I wondered what possible contribution I could make to this rich book of facts, this book of women whose lives have been a longing and a struggle for a revolution that would transform their entire country and would include women’s lives in that transformation. (This has not always happened in revolutions.)
We were actually on our way to Nicaragua, but stopped in El Salvador. We owed this—the next three days—to our own U.S. government, which did not permit Nica Air to fly from the United States to Nicaragua. Still, the planes of my rich country seem to almost line the skies of the planet—unless some other earth-and-heaven owning nation says, “Not over us! Not just yet!”
In the course of those packed, well-organized days we saw the streets of San Salvador guarded against its own citizens by soldiers dressed in heavy weaponry. We traveled to barbed-wire camps, dusty, full of displaced villagers. We learned from the idealistic and endangered Catholic and Lutheran caretakers that the barbed wire was not so much to keep the peasants in as to prevent the death squads from easily snatching a hounded mountain villager or a guerilla’s cousin for questioning and torture.
We saw orphanages where an energetic priest tiptoed around visiting U.S. congressmen. He hoped they would have contacts with philanthropists who might help pay for the cottage camps so that little children could have books to learn from and prostheses to walk with. (Just a few miles from this camp, this orphanage, on the very same road, four nuns had been killed, removed from the dangerous occupation of active compassion and prayer by busy killers.) Walking among these children whose parents were murdered or imprisoned or in exile, I couldn’t help but think of Vietnam, where first our government created orphans, then decided to adopt, nurture, and finally educate them, away from the life and history of their people.
We were able to visit Ilopango prison—the women’s prison—a little while after the fasting, the strikes, the struggles described in A Dream Compels Us. And found, ironically, a somewhat freer environment than we had observed in San Salvador. Young women greeted us, black-tammed commandantes who had been captured in the mountains. A chorus sang the “Internationale” to us. A theater group made a play. We met several young women who, having been fruitlessly interrogated, were shot in the leg to ensure immobility, then raped and arrested. In Ilopango prison there were many small children—some the babies of love, some of rape. For the legless young women, sixteen, seventeen years old, there was only one pair of crutches, which meant that only one woman could get around at a time, making for a kind of sad listlessness in the others. We called the MADRE1 office in New York (we were members of a tour organized by MADRE), and they announced this need on the WBAI radio station. Within a couple of days the office was jammed with crutches, and within two weeks a group from NACLA2 had brought the crutches down to Ilopango. A small shiny pebble in a dirty field of torment, hypocrisy, murder.
Back in San Salvador we visited the Mothers of the Disappeared. Their office had been raided and nearly destroyed a couple of days earlier. The women greeted us generously, as though they didn’t know it was our U.S. tax money that was being used to increase and deepen their sorrow. (They knew a great deal.) They had placed two large photograph albums on the table, which we looked at. We could hardly turn the pages, as it would be an act of abandonment of the murdered son or daughter photographed on that page—usually a teacher or health worker, the same dangerous professions attacked by the Contras in Nicaragua.
In San Salvador I
Come look they said
here are the photograph albums
these are our children.
We are called the Mothers of the Disappeared
we are also the mothers of those who were seen once more
and then photographed sometimes parts of them
could not be found
a breast an eye an arm is missing
sometimes a whole stomach
that is why we are called the Mothers
of the Disappeared although we have these large
heavy photograph albums full of beautiful
torn faces
In El Salvador II
Then one woman spoke About my son
she said I want to tell you This
is what happened
I heard a cry Mother
Mother keep the door closed a scream
the high voice of my son his scream
jumped into my belly his voice
boiled there and boiled until hot water
ran down my thigh
The following week I waited
by the fire making tortilla I heard What?
the voice of my second son Mother quickly
turn your back to the door turn your back
to the window
And one day of the third week
my third son called me Oh Mother please
hurry up hold out our apron they are
stealing my eyes
And then in the fourth week my
fourth son No
No It was morning he stood
in the doorway he was taken right
there before my eyes the parts of
the body of my son were tormented are
you listening? do you understand
this story? there was only one
child one boy like Mary I had
only one son
I have written these few remembrances of a country my country won’t leave alone because the faces of the people I saw in those short days do not leave me. I see it clearly right now. The teachers of ANDES—the teachers’ union—demonstrating on the steps of the great cathedral, where hundreds, mourning Oscar Romero’s murder, had been shot only a couple of years earlier. They held banners and called for decent wages, and an end to disappearances. On those historic steps they seemed naked to the rage of the death squads. I could see how brave they were because their faces were pale and their eyes, searching the quiet crowd, were afraid. Still, they stood there, shouted the demands, and would not be moved.
(1989)