In the 1980s El Salvador was ground zero for the US intervention in Central America. The United States would funnel over $6 billion US dollars to El Salvador in mostly military aid and police and security training throughout the country’s 12-year civil war, which would last from 1980 until 1992.
The violence and the US support for the country’s bloody authoritarian regimes would have a deadly cost, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of innocent victims.
In this episode, journalist Michael Fox heads to San Salvador where he visits a memorial for the innocent victims and looks at the legacy of El Salvador’s civil war today.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative-narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened: a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place Fox takes us to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox, Under the Shadow is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America).
Click here to listen to all episodes of Under the Shadow.
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Edited by Heather Gies and Jocelyn Dombroski.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox. Before we get started, I think it’s important to say that many portions of today’s episode deal with some pretty harsh themes from El Salvador’s civil war, including killings, massacres, and forced disappearances. If you’re sensitive to these things or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen.
OK. Here’s the show…
So I’m inside the Rosario Church. It’s just this one big, huge dome, almost like it’s a hockey rink cut in half. It’s all this mass of concrete, but each layer of the dome is like a different layer of stained glass that’s a rainbow. So red, orange, the yellow to green to blue, all the way up to the very top. It’s just magnificent. It’s just one big room. Up at the top of the altar, it says “Resuscitating hallelujah”. Revival of hallelujah.
And I’ve just come to this plaque. “Here lie 21 massacred citizens on October 29, 1979, on the streets of San Salvador, during the protest realized by grassroots organizations.” And they were buried on this side of the church.
So it was a peaceful protest, obviously against the repression that was happening. The widespread massacres and the repression that was happening at that point in 1979, and had been happening for years. And they were slaughtered.
[Music]
Survivors in the rally fled back into the church. They took the dead with them. They couldn’t leave, not even to a nearby cemetery. Sharpshooters and state security forces were waiting for them. So they buried the bodies inside the church.
It’s hard to comprehend the level of absolute repression where there were no holds barred. The government was at war with its people. It was backed by the US. And they were more than willing to do anything they had to to put down popular organizing and protest.
Remember, this was 1979. A dictator was in power, and US-trained death squads were killing roughly 800 people a month. El Salvador was on the brink of civil war.
[Under the Shadow theme music]
This is Under the Shadow — A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire.
I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.
In the last episode, I took you to Guatemala, 1980s, into the country’s genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the overwhelming support from the United States. Today, we’ll head just across Guatemala’s southeastern border to the tiniest country in Central America, a nation the size of the state of New Jersey that, again, in the 1980s, was at the heart of the US battle for Central America.
This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 4: “El Salvador – The Innocent Victims”.
[Music]
Among those 21 people gunned down at the march in San Salvador and buried in El Rosario Church were two young brothers: 25-year-old Jose Santos Diaz and 23-year-old Hilario Diaz.
Their younger brother, Lucio Vásquez, better known as Chiyo, was only eight years old at the time. Since we’re going to hear from him often, we’ve asked a voice actor to play his part in English throughout the episode.
Chiyo: A neighbor, who was also in the march, and who was also almost hit, he was the one that told my mom and dad. At the doorway, he lowered his head and told my parents. And he couldn’t say everything he had seen.
He couldn’t speak. All he could say was that two of their sons had been killed in a march and that he had to put on the radio, which had this breaking news alert. It still gives me the chills. He said their names were on the list of the killed.
Michael Fox: Chiyo had another brother, Juan, and sister, Carolina, who were also in the march. They survived, and confirmed the news when they got home.
Chiyo: My mom was really strong. Can you imagine all of the pain that the death of two sons would cause? And she said, “Oh… My two little birds have gone ahead, but I’ll be there soon.”
Michael Fox: Chiyo’s family were poor campesinos from the mountainous region of Morazán in the eastern corner of the country. This would become one of the bastions of the guerrilla forces during the civil war. But already the military patrols there were heavy-handed, and they murdered with impunity.
Chiyo says his mom had deeply religious convictions.
Monsignor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, would preach every Sunday. As violence grew across the country, he became ever more outspoken against the assassinations and massacres. His words were carried over the airwaves. People across Central America tuned in, including Chiyo’s mom.
Chiyo: When my mother was listening to Monsignor Romero, we had to keep quiet or she’d tell us, go play outside. She listened to Monsignor Romero religiously, and she learned a lot. She was really conscious of the situation, and she knew that, with the death of her children, her death was also possible.
Michael Fox: That is in part because death squads and state security forces knew the names of those who had died in the march. They knew they had been protesting. And they could easily discover where they had lived.
Three months later, February 1980, soldiers came knocking. Only Chiyo’s mother and sister were home.
Chiyo: My mom was so straight. So honest. So humble. And the military killed her at her home, as well as my sister Dora.
Michael Fox: Chiyo and his surviving family members buried his mother and sister in a secret funeral at a local cemetery, and then fled to the mountains.
Chiyo: And that’s how this little campesino boy, who was happy playing with friends, or getting one new pair of shoes a year, was forced out of this childhood bubble. I began to see the reality in the country, drowning in repression and shootings from the army and the national guard. I had to leave school. We had to leave home.
Michael Fox: The remainder of Chiyo’s family would eventually join the guerrilla.
[Music]
Plagued by fraudulent elections, by the late 1970s, El Salvador had lived for decades under military governments. The country was largely controlled by 14 families that descended from old coffee wealth. Land ownership was hugely concentrated. Poverty was on the rise, as was the cost of living, and campesinos found it harder and harder to survive.
I want to bring in someone here for some context.
Jorge Cuellar: I’m Jorge Cuellar. I’m an assistant professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College.
Michael Fox: Jorge is in his mid-30s. Short hair, low boxed beard, glasses. He was born in El Salvador and came to the US as a young child in the early ’90s. He grew up in Los Angeles. We’re going to hear a lot from him in this episode.
Jorge Cuellar: These lands, which are concentrated basically 80% in the hands of a few and 20% for everyone else. And that is simply an untenable distribution of land, which is what people need to survive. And so that polarization at the level of land distribution is one of the catalysts, one of these erupted moments that lead to the war, that lead to this protest around these issues in the ’60s, in the ’70s. In the ’70s, there’s already a repressive state attempting to squash popular movements for land reform.
Teachers who are attempting to educate the rural camposino as a vehicle for consciousness, and them realizing that, you know, they got a terrible situation or a terrible hand dealt in life. And so this becomes, these different groups become an opposition to the state.
So the repressive apparatus begins to attempt to silence them. And this continues on throughout the late ’60s and ’70s, and that’s what leads to the mass movement around organizing themselves amongst different left-wing groups.
Michael Fox: People are organizing and in the streets. Workers, social movements, teachers, students — Like Chiyo’s brothers and sisters.
And the country is hemorrhaging from the military and government response. State-sponsored violence, extrajudicial killings — These mostly carried out by US-backed military forces and death squads, which were founded and trained by US officials years before as a means of pressuring political activists and organizers with terror.
[Music]
In February 1980, Archbishop Monsignor Romero writes to US president Jimmy Carter, asking him to stop fueling the deaths and cut off US military aid to the Salvadorian dictatorship. Carter never responds.
One month later. Sunday, March 23. Monsignor Romero speaks directly to the country’s soldiers during Sunday Mass at the Cathedral in San Salvador.
Archbishop Óscar Romero [recording]: I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and, in particular, to the troops of the National Guard, the police, the garrisons. Brothers, you are part of our very own people. You kill our own campesino brothers.
In the face of an order to kill given by a man, the law of God that says “thou shalt not kill” must prevail. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It’s time for you to recover your consciousness, and let them obey their conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin.
The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of personal dignity, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the Government to take seriously that reforms mean nothing if they come bathed in so much blood.
In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to the heavens more tumultuously every day, I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression!
Michael Fox: The next day, he is shot and killed at the altar while delivering mass.
[Music]
In front of me is this arched Capella, this small church, Catholic church. Built with triangles and wooden — These big wooden doors. And you walk back in and it’s got two rows of wooden benches on either side, and the lights hanging down through the middle in the star shape.
And it was here, on March 24, 1980, that Monsignor Romero was shot and killed while he was giving Mass.
At the far end there’s two pictures, paintings of him on each wall with his glasses on, and his red cap on the top. And just beyond that are the few stairs up to the altar. That’s where he was killed. Literally while he was saying prayers.
The Christ on the back of the wall is the same. And there’s a saying on the wall: “In this altar, Monsignor Óscar Romero offered his life to God for his people.”
Six days after Archbishop Romero’s killing. Palm Sunday, March 30, 1980. Tens of thousands of people pack into San Salvador’s main plaza for Romero’s funeral.
But, as priests read the gospel, a bomb goes off. Sharpshooters open fire on the crowd. Chaos ensues. People run for cover. 40 people are killed, many trampled. 200 injured.
[Music]
By the end of 1980, the resistance to the violence of the military regime had united to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. Small guerrilla groups had assembled and fought against the repression and killings throughout the 1970s, but this was the first time they formed a united front.
Within a few months, the FMLN would launch its first major offensive against government forces, occupying and controlling major portions of the departments of Chalatenango and Morazán, where Chiyo grew up. The FMLN would hold these regions throughout the war.
El Salvador’s civil war was in full swing. The guerrilla radio, Radio Venceremos — Which we’ll talk about next episode — Was on the air.
US President Ronald Reagan [recording]: The trust is where it belongs — In the people.
Michael Fox: And US president Ronald Reagan had been elected.
Professor Jorge Cuellar.
Jorge Cuellar: There’s a sequence of events that demonstrate the escalation of this violence and the US role at every turn. Sources say that it was like $1 million to $2 million a day that were being sent in military aid and military support for the state forces.
Michael Fox: That, in a minute.
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Also, if you’re enjoying Under the Shadow, then you will definitely want to follow NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA’s reporting and analysis goes beyond the headlines to help you understand what’s happening in Latin America and the Caribbean from a progressive perspective. Visit nacla.org to learn more.
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US President Ronald Reagan [recording]: Too many have thought of Central America as just that place way down below Mexico that can’t possibly cause a threat to our wellbeing. And that’s why I’ve asked for this session.
Michael Fox: President Ronald Reagan took office in early 1981, with a laser focus on fighting the so-called communist threat in the region.
US President Ronald Reagan [recording]: If we do nothing, if we continue to provide too little help, our choice will be a communist Central America, with additional communist military bases on the mainland of this hemisphere, and communist subversion spreading southward and northward.
Michael Fox: Remember, just a year and a half before, the rebel Sandinistas had overthrown dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Reagan feared, along with many US officials, that if they did not fight back, the dominos would fall across the region.
In Guatemala, as we looked at last episode, Reagan was more than happy to back bloodthirsty authoritarian regimes, carrying out devastating scorched earth policies to stem demands for reform.
He would do the same in El Salvador, but with even greater intensity. The US would send over $6 billion US dollars to El Salvador in mostly military aid and police and security training throughout the 12-year long war.
US President Ronald Reagan [recording]: What we see in El Salvador is an attempt to destabilize the entire region, and eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border.
Michael Fox: In other words, for the US government, El Salvador was ground zero.
Professor Jorge Cuellar.
Jorge Cuellar: Reagan’s fixation with El Salvador really is that if El Salvador falls then the rest of Central America will become a part of the communist bloc, which — At this moment we’re in the height of the Cold War. Everybody is a secret communist, and suspicious, and a possible insurgent, all of this. And so that fear mongering becomes crystallized in the military response that the Reagan administration takes towards El Salvador in order to make sure that communism ends in El Salvador. Communism ends there.
News Report: Army helicopters patrol from the skies. Heavily armed troops patrol from the streets. And tonight, San Salvador is an unofficial state of siege, shrouded in silence.
Michael Fox: The title of one documentary from this time posed the question: Is El Salvador another Vietnam?
Documentary: Pacification. Search and destroy. Scorched earth. All are part of the same strategy employed in Vietnam. The security forces sweep through the countryside, burning crops and killing livestock to deprive the guerrillas of food, driving more than 600,000 people from their homes and into overcrowded refugee camps.
Michael Fox: In faded images, the documentary shows scenes of Salvadoran soldiers passing bodies of dead campesinos along mountain trails. Fields burning. Helicopters.
Documentary: In a country as densely populated as El Salvador, the guerrillas could not continue to fight without support from the peasants. As a result, the entire population has become a target for the Salvadoran army.
Michael Fox: Washington brought in officials and top advisors with Vietnam experience. One State Department official quoted in a Washington Post article said: “We assigned a lot of people to Vietnam who were action-oriented because it was the highest national priority. It’s not surprising that they find themselves now in Central America.”
In the anti-war movement, the slogan repeated again and again: “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.”
But there was an important difference: While in Vietnam, the United States had boots on the ground, in El Salvador, the US government chose to funnel weapons, money, and training with the hopes of guiding things from nearby. Congress had already limited the number of US military advisors in the country to 55. Although, historian Greg Grandin points out in his 2006 book Empire’s Workshop, the number rose to almost triple that, along with an equal number of CIA agents.
The size of the Salvadorian military was increased eleven-fold, from 5,000 to 53,000 soldiers.
Salvadorian military officials and elite battalions were trained by US officials or sent to the US School of the Americas, which at the time was in Panama, and later, after 1984, in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Jorge Cuellar: Military officers, to get specific kinds of counterterrorist training, counterinsurgent training, will go to Panama, study there, get the credentials — Get skilled up, essentially — And bring those tactics back home.
Michael Fox: Among El Salvador’s military officers trained at the US School of the Americas is Colonel Domingo Monterrosa.
Jorge Cuellar: …Who is one of the proponents of the full extermination of the communist scourge in El Salvador — And this is very much a Reagan era figure who is parroting what Washington wants him to parrot.
[Music]
Michael Fox: Less than a year into the Reagan administration, Monterrosa and his elite US-trained special forces, the Atlácatl Battalion, would carry out one of the single worst massacres, not just of the Salvadorian Civil War, but of all of 1980s Central America.
Between December 11 and 12, 1981, the battalion slaughtered 986 people in the community of El Mozote. More than half of them were children.
Jorge Cuellar: They go on an extermination campaign. This is the moment of scorched earth policies, of draining the sea, of getting rid of the bases of insurgent support. Which meant, in this case, exterminating anybody who could possibly now, in the present or in the future, become part of the armed movement.
And El Mozote becomes the site where there’s an indiscriminate killing of women, children, and men in this rural community.
[Music]
Michael Fox: The guerrilla Radio Venceremos broke the story. Two weeks after the killing, it aired an interview with the main witness and one of the only survivors of the massacre, Rufina Amaya.
Her testimony is terrifying. She describes how the soldiers divided up the village. They killed the men first, then raped and killed the women. Rufina Amaya lost her husband and four children. The Washington Post and The New York Times published her testimony and reporting from El Mozote not long after.
[Music]
The Salvadoran government and the Reagan administration adamantly denied the reports and downplayed the severity. But documents discovered recently by Stanford professor Terry Karl show that the United States actually had an official on the ground with the battalion that day. The US knew what had happened, and the US condoned it. Hundreds of bullets that were used in the massacre and found decades later had headstamps showing they were made in Missouri for the US government.
Professor Terry Karl spoke to students in 2022 about the profound impact of the massacre on El Salvador.
Terry Karl: This massacre, and the other 53 that I’ve documented in this country, were the reason for the beginning of mass exit from El Salvador. By 1982, about a fifth to a quarter of El Salvador’s population had left the country and fled primarily to the United States. And that violence has continued ever since, particularly in the areas where large massacres occurred or major human rights violations occurred.
[Music]
Michael Fox: President Reagan would blame the increased migration on the communists and “Cuban-supported aggression”. But, in reality, the responsibility rested squarely on the shoulders of US-backed forces, which carried out atrocities, ruined lives, families, and communities, and destroyed whole towns and villages.
Adrienne Pine is an anthropologist and the author of the 2020 book Asylum for Sale.
Adrienne Pine: So what you have are people being displaced by these policies.
Now, sometimes these policies are really dramatic, whether we’re talking about US support for genocide in Guatemala, US support for what’s called the Civil War in El Salvador but was just this this massive US-funded attack against people who were seeking liberation.
Michael Fox: I mentioned this in the first episode of this podcast, but I wanted to underscore it here: US foreign policy and US intervention has been at the root of the so-called migration crisis going back decades. Nowhere is this clearer than in El Salvador.
As the war waged on, in the United States, people protested against the outsized role of the United States in the conflict. By 1985, some 80,000 people had signed a pledge of resistance, vowing to resist US support for extrajudicial killings across Central America, including in El Salvador.
Protester [recording]: I belong to the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador. And when I started hearing about what our money was paying for, it just really infuriated me. And really, we do have blood on our hands if we don’t do anything. You don’t agonize, you organize.
Michael Fox: The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or CISPES, was founded in 1980. It played a key role in building a broad movement against US military aid to El Salvador. It was so effective that it was targeted and spied on by the FBI.
Writing later for NACLA, historian and activist Van Gosse described the Central American solidarity movement as “bewilderingly diverse”.
Remember, this was also the time of the first US sanctuary movement. At its peak, more than 500 religious congregations in the United States provided shelter and protection for Central American refugees fleeing war and facing possible deportation from the US. Movement members likened their work to that of the Underground Railroad. The relationships built by churches and solidarity groups like CISPES would remain long after the war.
In 1989, the FMLN launched its final offensive. US-trained troops faced scrutiny for a high-profile massacre of six Jesuit priests. And it was clear there would be no military solution to the conflict. Negotiations to end the war sped up.
Peace accords were signed in Mexico in January 1992. Salvadorans celebrated in downtown San Salvador in the same plaza that had been the scene of the massacre 12 years before, on the day of the funeral of Monsignor Romero.
The guerrilla forces lay down their weapons. The FMLN transforms from a rebel army into a political force vying for elections. The military gets reconfigured. A new civilian police force is created, and the country tries to build an unstable democracy on the rubble of the war.
But the peace deal didn’t fix many of the longstanding unresolved social problems that had plagued the country, and which had led to the conflict in the first place.
Professor Jorge Cuellar.
Jorge Cuellar: For many Salvadoran people who experienced the war, some of who participated, some of who didn’t, there was no sense of possibility, and that the promises of the peace accords were really a way just to stop violence, but not change anything politically that would have any concrete impact on the lives of people, on their access to education, access to quality and dignified work.
Michael Fox: And the trauma of war and the legacy of the violence remained.
Jorge Cuellar: There’s a really great way that the journalist Oscar Martinez, a Salvadoran journalist, talks about the post-war. He says, the war ends all of a sudden, by decree. Basically, the war ends, and then you have a ton of people who have PhDs in killing, and what do they do? To me, that’s such a useful way to think about what a 12-year-long war does on someone. The number that it does on someone.
Michael Fox: The peace accords created a Truth Commission which investigated the massacres, extra-judicial killings, disappearances, and death squad violence. It released its findings the following year, March 1993. 75,000 people had been killed during the 12-year-long civil war. State forces were responsible for 85% of the violence; The FMLN rebel army, 5%.
Five days after the release of the report, the military denounced the findings and threatened a coup. In response, El Salvador’s legislature passed an amnesty law, protecting war criminals from being tried.
Jorge Cuellar: It creates this, already, from the beginning, a culture of impunity. A culture of impunity. And that is, for me, at least, is really key to understanding why the legacies of the war are still imprinted on the institutional quasi-democratic architecture of the country.
Michael Fox: Among the mandates of the Truth Commission, however, was the creation of a memorial for the civilian victims of the war. It would take 10 years for it to become a reality. And it was only built because of the tenacity of the family members of the victims.
So I’m on the edge of this park, Cuscatlan. I’m standing along a wall on the northwestern edge of the park. It’s kind of a marble wall, black. It’s really reminiscent of the Vietnam memorial — In fact, that’s what this was made after — In Washington. And I’m at the very front of it, and there’s this etching of two people, they look like kids, in these corn stalks, their faces smiling, reaching out.
And the big words, block letters above, say, “To the anonymous civilian victims.” Las víctimas civiles anónimos. Below it says, “a los trenta mil nombres, la memoria la verdad.” Among the 30,000 names carved into this monument for memory and truth are not written the names of the thousands of civilian victims that we never even learned about.
In a documentary about the wall titled Names, so they are never forgotten, mothers and wives of innocent victims and those disappeared during the violence tell their stories. They recount how and why they organized to build the wall.
“Every November 2, Day of the Dead, everyone comes here, and we have the tradition of leaving a flower for our loved ones,” says Guadalupe Mejía, whose husband was murdered by the national guard. “The family members of those who were disappeared didn’t have a place to do this before,” she says.
Santiago is the director of the Museum of Word and Image, which is dedicated to ensuring that the past is not forgotten. We’ll hear a lot from him in the next episode.
Santiago: This wall has become a space of remembering the past, where family members hold many activities. It’s beloved. It was created by the community. And it has really profound meaning for looking toward the future.
Michael Fox: It has this whole list of the massacres in El Salvador, the different years, the places they occurred. 1970 through 1979. 1980. The list of 1980 is just huge — It covers two huge long rows. Dozens of locations…
Here’s the thing. And this is, I mean, it’s so reminiscent. So reminiscent and so sad. Because of course it reminds me of the wall of the victims of the disappeared and killed in Guatemala that I visited last episode.
I visited the wall several times while I was in San Salvador. Watched as families walked slowly by, reading the names, little children beside them on their tricycles.
For many here, this is ancient history. A forgotten time that’s shelved in history books. And the current president is working to ensure that it stays that way.
His name is Nayib Bukele. He’s a millennial social media superstar. A Trump-like strongman who has turned the country on its head. And he has led an assault on the past.
During a speech in El Mozote in 2020, on the anniversary of the massacre, Bukele accused former presidents on both the right and the left of exploiting the El Mozote massacre for political gains.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele [recording]: The war was a farce. They killed 75,000 people on both sides, including the thousand here in El Mozote, and it was a farce. Just like the Peace Accords.
Michael Fox: On Jan. 16, 2022, on the 30th anniversary of the peace accords, he set up police and military checkpoints to block people from marching in honor of the end of the armed conflict. His allies in the legislature passed a law to no longer officially commemorate the peace accords, which Bukele has called an “illegitimate agreement”.
He has also ruled with an iron fist, dramatically intensifying a crackdown on the country’s gangs.
Remember, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 got their start on the streets of LA.
Anthropologist Adrienne Pine.
Adrienne Pine: And you also have this phenomenon of gangs, which is fully a product of the US-led war in El Salvador, where kids are forced to flee this US-led violence and go to places like Los Angeles, where then they are forced to defend themselves against the Mexican gangs that already exist.
Michael Fox: In the 1990s, you have mass deportations.
Adrienne Pine: Kids who grew up from the time they were one or two years old in the United States, maybe joined gangs, maybe got involved in crime, being deported to El Salvador where they don’t speak the language, they don’t have family ties, they don’t have cultural connections, and forming gangs.
Michael Fox: Post-war El Salvador offered fertile ground for the gangs to grow. They take over, sinking the country back into violence. Years of a heavy-handed police and military response, known in Central America as mano dura, only made it worse.
Those police and military forces, like before, were trained by the United States. The hardcore policing tactics, known as zero tolerance or broken windows, were perfected by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. These would also be imported — Or deported — From the United States to Central America, sinking El Salvador into further violence.
In his gripping memoir, Unforgetting, Salvadoran-American journalist and professor Roberto Lovato directly connects all the dots: authoritarian regimes, civil war, migration, gang violence. He writes, “Many of us have been watching the deadly double helix of extreme violence and migration spiral out of control for more than 25 years.”
This was all before Bukele.
But when he was elected in 2019, he promised to take things to a whole new level. To root out the gangs.
And he did. In early 2022, he instituted a state of exception, suspending civil liberties and due process. He’s locked up 70,000 suspected gang members since then. For much of the country, his policies have been an overwhelming success. He’s slashed crime rates like never before, earning him an approval rating of an astonishing 90%.
[Music]
But in the dragnet, he’s also picked up thousands of innocent people. Family members of the detained say as many as half of those imprisoned are innocent. They are being held indefinitely, incomunicado, with no rights. Many family members do not even know where they are. But they have responded.
I attended this march in San Salvador on May 1, 2023. It was packed. Thousands in the streets. Family members of the detained marched with large pictures of their loved ones. Their stories, their signs, their pictures, were eerily reminiscent. As was the chant.
It was the same that echoed over these same streets 40 years before: “They took them alive. We want them back alive.”
I spoke with Vanessa Beatriz Alfonso. She wore a red flowered dress. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Vanessa Beatriz Alfonso: I’m here because they took my husband on Feb. 1. He’s a hard worker, and he’s never been in trouble with the law. His son is two and a half years old. And now, I understand that there are so many innocent people in jail, because my husband is there. It’s hard to understand until you live it yourself.
Michael Fox: I have one more person to introduce you to. I meet him at the wall. His name is Diego Josué Rivas Cruz. He’s 14 years old. He walks slowly by, reading the names etched in marble.
I ask him if he knows anyone whose name is there.
Diego Josué Rivas Cruz: No, no, I don’t. But I like to imagine what those people would have been like. They would have been here. What would have happened if they hadn’t gone through all this?
And the curious thing is that this still impacts the present. How many people? How many futures? Children. Families. Look at the number of massacres. It’s insane.
Michael Fox: We chat. Our conversation turns to the present. He’s about the age of many of the guys who have been picked up by the police as gang members, and who are languishing in jail.
Diego Josué Rivas Cruz: They’ve taken so many innocent people. I have friends who’ve been taken. And when I take buses, I’m afraid. I don’t know if I’ll be the next.
Michael Fox: He says before he leaves his house he worries about what to wear so he won’t look suspicious.
Diego Josué Rivas Cruz: Just by being a guy about my age, you’re already a suspect. Or for having a certain haircut, or living in an area where there have been gangs. It doesn’t matter if you actually are a gang member, the soldiers don’t care.
[Music]
Michael Fox: The soldiers don’t care.
Diego’s words sound really familiar, and it took me a while to realize why. I had heard almost the same thing before, but from Chiyo. Remember, he was the young boy whose brothers, mother, and sister were killed by the military in 1979 and 1980. Diego was talking about the soldiers’ crackdown today; Chiyo was talking about their actions 40 years ago.
Chiyo: For the military, everyone they said was a guerrilla was taken as if they were a member of the guerrillas. And everyone accused of being a member of the guerrillas could be tortured, exiled, or disappeared.
Michael Fox: Today, they’re locked up and held without rights, habeas corpus, or due process. Many families haven’t spoken to their loved ones in years. They say they are innocent, but they can’t even talk to a lawyer. Meanwhile, the number of deaths of those on the inside is over 300 and climbing.
And, like before, impunity for state abuses is the norm.
The wall at Cuscatlan Park is not only a memorial for the victims of the past. It’s also crying out in the present.
Professor Jorge Cuellar
Jorge Cuellar: The guerrilla scourge gets replaced by the gang or this new spook that haunts El Salvador.
It simply is more of the same. There are those echoes of this wall of names, of disappeared people, of people who were slain during the war. And that there’s a new generation now that are also disappeared that are arbitrarily detained. Mass graves, clandestine graves, all over El Salvador, of the last 20 years, which is all post-war violence.
[Music]
Michael Fox: I stand in front of the wall a few minutes longer. The birds dip and weave. Kids play. Traffic rumbles by on the street not far off. Life walks on all around me.
How do you make the past live on? How do you not forget, or ensure that the people don’t forget? How do you build on what happened, and make sure it never happens again?
Memoria historica, or historical memory, is a name given to the collectivized efforts to breathe life into the past. In Latin America, it often speaks to how societies visibilize the horrors of dictatorship, genocide, and armed conflict.
Memorials, like the wall for truth and memory in Cuscatlan Park or the memorial for the disappeared in Guatemala’s Comalapa, they’re perfect examples of this. They honor and remember the victims, and create a living memory so that we will never repeat past atrocities.
But historical memory can take many other forms: Education. Books and documentaries. Museums. And even radio archives.
That is where we will go in the next episode: to the archives of Radio Venceremos, the radio of El Salvador’s FMLN guerrilla movement in the 1980s, and an initiative in the capital of El Salvador that is keeping this revolutionary past alive.
That’s next on Under the Shadow.
[Music]
Before I go, I wanted to let you know that you can find pictures of the Monument for Truth and Justice in Cuscatlan Park, and also the present-day march of family members of the detained, on the websites of both NACLA and The Real News.
Also, if you like what you hear, please consider heading on over to my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
Thanks so much. See you next time.
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