As many of you know, El Salvador was in the grips of civil war from 1980 to 1992. It pitted several rebel groups commonly called the FMLN. Predictably, Washington robustly backed the nation’s rightwing regimes. The conflict spurred the exodus of Salvadorans which continues.
Just after Christmas 1985, I spent several days in Perquin, a rebel-held village in the mountains of Morazan, El Salvador. I was on a reporting trip for Time. It was among my most illuminating journalistic experiences. Here is an excerpt from my book.
Perquín and another nearby town, San Fernando, had suffered a great deal of government bombing. Most of the
buildings were in ruins or damaged. Even a grade school in San Fernando had been destroyed. Among the rubble, I found a brass plaque that proclaimed that the school had been built thanks to the Alliance for progress, President
Kennedy’s ambitious program to foment economic progress in Latin America. The Kennedy Administration was to invest
many billions of dollars in the effort, which was envisioned to last twenty years. Now, American-made bombs had destroyed a school built using American money.
I also visited the site of the La Joya massacre. As most of those killed lived in El Mozote, the massacre is best known
by that name. El Mozote was a small mountain village that the Salvadoran army discovered supported the ERP (a faction of the FMLN). On December 13, 1981, the elite, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion led by Lieutenant Commander Domingo Monterrosa massacred up to 900 civilians, including many women and
children. Ghosts now haunted the site, said residents who were afraid to be there at night.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 