Joan Didion: Salvador

“Salvador” (1983) by US writer Joan Didion is a short book about El Salvador. She spent two weeks there in June 1982 in elite circles as part of the US press. That was six months after the El Mozote massacre and one month before President Reagan in the US was due to tell Congress that El Salvador had made enough (symbolic) progress on human rights to merit more foreign aid (called blackmail by some in El Salvador).

El Salvador: In 1982 the army was fighting rebels up in the hills, only some of them actual Marxists or communists. White people owned most of the land and had ever since the days of Spanish rule. The Indian and ladino (mixed-race) majority on occasion rise up to demand land reform only to be massacred by the army. Thanks to the logic of the Cold War, says Didion, the US was pouring money, weapons and military training into a reign of right-wing terror that would not speak its name.

Didion, a self-described gringa, is a White American lady from Los Angeles, California whose maid seemed to be from El Salvador. Didion is a journalist with a literary love of irony, metaphor and the telling detail. She is a huge Hemingway fan, just not of his short sentences.

Bits of what she saw and heard:

Nahuizalco – the scene of an Indian arts festival, dispirited and sadly fake. In 1932 it was the scene of a massacre of Indians. Destruction of their culture duly followed (later reassembled by scholars). In 1982:

“In the schoolyard there were [shade] trees, and tables, where the Queen of the Fair, who had a wicker crown and European features, sat with the local guardia, each of whom had an automatic weapon, a sidearm, and a bayonet. The guardia drank beer and played with their weapons. The Queen of the Fair studied her ox-blood-red fingernails. It took twenty centavos to enter the schoolyard, and a certain cultural confidence.”

The cathedral – dead flowers on the altar. Two years before the archbishop himself, Oscar Romero (now a Catholic saint), was killed during mass at a hospital. Four US nuns were killed in El Salvador later that same year.

The National University – shut down by the army. There she saw what soldiers called subversivo pamphlets: reprints of an article on inherited enzyme deficiency from The New England Journal of Medicine.

The truth – la verdad in Spanish. At a party at the US embassy she was informed:

“If I wrote la verdad it would be good for El Salvador. I realized that I had stumbled into a code, that these women used la verdad as it was used on the bumper stickers favored that spring and summer by [right-wing] ARENA people. “Journalists, Tell the Truth!” the bumper stickers warned in Spanish, and they meant the truth according to Roberto D’Aubuisson.

D’Aubuisson was probably behind the archbishop’s murder, but the CIA seemed uninterested in proof of that.

Didion’s undertone: The US means well but you know how these people are.

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

• books – books I read in 2019
• Dominick Dunne – her brother-in-law
• El Salvador
  • Oscar Romero
  • US press in El Salvador:
    • Raymond Bonner – covered the El Mozote massacre
    • James LeMoyne – “one of the most dishonest journalists I’ve ever seen,” says Chomsky
• filters:
  • White paternalism
  • The propaganda model
  • journalistic truth
• Vietnam War
  • Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals – to speak truth to power
  • Martin Luther King’s Riverside speech against the Vietnam War – militarism, materialism, racism
• How to write like Hemingway

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