Salvadoran Survival: An Enduring Testimony

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 16, 2001 | by Suzanne Fields

El Salvador is a country illuminated by negative comparisons. It's the smallest country in Central America. It's the only one without a coast on the Atlantic. It's the most "ecologically damaged" country in the Americas.

So many trees have been cut down for wood or for farming that less than 2 percent of its original forest remains. Much of the water is polluted. Earthquakes, hurricanes, cholera epidemics and dengue fever, a terrifying disease carried by mosquitoes, all have descended on this country during the last few years.

When you think of a winter vacation at a beach resort, you don't think of El Salvador, even though its black-sand beaches on the Pacific Ocean have what a dreamer might call "potential." But a visitor can't expect to watch the golden sunset slip behind Playa El Cuco, all the while lounging on a luxurious hotel balcony. This is not a Fantasy Island escape for Latin lovers.

But in spite of the dirt, grime, dust and devastation, there's something disarming about this little country that strikes a visitor with more than pathos. El Salvador was hit by two earthquakes exactly one month apart. Salvadorans have a kind of dignity in resignation, a muted testimony to endurance.

Near the entrance to the town of San Vicente, which was one of the hardest-hit towns in the second earthquake, a skeletal structure for a billboard stands high on a hill. Looking through it a visitor sees the rubble of gray stones below, silhouetted against a blue sky with a cliche of white fluffy clouds passing overhead. The view is framed as if it's a satirical advertisement to itself: Welcome to El Salvador.

Once inside the city, San Vicente becomes a hive of activity. Trucks are hauling away debris, cement mixers whir with possibility. Soldiers and engineers enlisted to rebuild houses and repair rooftops relax occasionally to shoot pool on the one felt-covered table that survived the quake. In this setting of peeling paint and crumbling walls, "behind the eight ball" is not metaphor.

So many men carry guns in El Salvador that, when I went to a bank to exchange money in the city of San Miguel, I watched customers check their semiautomatics at the door with an armed guard as though they were checking their shopping bags in a store at the mall. The hazards of war are gone, but weapons are now in the hands of gangs of criminals. Even more menacing than guns are the machetes that farmers in the countryside wear for cutting sugarcane. Neither gun control nor machete control has come to El Salvador.

During the long Marxist insurgency, the dead turned up everywhere in this little country, exposing children to violence and death in an X-rated reality. The military killings stopped when the cease-fire was negotiated in 1992. Salvadoran leaders who once sought help from the United States to fight guerrillas now seek aid for victims of the earthquakes.

President George W. Bush, meeting with Salvadoran President Francisco Flores at the White House, agreed to halt deportation of Salvadoran illegals from the United States for 18 months so they can send money home to the latest victims. He pledged $100 million in reconstruction aid this year and next.

There are no Candides in El Salvador. Its citizens know better than to believe that theirs is the best of all possible worlds. But they do have a sense of humor. On a tree growing beside a small bridge along the Pan American Highway, locals have hung dozens of empty Coke bottles as though they were fruits waiting to be picked. When I ordered a Coke or bottled water at a roadside cafe or market, the clerk poured the liquid into a plastic baggie and wrapped the opening around a straw for me to drink: packaging as a not-so-primitive art.

Insights into the reality of this part of the world are better created by novelists than observed by journalists. A writer needs the tools of comic irony to capture the resourcefulness of the people. The cowboys I saw herding bulls and cows, for example, wore big sombreros but rode bicycles instead of horses.

Many say the truth of their experience is captured better in fiction and folk art than photographic realism. The fanciful and fantastical beget an authenticity that excites the imagination and makes life both more livable and more laughable.

A huge beach towel in a shop in downtown San Miguel captures this Salvadoran sensibility with a picturesque pastoral scene that looks as though it were designed by Gauguin. Here, native women sit in a beautiful river washing colorful clothes while a man scoops pure water into a big orange jug. Happy farmers drive a cart pulled by oxen, and cheerful women with baskets of fruit on their heads enjoy the benign natural beauty. A well-fed dog barks. A cock pecks at grain. In front of a cottage made of clay bricks and a thatched roof of earthen hues a man lies in a hammock in idyllic perfection.

In a small park in San Vicente the earthquake had knocked the bust of an "eminent historian" off its pedestal. The sculpted head remained intact but lay at the base of its perch instead of atop it, a fitting footnote in a land where human nature is a victim of a more powerful nature.