a campaign of hate, slander and abuse, calling each other Nazis, dwarfs, drunkards, sadists, spiders, aggressors and thieves. There were pogroms. Shops were burned.
In these circumstances the match between Honduras and El Salvador had taken place.
The war ended in a stalemate. The border remained the same. It is a border established by sight in the bush, in mountainous terrain that both sides claim. Some of the émigrés returned to El Salvador and some of them are still living in Honduras. And both governments are satisfied: for several days Honduras and El Salvador occupied the front pages of the world press and were the object of interest and concern. The only chance small countries from the Third World have of evoking a lively international interest is when they decide to shed blood. This is a sad truth, but so it is.
The deciding game of the best-of-three series was held on neutral ground, in Mexico (El Salvador won, three-two). The Honduran fans were placed on one side of the stadium, the Salvadoran fans on the other side, and down the middle sat 5,000 Mexican police armed with thick clubs.
VICTORIANO GOMEZ ON TV
Victoriano Gomez died on 8 February in the small town of San Miguel, El Salvador. He was shot under the afternoon sun, in the football stadium. People had been sitting in the grandstand of the stadium since morning. Television and radio vans had arrived. The cameramen set up. Some press photographers stood on the green playing field, grouped around one of the goals. It looked as if a match was about to begin.
His mother was brought out first. The worn out, modestly dressed woman sat facing the place where her son was to die, and the people in the grandstand fell silent. But after a while, they began talking again, swapping comments, buying ice cream and cold drinks. The children made most of the noise. Those who could not find seats in the grandstand climbed a nearby tree for the view.
An army truck drove on to the field. First, the soldiers who would be in the firing squad got out. Victoriano Gomez jumped down lightly on to the grass after them. He looked around the grandstand, and said loudly, so loudly that many people heard him: ‘I am innocent, my friends.’
The stadium became quiet again, although whistles of disapproval could be heard from the places of honour where the local dignitaries sat.
The cameras went into action: the transmission was due to begin. All over El Salvador, people were watching the execution of Victoriano Gomez on television.
Victoriano stood near the running track, facing the grandstand. But the cameramen shouted at him to go to the middle of the stadium, so that they could have better light and a better picture. He understood and walked back into the middle of the field where he stood at attention — swarthy, tall, twenty-four years old. Now only a small figure could be seen from the grandstand and that was good. Death loses its literalness at that distance: it stops being death and instead becomes the spectacle of death. The cameramen had Victoriano in close-up, however; they had his face filling the screen; people watching television saw more than the crowd gathered in the stadium.
After the firing squad’s volley, Victoriano fell and the cameras showed the soldiers surround his body to count the hits. They counted thirteen. The leader of the squad nodded and slid his pistol into his holster.
It was all over. The grandstand began to empty. The transmission came to an end. Victoriano and the soldiers left in the truck. His mother stayed a while longer, not moving, surrounded by a group of curious people who stared at her in silence.
I do not know what to add. Victoriano was a guerrilla in the San Miguel forests. He was a Salvadoran Robin Hood. He urged the peasants to seize land. All of El Salvador is the property of fourteen latifundista families. A million landless peasants live there too. Victoriano organized ambushes of Guardia Rural patrols. The Guardia is the latifundistas’ private army, recruited from criminal elements, and the terror of every village. Victoriano declared war on these people.
The police caught him when he came to San Miguel at night to visit his mother. The news was celebrated on every hacienda. Unending fiestas were organized. The police chief was promoted and received congratulations from the president.
Victoriano was sentenced to death.
The government decided to promote his death. There are many dissatisfied, mutinous people in El Salvador. The peasants are demanding land and the students are crying for justice. The opposition should be treated to a show. Thus: they televised the execution. Before a standing-room-only crowd, in close-up. Let the whole nation watch. Let them watch, and let them think.
Let them watch.
Let them think.
HIGH TIME CONTINUED, OR THE PLAN OF THE NEXT UNWRITTEN BOOK, ETC
9
I was thinking of weaving into this book a dictionary of various phrases that take on different meanings according to the degree of geographical latitude, and which serve to define things that have similar names but distinct appearances. Such a dictionary would look more or less like this:
10
SILENCE. People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence; at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.
What silence emanates from countries with overflowing prisons! In Somoza’s Nicaragua — silence; in Duvalier’s Haiti — silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice — of complaint or protest or indignation — disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante—the state of silence.