El Salvador: Or, a walk in the rain

We´ve arrived at Guazapa, one of the guerrilla strongholds during the civil war. To greet us are three youth in a youth-run eco-tourism organization, to take us on a tour through the ¨backyard¨of the community.

I should probably mention at this point it had been raining all day before and today, with no sign it would stop. No one in the group was discouraged by the drizzle and we agreed to take the tour anyway.

The kids were about our age, ready to answer any questions we had, although little was volunteered. I attribute this more to my bad spanish and the rain than their tourism capabilities. On the way up the mountain, we stopped at various points of interest.

First, we stopped at the edge of one of the cornfields. This is not a typical cornfield--it´s all generally on a slant, and an individual field was roughly an acre or two big. All the corn had been turned upside down on the stalk, as our guides explained, to keep the corn dry inside. The husk slid all the rain off this way. Also, the corn here is white. The legend is that long ago, a princess was seduced by one of the gods, and became pregnant. Soon after, the kingdom suffered from a famine. The king, believing her immoral act was the cause, said she must either rectify the situation or be killed. She went to the god, and told him the situation. He told her to tell the people to start plowing their fields--they would use her teeth for seeds. The ¨seeds¨took, and when the corn matured, it was the exact shade as the princess´s teeth.

Next stop was a large stone with a depression in the middle of it. Basically an outdoor pestle, it is believed indigenous people used the stone to prepare medicines. It´s a bit odd to see the stones apparently scattered around the fields, sometimes inside the corn rows, doing nothing but collect rain and mud.

Also on the walk was an indigo ¨bath¨. I didn´t get this part of the tour at all--the rain had picked up and the voices couldn´t compete with the various forest sounds. The place where the indigo was made looked like an old stone basement, open to the elements. The bark of indigo trees somehow gets processed in this stone-walled structure. Indigo plays an important part in El Salvador history. This blue dye was the country´s first export product, and colonizers moved all original inhabitants of the lowlands where the indigo trees grew best. This was of course the best land in El Salvador for cultivation, so the people were forced to the highlands to make a more difficult living there. The great irony is that when the indigo trade ended (after the germans created artificial paints), coffee became the new export product. This grows best in the highlands, so the indigenous people again lost their lands to the colonizers.

The land situation was this: land was divided into haciendas, enourmous coffee fields owned by a single person. Those who didn´t own the land could still live on the edges, provided they worked as coffee pickers. They were also allowed a small piece of land to grow subsistence crops. Basically slavery. In 1932, many coffee pickers attemped an uprising, managing to kill about 100 hacienda owners before the military came in and killed 3000 campesinos (literally, country dwellers).

This was the beginning of a brutal period of repression, which didn´t spark into actual civil war until 1982, exactly 50 years after the first uprising. During this war, at least 75,000 people died, 85% of them killed by the national army. Only 5% were killed by the FMLN, the guerrilla movement, and the other 10% cannot be determined. An additional 8,000 went missing, with another 1 million homeless and yet another 1 million exiled. The war lasted 10 years, with peace accords being signed January 1992. During the war, the US government gave roughly $7 billion to the government, beginning with Carter and ending with H. W. Bush. Reagan of course was an emphatic supporter of the aid.

It´s one thing to know these facts. It´s another to talk to someone who lost family members, eyesight, limbs, and more in the war. It´s another thing to see, during this eco tour, a small hole dug into the hill side to hide people from bombs the government would send down as part of a Scorched Earth campaign that did little more than kill innocent people. The hole was a small tunnel someone could crawl into, currently filled with water and the occassional bat. When in use, it was covered by bamboo and random detritus, and was a successful way to hide from the military and their weapons.

After looking at the tunnel, we went further up the mountain to a guerrilla base. We didn´t get to see where the ¨hospital¨used to be, because it would have requred two more hours in the rain. Which is a shame. But we got to see the kiosk, which was a cabin with large awning we could stand under, with a few old signs says ¨danger, mines¨in spanish. We were assured all the mines had been cleared away and the signs stayed only as a relic of the times. During the war, landmines were used to protect the guerrillas from the foot soldiers. On of our hotel managers in San Salvador, Damien, actually led a group of 15 guerrillas, and they engaged in the same activity, among other things. (Damien is a whole other story. I´ll see if I can get that up as well)

This was our last stop. On the way back, I admired the beauty of the land, talked to my friends about upcoming college registration, and tried to process just what exactly we had seen.