El Salvador

I think there comes a point in all of our lives (or maybe two or three) when our world is fundamentally turned upside down. You encounter a place or a person or have some impactful experience, and it changes your entire way of looking at the world. For me, that encounter was El Salvador.

I travelled to El Salvador this past week and arrived back in Managua late Friday night. We divided our time between the capital (San Salvador), the campo (a community called Santa Marta), and a smaller town in the mountains called Suchitoto (where I met Sister Peggy, the nun from New Jersey, who was quite possibly one of the most wonderful women in the world. Within the first two minutes of talking to her, she dropped this line: "And look at the U.S. now! We've found ourselves in all this shit in Iraq and we don't know how the hell to get out." Next thing I knew, she was quoting the book of Mark and telling us that we are all children of God. Does it get any more endearing than that?)

But back to El Salvador. We spent the week learning about their history, their civil war, and the current state of the country. In everything we did, the goal was really just to understand hardship by interacting with people who have endured so much of it. As my host mom in Santa Marta said to me shortly after meeting her, "Ah, yes. You've come here to learn about our suffering."

I'll be honest: before going to El Salvador, I knew next to nothing about its history. And even if I had, I'm not sure it would have prepared me for all that I experienced there. To write about the atrocities and suffering on a blog doesn't at all do it justice, but words are all I have at this point, so that's what I'll do. Here's a quick look at the history of the country...

Boiled down, El Salvador's story is one of mass poverty at the hands of a small economic/political elite; for as long as can be remembered, the majority of the population has been landless and oppressed. In 1932, indigenous groups tried to organize an uprising against the landlords and the government, but the National Guard responded to this by killing 17,000 indigenous people. This event, known as la matanza (the massacre) created an alliance between the military and political elite, which continued to oppress the majority of the people through the 20th century.

In 1980, more than 75% of El Salvador's population lived in poverty, and over half lived in extreme poverty (unable to afford the basic food basket). It was around this time that workers, farmers, priests, and others began to mobilize, demanding social change. As the movement spread and numbers grew, the government responded with even MORE oppression and violence. In 1980 alone, more than 1,000 people were killed PER MONTH, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians, and most were carried out by the National Guard. In March 1980, the Archbishop of El Salvador (and a national hero, for good reason), Oscar Romero, was assassinated the day after he pleaded soldiers to stop obeying orders and end the violence (he said: "In the name of God then, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise to Heaven, each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!").

After his death, the war unravelled even more and the number of deaths continued to accumulate. The strong majority of these were committed by the military's "death squads" which would raid and wipe out entire communities suspected of organizing resistance. According to the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission, the intellectual author of these death squads was also the founder of the political party ARENA, which still holds power in El Salvador today. (In fact, just three days ago I sat in the National Assembly, in a room enshrined to this man, talking to a delegate from ARENA. It was, to say the least, eerie and unsettling.)

In all, more than 75,000 people were killed (in a country of less than 5 million) in the 12 years before the peace accords were signed in 1992. This comes out to 1 in every 56 Salvadorans, and it doesn't take into account disappearances. In essence, not a single family or community went unaffected.

In Santa Marta, we listened to the testimony of one of the women from the community. This was a community ADVERSELY impacted by the war. They were heavily, heavily persecuted by the military... so much so that in 1981, the entire community fled to Honduras and stayed there as refugees until 1987 when a group of them decided to return to Santa Marta. Her testimony of the war years included accounts of torture, rape, disappearances, and mass killings. As I sat there hearing about atrocities more awful than I could have ever imagined, it took all of my strength to convince myself that this story was real, and that it was hers. I felt like I was living a nightmare just LISTENING to her--the idea of actually living through it was more than I could take. In fact, the only coherent thought I could form was a single, short word: Why?

And then came the kicker. Because then we learned that the United States supported El Salvador's government throughout the entire war: through the killings, the human rights violations, all of it. In fact, not only did we let it happen, we gave the equivalent of $1.5 million PER DAY for 12 YEARS over the course of the war. And with that, the question "WHY?!" came crashing down on me all over again, like a 5,000 pound weight.

I was consumed by that question for days, and I was convinced that, if I just asked enough of the right questions, I would eventually get to the bottom of it. Something would click, the pieces would fall into place, and it would all make sense to me. So I spent the next few days TIRELESSLY asking questions... talking to whoever was there and asking them whatever was on my mind. But it didn't get any clearer; in fact, the whole WHY question just seemed to loom larger.

It was on the bus ride out of Santa Marta that I gave up trying to figure it out--maybe partially out of defeat and exhaustion, I don't know. But it occurred to me that no matter how many of the "right" questions I asked, I would never really understand it. I was trying to make sense of something that had no logical reasoning behind it. Or, as my friend Samuel said, "There's sense behind it, Kendall, but it's all political. You're just frustrated because you're looking for moral sense." Considering for a second that he was right, I decided to turn off my tendency to reason through things for once in my life and just decided to accept it for what it is: a tragedy that I will likely never understand.

This seems to be a trend for the semester. I think I came here trying to get a better grasp on the world and instead... my idea of the world is just getting turned inside out, repeatedly. I keep stumbling upon questions, wrestling with them, kicking them, often GETTING KICKED by them, and eventually walking away--sometimes with answers, but more frequently without. Maybe that is progress, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of a way. Maybe the best thing I can learn is just how small my understanding of the world is.

I don't know. But I do know this: as painful and as frustrating and as overwhelming as this whole process is, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I'd rather be exposed to the worst of the world if it means someday being able to do something about it. I know that these experiences are changing me, molding me for some purpose... and that is where I find my hope.

"Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand..." Jeremiah 18:6