THE SIEGE OF SAN SALVADOR
Anthony Daniels finds the capital
of El Salvador under increasing guerrilla pressure
San Salvador AS a patriotic television advertisement once claimed, with an understatement characteristic neither of the medium nor of the place, No hay nada como El Salvador — there is nothing like El Salvador.
The capital feels under siege. The petty commerce of the city centre has an almost febrile quality — the last lingerie, as it were, before the revolution. Every public building has been covered with slogans in favour of the guerrillas, and even the Americans have given up removing the red lettering — `Here is where the massacres of the people are planned' — from the tank- and car-bomb-resistant walls of their embassy compound. On the Avenida Roosevelt stands the crumbling military hospital: soldiers scan the passing vehicles for attackers, amputees take the sun in the street, and the walls of the hospital are daubed with exhortations to `honest' sol- diers and officers to desert and join the revolution. The number of lottery ticket salesmen is astonishing.
Rumours abound: the guerrillas are mas- sing on the slopes of the volcano of San Salvador for their final final offensive. (I heard the same rumour the last time I was here, nine months ago, but presumably one day it will be true.) The wife of the owner of the small hotel where I stayed said she never allowed her children out of the house, and her daughter of five had asked to be taken away from Salvador. (The newspaper said there were 1,600 new applications to leave every day.) Children reacted to the violence in one of two ways, said the owner's wife: either they became nervous wrecks or grew addicted to dan- ger, after a few days of peace in the city beseeching the helicopters with protruding machine-guns to release their bombs, or at least to fire at someone, no matter who. Sure enough, that evening a bomb went off in the street next to mine. It was in a telephone booth, a piece of sabotage en- tirely redundant in my experience of Entel, the telecommunications company. No one was hurt, or even much disturbed by it: the two blind violinist beggars on the other side of the street from where I heard the blast continued their rendering of what sounded uncannily like 'I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside'. Two days later a car-bomb exploded near a police station and a passer-by was killed, his complicity with the regime proved by his proximity to the police station. No one would mistake life in El Salvador for a scene from a novel `Are you going to take it with you, sir, or shall we re-possess it right away?' by Anita Brookner.
Even in the eastern, prosperous suburbs of the city, where everything seems calm and well-ordered, la situacion, as people often call it (perhaps to render it less personal), makes itself felt. A well-stocked supermarket respectfully requests its pat- rons to leave their guns outside; the proliferating hamburger chains (one of them with the charmingly cultured name of Biggest, pronounced Beeg-est) provides gunmen to guard against kidnap from the children's playground. The occupants of a suburban street employ 24 armed guards; when returning home from work they are careful always to back their cars into their drives so that they can escape quickly should there be guerrillas in the bushes.
In the circumstances, the British School, an educational establishment for the chil- dren of the elite, continues to function with admirable sang-froid. The uniforms are smart, the standard high. The headmaster, having taught for years in Hackney, is used to working in an environment of civil war: the sunshine and the good manners of the children are a bonus. Of course, he re- ceives telephoned bomb-threats from time to time; usually they are from children who have not done their homework and who, taking advantage of la situacion, hope thereby to postpone the hour of reckoning. But the children are generally charming and poised, imbued as are all Salvadoreans with a sense of family loyalty and untainted by the idea that it is their duty to rebel against parental authority. They are pre- pared for eventual evacuation to Los Angeles; though immensely privileged, many of them are already acquainted with personal tragedy. But as I watched a 16-year-old setiorito drive away from the school in his brand-new tinted-windowed BMW saloon (worth 50 men's yearly wages) I could not help but wonder whether the Salvadorean upper class was intent upon self-destruction, so brazenly to display its wealth when half the population was unemployed and revolution was at the very gates.
For la situacion is deteriorating. There is
now no department, as there was a few months ago, free of guerrilla action. Not only are attacks on the army increasing, and bombs of one sort or another explod- ing nearly every day in the capital, but the FMLN (karabundo Marti National Libera- tion Front) has recently threatened mayors with death unless they resign publicly and irrevocably. At least eight have been killed and more than 30 have resigned. Even in its threatening letters the FMLN is unable to throw off the turgid style of student revolution: a style that is as good a guide to the mentality of its authors as anything it actually says.
The purpose of this letter, which the FMLN, the Historical Vanguard of the Salvadorean people, sends you is to communicate the following.... In the counterinsurgency plan there is a close relation between the political factor and the military factor.... The [order to resign] must be obeyed, since we do not wish to see ourselves obliged to take mea- sures that could directly affect your physical integrity, and since we have been given experience of popular justicd applied to mayors for disobedience to such orders thereby declaring themselves as enemies....
In response, the army is resorting again to death-squad tactics. The number of bodies is rising. And in the little town of Usulatan I saw the Sixth Brigade of the army try to capture the hearts and minds of the townspeople with mariachi and brass bands, three clowns and a bag of sweets whose contents were thrown to the chil- dren. A harridan of a female soldier in olive-green fatigues repeatedly and insis- tently demanded un fuerte aplauso (a big hand) for the valiant Sixth Brigade and their wonderful performers on esta noche de alegria (this night of joy). Despite the surprising professionalism of the entertain- ers, the townspeople remained impervious to the harridan's orders to enjoy them- selves and remained morose, only a third of them clapping tepidly. Nights of joy are not normally associated, even in El Salva- dor, with low-flying helicopters and sol- diers patrolling the square with automatic weapons at the ready, to say nothing of a young lieutenant making an increasingly
ranting speech in favour of freedom while a cyclostyled sheet is handed out portraying a communist guerrilla as a man with hairy arms, horns and pointed tail, in contrast to a debonair and handsome Salvadorean soldier, defender of roads, the honour of women and liberty.
Watching complacently was a Salvado- rean officer, accompanied by a man In fatigues with a pistol who was clearly a gringo. Was he there to teach the Disney- land approach to counterinsurgency? I felt that the sweets (for which the children scrambled as children do everywhere), the risque jokes of the clowns and the sen- timental songs of the bands were an insult to the suffering of a people, borne with such dignity. The Americans have a problem in El Salvador. The army is composed of press- ganged conscripts and career officers in- terested only in personal fortunes, for whom the war is a business opportunity and therefore not to be ended. (There are three ranks in the Salvadorean army, says the old joke: private, lieutenant and mil- lionaire.) Arena is almost certain to win the forthcoming elections and Arena isa party which even Madison Avenue will find difficulty in portraying as moderate. The FMLN is offering negotiations; having been told by the Russians that it can expect no financial support from them in the event of victory, it has moderated its demands. But who believes that men take to the mountains to fight nine years for the chance to lose the next election? Or who believes that men who recently espoused a doctrine that specifically enjoins the use of deception in the path to absolute power are suddenly to be trusted?
And I see now that I have written precisely the kind of article I intended not to write. The words of a Salvadorean come back to haunt me. Knowing I was a writer, she said as I wished her goodbye, No todo en El Salvador es malo — not everything in El Salvador is bad. She was right; for I have not met anyone who knows the country and, whatever his political persua- sions, does not come to love it.
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