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Salvador

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Joan Didion's portrait of El Salvador left me with vivid and haunting imagery of daily, commonplace disappearances and murders; of body dumps; of the Metropolitan Cathedral that the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero refused to finish, "on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence over its display;" of the ghostlike, dispelled National University ("It's not possible to speak of intellectual life in El Salvador"); of the United States' duplicitous role.

"Any situation can turn to terror. The most ordinary errand can go bad ... There is an endemic apprehension of danger in the apparently benign." Joan Didion makes it possible to imagine living this way, every day, with no escape, surrounded by brutal evidence of violent torture and death everywhere.

By the end of Ms. Didion's narrative, it becomes evident, if the reader did not already have some inkling at the beginning, that "American policy, by accepting the invention of 'communism,' as defined by the right in El Salvador, as a daemonic element to be opposed at even the most draconic cost, had in fact achieved the reverse." "To the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist ... where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared ... In other words 'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take."

Reading Ms. Didion's firsthand report of the two weeks she lived in El Salvador in 1982 has made me hungry for more details. Her account is no ranting, "liberal" narrative, despite discussing a highly politically charged topic. It seemed truly a dispassionate observation of a country's life and culture laid to waste--our tax dollars at work. Truly cause for reflection on our government's--and our personal--role and effect on the lives of people with whom we share this earth.

... and, unfortunately, it's all true.

This is one of the few books that have the distinction of being one of *the* most depressive reads of my entire life, but it left quite an impact on me. It made me realize how much the people of El Salvador suffered everyday, how they lived in unbelievable fear seemingly each and every day of their lives, how they were (and remain) good people, and how Saint Raygun Ronnie Reagan and Company knew exactly what those death squads were doing to innocent people - and gave them a hefty chunk of American taxpayer dollars and military equipment regardless (along with training some of those squads in American military camps!).

After finishing the book, I'm surprised Joan walked out of El Salvador with her life. Reading about her watching a young guy being forced at gunpoint into a truck knowing what was going to happen to him, about how body dumps were actually quasi-tourist attractions, how clothes were ripped off the dead so the living wouldn't go without (because the citizens were that poor!), of the contrived cultural festival in one town and how young men didn't dare be seen (lest they be taken away later on), of how there are armed men everywhere one goes, and of how she, her husband, and a journalist got out of a very sticky situation one day after visiting a morgue (which, according to her, is very accessible in the country. I don't know if it's the same a quarter of a century later) where rebels (or "freedom fighters" in Reagan's jargon?) surrounded their car and wouldn't move. If the journalist, who was driving, scratched the armed mens' car it wouldn't have been pretty and if they sped away, again, there would have been a problem. (The journalist was able to slowly back up and not hit anything, thereby saving everyone's lives).

I read the book literally (not looking between the lines of what she was saying) and envisioned living in El Salvador under such fear and it was not a pretty feeling. I feel bad for every innocent Salvadoran who has had to live in such fear and lawlessness, only to have one of the most powerful nations on the planet give money and military equipment to the people causing all the misery!

El Salvador and its people deserve *way* better!

Joan did a much better job than anyone at the major magazines (such as Time and Newsweek) could have ever done - and that was to bring the feeling of fear, dread, and misery up close and personal for everyone to experience. - Donna Di Giacomo

For anyone interested in the 12-year bloody civil war in El Salvador and the U.S. complicity in that war, this is a absolute read. It is a slim volume in which Didion lays bare in a matter a pages the U.S.'s criminal involvement in El Salvador's internal political affairs in the name of the war against "communism." There are few books in its class. I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one sitting! It provides a quick study of the U.S.'s complicity in the murderous regimes in El Salvador in the 1980's.

Didion's uncanny ability to use the words and mechanics of the English language to convey particular meanings is lustfully breathtaking. A fine line between the writings found inside a diary and a journalist's objective reportings, Joan Didion's _Salvador_ conveys El Salvador's civil war in ways that only she could. An outsider to the region, Didion's writings do not attempt to account for the chronological history of the civil war. Instead, she uses this diaretic format to help the reader enter into a world so foreign from the luxury-plagued U.S. that both Joan and her readers are left out of place, struggling to come to terms with the terror then reigning across El Salvador's tropical countryside--all along forcing her readers to confront the odious role played by our nation's then Vietnam Syndrome inflicted CIA. (May I also suggest the movie _Salvador_,...It is based on the diary of another freelance journalist/photographer who covered the civil war in El Salvador at the same time as Didion. These two works will move your mind and your heart, altering the way you look at the world as well as our country.)

Well,we barley made the airport
For the last plane out
As we taxied down the runway
I could hear the people shout they said:
"Don't come back here again.Yankee"
But if I do I'll bring back more money
Cause all she wants to do is dance - Danny Kortchmar

Reading Joan Didion's account of her two week visit to El Salvador in 1982 at the height of the Salvadoran Civil War which was eventually to cost 75,000 lives is truly a trip back through time. Reagan ruled and the perceived evil of the time was communism and the worse kind was that found in the Americas. It was to be battled at any cost.

Didion talks of terror but it is a different sort than what we speak of today. It is the terror of being disappeared, it is the terror of a menacing army who perceives that you are on the wrong side.

Didion lunches with Victor Barriere,the grandson of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, former president of El Salvador whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez used as a model for his book The Autumn of the Patriarch. The grandson tells Didion:

"It was sometimes strange going to school with boys whose fathers my grandfather had ordered shot,"

Didion talks about how difficult it is to get accountable news in El Salvador. For each story there are dozens of variations. Everything is murky and obscure with and edge of danger permeating, nothing is clear. In this environment Didion feels that perhaps Gabriel Garcia Marquez could more aptly be labeled a social realist.

Didion has written this interesting slim volume that takes you back through time. It is indeed told from a certain perspective and bias, but for those interested in the time period it is still a valuble and interesting read.

Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.

Being in El Salvador must have felt like never knowing that at any moment someone could step up from behind you and fire a bullet into your head. Could one ever get used to that? Used to bodies left every day on the side of the road? Used to them laying unclaimed because, if they were claimed, that person would be next? It really made me realize how much I take for granted living under the rule of law. Human life seems to be of such little value almost everywhere else.

The other thing Didion made me realize was that there was hope for my writing. She writes in huge, long, never-ending run-on sentences with scads of parantheticals and comma-separated interludes and explanations, as well as semicolon appendages (many whole paragraphs are only one sentence long), yet she gets away with it; there's hope for me.

It would be false to say that I was ever truly familiar with the situation in El Salvador at any time, not truly, and what makes Didion's Salvador such an extraordinary essay is that it so thoroughly and eloquently elucidates a time and place, but does so with specifics that feel as endemic to any political crisis now, or any 100 years ago. In her first chapter, she describes her experience in El Salvador by saying "I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror." Salvador is an extraordinarily precise evocation of El Salvador in 1982, of the failure of Reagan's policies there, but what makes it still relevant is exactly that evocation of mechanics, of the bodies at the morgue that add up but don't amount to a story, of the shudder of fear at the sight of headlights in a dark dining room, of the shifting game of verbiage that describes progress or failure or civil wars or assassinations. What I mean is that Salvador will move and feel familiar to anyone, and that, at the point she describes the particular failing of America that allows us to approach this conflict as "something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador," it will seem the most reasoned, obvious, and unsettling conclusion about national and international conflicts.

This is not the book to learn about the civil that engulfed El Salvador for over 12 years. This book gives a snapshot of widely held liberal political views of the war. Is quite arrogant to spend two weeks in a total foreign country, have dinner with a rich local family, meet with U.S embassy personnel and to assist to a few social functions ( all in English) Put all this experience together and write a book that tries to explain a conflict so violent that its roots go back decades. If this was not enough the writing is quite dramatic and one wonders how accurate are some events that Joan writes about. One such event describes walking in some upper class neighborhood reaching for her purse and hearing clicks of guns being loaded ( this I assume from private bodyguards being paranoid and alert to a possible treat coming form her ) I have visited such neighborhoods and walked those streets at around the period of time that Joan was there. I honestly do not remember any such episodes.

This book provides a one side perspective of the conflcit. The writing is so dramatic as to be laughable. Nevertheless if El Salvador is a topic of interest to you, it might be worth the reading as a way to learn more of events that occurred in that country at that particular time. No way this book can be taken whole and quoted as a single source to describe the Salvadorian Civil War

Joan Didion's book is a reedy, powerful work of nonfiction that explores El Salvador's horrific civil war and the American government's dark involvement with helping certain individuals "to disappear." In this work, Didion travels from "battlefields to body dumps" to uncover what many in the political regime do not want covered. With gun shots echoing in the night, frightened citizens keeping quiet and the fear of imminent bloodshed on the minds of many, Salvador is a classic, true tale of political intrigue, violence and secrecy that is equil to the works of Thomas Hauser's Missing and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs and The Soccar War(s). Joan Didion is a journalist and author who truly gets into 'the bush' of the matter.

I have lived in El Salvador now for over eight years. To visit El Salvador for three days and continue to make a profit on those three days -past- seems completely immoral to me, especially since the book remains in print and continues to influence the world's opinion of El Salvador. I find this completely unfair. Would it be possible for Joan or Oliver or anyone else that enjoyed an income from the events of 20+ years ago to come back and revise their assesment? It would probably cost them all of two or three thousand dollars for the trip, but of course, it would stop the thousand if not million dollars in sales of these recollections which were wish fullfilling fantasies to begin with. All of El Salvador suffered during this time, why perpetuate the suffering? And what about any three days in any given city in North America? Could'nt the "glass is half empty" scenario be drawn to horrify any sensible person from every wanting to visit there, simply by selectively clipping the daily paper? I think so.