All travel is a privilege ...particularly when you meet people who lived through tumultuous events.
To sit and hear their stories of personal and family adversity, woven through the tapestry of a historical national struggle is travel’s most precious bounty.
Latin America is over-represented in this respect. And El Salvador more so than most.
What it has that is different is an intriguing openness and a willingness to face up to its darkest past and most controversial present. To talk about itself and its politics in public spaces.
Rafael Hernandez, known usually as Don Rafa, is a former sniper and commander of the FMLN. He has the wiry frame, easy smile, candidness and bearing of a man whose life experiences have burned away all illusions, conceit and fear. In Cinquera, his place of birth, 7 civilian massacres were conducted during the civil war. It was the practice of the US trained army to wipe out whole populations in order to net a few rebels who might be among them. Organised resistance became a matter of survival for the rural poor.
Don Rafa is now a ranger and guide at Cinquera Forest Ecological Park. It is a job for which he is singularly qualified: the product of a life fighting in and from the jungle, he knows intimately the plants that are edible and those that have medicinal properties, where and when he can find protein - terrestrial crabs, armadillos, insects - and it is a tragedy that this hard-won knowledge is not recorded and preserved.
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René, a tourist guide from nearby Suchitito, talks about his grandfather, the Nicaraguan born FMLN Commander who bore the highly impressive nom de guerre Red Jesus. In 1991, Red was lured from the jungle to the UN peace talks with assurances of safety from the army, then assassinated in San Salvador.
The other side of René’s family were well connected within the government and he attended school in the US with the sons of military men trying to kill his family, wondering why they were the bad guys.
Salvadorans revere Oscar Romero most fondly of their national heroes. His likeness features on murals everywhere. Things had to get pretty bad for the local Archbishop to break with Rome, reject the pope’s express instructions, and throw his lot in with the common people. And then they got worse. Romero was shot dead mid-sermon in San Salvador and a brutal civil war broke out.
A short history is necessary to give context.
After the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado arrived in 1524, the Pipil, Lenca and other local indigenous people were forced to work on cacao and indigo plantations. The shift to coffee production after independence in 1821 deepened an already vast wealth inequality between indigenous workers and Spanish settlers, with just 14 families owning all production.
Social unrest grew in the 1920s, particularly after the market crash of 1929. When the results of municipal elections were cancelled in January 1932, indigenous and communist rebel leaders concluding they could not effect change through the ballot box, started a revolution.
The government put down the rebellion, convicted and executed its leaders (including Farabundo Marti), and began reprisals against the peasants. The slaughter resulted in the effective extermination of the Pipil, largely non-combatants, some 40,000 people in 2 weeks.
The FM in FMLN celebrates Farabundo Marti and LN stands for Liberación Nacional. Salvadorans remember! It formed in 1980, a response to the government contracted death squads which roamed the countryside killing indiscriminately in the 1970s.
In 1992, a UN brokered peace was finally achieved. Part of that involved a truth and reconciliation process similar to South Africa. The friendship of Don Rafa and Rene is representative of that process. And the process is representative of generations utterly exhausted by war.
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With the same openness, El Salvador faces a new story.
The country was in a mess following the Civil War. Trauma, lawlessness in the cities, and demand for cocaine in the West facilitated the rise of criminal gangs, the 2 most dangerous being MS 13 and Barrio 18. El Salvador became the most violent place on earth, San Salvador as 60 Minutes put it “a dirty, dirty city”.
Then it took a surprising turn. Nayib Bukele was elected president at 37 in 2019.
It is hard to be balanced in passing judgment on everything he has done. He made bitcoin an official currency, alongside the US dollar. Then he built the largest prison in Latin America, suspended habeus corpus and arrested every last gang member in the country.
While doing this he invited in the cameras of the world to document this critical national experience. More politics in public spaces.
Some will point out that the net extended wider than the gangs and that emergency powers have continued far longer than necessary. Whatever you think about that, it is undeniable that Bukele remains incredibly popular, Salvadorans are thriving more than ever and have opportunities not previously open to them.
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Surfing, an activity associated with freedom, is popular on the black, volcanic sands of the Pacific coast. There are a number of cracking breaks, including at El Dunco. Some pretty good, fresh, rustically prepared seafood to be had here too.
My view may not be popular. It is that El Salvador is being used as an experiment for the ideas of techno-authoritarianism popular on the US far right. And, while I agree dire circumstances demand dramatic interventions, that something had to be done in El Salvador, the scions of Silicon Valley - being averse to reading history and therefore doomed to repeat it - fail to recognise their ideas are basically a rehash of what Heidegger flirted with and Mussolini adopted in the 1920s.
This story is far from over.