Posts: San Salvador
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Author: by Marshall
Valentine
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Source: The Prism
http://www.ibiblio.org/prism/July96/elsal.html
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BELLY OF THE BEAST: El Salvador
by Marshall Valentine
The government of El Salvador
The United
States Embassy was being converted into a fortress. The walls under
construction appeared to be designed to withstand an atomic bomb, four
feet thick across the tops, tapering down to a six foot base.
They were anchored deeply in the substratum, reinforced by brambles of
rebar. These walls formed a perimeter of rigid concave arcs, each
terminating in a spacious gun tower. The gun towers, built to withstand
an artillery round, occupied by members of the over 200-man Salvadoran
contract security force, had intervisibility with one another.
Weapons apertures were oriented to
provide interlocking fires, in the event a final protective wall of
supersonic lead were needed against hundreds of thousands of
modernly-equipped, well-nourished FMLN shock troops. Chain link fence
stretched high over the scene as a defense against rockets. Marines
with M16s were posted at the visitor entrance, and Salvadorans with
Uzis flanked the vehicle entrance where Embassy employees entered and
exited in the fleet of armored cars driven by hired Salvadoran guns. Embajada
Americana had better security than the National Government
buildings of El Salvador. Complete overkill, yet somehow it was
appropriate for the actual Government of El Salvador...for that is
exactly what the United States Embassy was.
It was the summer of '85.
United States omnipotence had been
discredited less than two weeks before I arrived, when an impatient
group of loose cannons, foregoing permission of the FMLN high command,
dressed up as Salvadoran soldiers, loaded onto a flatbed truck, leapt
out in front of a chic restaurant and bar strip called Zona Rosa, and
sprayed down two restaurants with automatic weapons fire. Salvadorans,
Chileans, and Guatemalans had been killed. Also slain were four United
States Marines.
The shit, to coin a phrase, had hit
the fan. The Embassy was crawling with FBI agents who had taken over
the investigation. Marines were placed on tighter restrictions and
given permission to grow their hair longer (supposedly to look less
military...never mind that many of them were blond). Ilopango Airport
was a beehive of activity. Helicopters, flown by Salvadorans and
shadowy Americans, shuttled destruction (between secret support sorties
for Reagan's war against Nicaragua) into Morazan and San Vicente with a
renewed vengeance.
Reunion and Reminisence
Bobby Zimmer (not his real name)
was a former coworker of mine. We had served together in a
counterterrorist unit in Fort Bragg, before he had landed a job with
the MILGROUP (US military representatives on the Embassy team) in El
Salvador. In El Salvador's poverty stricken desperation and spasms of
unrestrained brutality, he was as content as a pig in shit. A quick
study, he had mastered functional Spanish in a matter of weeks,
improving it at a remarkable pace on the job...and off. He frequently
extolled the value of "long- haired dictionaries" for gaining fluency.
Bobby was a small man, but not diminutive, with a demeanor that
disallowed intimidation. He was handsome, in a "West Side Story" kind
of way, and very popular with women. He had taken up residence in
Colonia Escalon.
Bobby's role in El Salvador was to
train a new, elite, Salvadoran counterterrorist force. He was being
referred to as the "Charlie Beckwith of El Sal"--Beckwith was the first
commander of the elite Delta Force. When he took me out for steak and
lobster the second night I was in-country, he imparted the story of the
snafu he had encountered on his new unit's first operation.
In our own counterterrorist
training, it was emphasized again and again, that in order to
discriminate between hostile and non-hostile people, a decision had to
be made in nanoseconds. The shooter must focus first on the hands. "No
one pulls a trigger with his dick," they said. The presence of a weapon
denotes hostility, and the conditioned response is to rapidly fire two
rounds into the "center of mass," that is, the thorax of the "hostile
target." This is done on the move, as shooters on the assault team are
charging to positions of domination within a room. Bobby had taught his
trainees this method of "target discrimination," drilled it into them
until they were like well-oiled machines. Look at the hands. See the
gun. Two bullets in the chest.
Independent tactical judgment is a
key personality trait that US counterterrorist operators are selected
for. If US forces entered a hospital, let's say, that had become a
crisis site, they would (hopefully) evaluate intelligence, and if there
were contract security people inside who had weapons, everyone would be
made to understand that target discrimination had just become slightly
more complicated. That is not how it turned out when Bobby's boys
encountered their first operation. When striking healthworkers at a
hospital in the capital barricaded themselves in, the US-trained
Salvadoran force went to work.
They had been trained to "shoot at
guns," and that's what they did, slaughtering a substantial number of
hospital security guards who were dashing about in confusion with
holstered and unholstered weapons.
Bobby laughed a little with the
retelling, adding that El Salvadorans were lucky to have their whole
country as a training site. They were just bound to improve.
"Isn't this incident a little
sensitive?" I queried. What if the press played this up?
"Yeah," he replied. "It's sensitive
in three ways. It's operationally sensitive, because if the press
exposes us, we lose our funds. It's culturally sensitive, because
Salvadorans are swayed so easy by stories like this. And it's
politically sensitive, because I'm trainin' the best right wing death
squad in the world."
"These wolves who stole my daughter"
Inez, the daughter of Presidente Duarte was taken prisoner by the FMLN
while I was in El Salvador. Her captors managed to move in quickly at a
vehicle stop, hose down her bodyguards with automatic weapons, and
snatch her as a hostage. They would later secure the release of dozens
of FMLN prisoners...the sequel to the Zona Rosa killings...all tolled,
a Pyrrhic victory. These two actions gave the US Congress a green light
to release more lethal aid to the Government of El Salvador, and the
Embassy clamped down tightly on information regarding Salvadoran Army
human rights abuses.
The muckrakers
Not that it was really necessary to hide abuses. Those who reported on
El Salvador tended to hang out at the pool in the Camino Real Hotel,
with transistor radios pressed to their ears. I was chatting up a
member of the press corps one day, as I had lunch at the Camino. She
was around 30, with a dissipated weariness, and worked for the Chicago
Tribune. She was just terribly excited, because she had been let
aboard a helicopter the week before, that flew into Morazan. She
actually got some bang-bang footage. She was just eternally grateful to
the Embassy for arranging it for her. Would I mind, she asked, taking
her out for coffee or a drink somewhere in the barrios, sometime? She
would never think of doing it alone.
I was disillusioned. She completely
annihilated my conception of reporters as slightly crazy, fearless,
obsessed with getting at the real story.
Brian Hastings (not his real name)
was another member of MILGROUP, also a former member of the
counterterrorist unit at Fort Bragg. He dealt with training management
in the Estado Mayor, army headquarters. He once told me off the
cuff that his biggest problem was getting the officers to quit
stealing. He was another pretty boy, naughty, strawberry blonde,
freckled. He had developed an enviable reputation as an productive
liaison with the Salvadoran military over the past five years, and his
charm, looks and reputation made him a favorite of young, female
reporters. I went with him and an Embassy entourage to visit an
orphanage, once, at Sonsonate. The women from the press pool absolutely
doted on him, and he rewarded them with tons of mischievous magnetism.
Bobby did the same thing at a party
I attended. They would skin up alongside him, asking how he thought
progress was coming with the human rights situation. He would ask them
how it seemed to them. Well, there were only a few battlefield
executions of prisoners still taking place, according to rumors, but
they'd heard nothing else. We can't expect them to come around
overnight, now, can we? Would you like to go dancing at an all night
club later? You know where one is? I know where they all are.
The reporters at the Camino Real
hired Salvadoran rich kids. It was very important that they be
educated, English-speaking kids, 20 to 25 years old, who could keep
them abreast of rumors and happenings in the Capital.
The boys in the band
I was hanging around outside the Embassy one day, eating pupusas from
the stand that was outside the vehicle entrance, when a well dressed
young man, who spoke passable English, asked me if I were with
Security.
"Why?" I wanted to know.
"I think I am in trouble." He
proceeded to tell me that he had somehow become involved with a car
theft and cocaine ring, run by a Salvadoran major and a Salvadoran
woman who was a lawyer at the PanAm Building. The group used a Latin
band, named Macho Uno, to mule the drugs to Falls Church, Virginia,
where they then picked up stolen automobiles that were driven back to
El Salvador for sale at an exorbitant price. The deal made money both
ways. It was unclear to me how this fellow was involved. It was obvious
he was scared.
I escorted him up to the SY Office,
as security is called in the Embassy, and sat him down with Lenny
Lipton (not his real name), who was in charge of investigations. This
really wasn't my field. Lenny invited me to sit in on the interview.
Lenny, a former Delaware cop,
quickly ascertained that the gentleman was hedging on something, and
that "something" was his legal status within the United States. Once
Lenny had the lad on the defensive, he bore down on him about the rest
of his story. The man actually started sweating as it became apparent
that Lenny neither believed his story, nor intended to do anything
about it.
When the young man was dismissed and
escorted back out of the Embassy, I asked Lenny what he thought.
"It's probably true, most of it."
"Well are you gonna report it?"
"Why?" he asked.
"Well, what's gonna happen to him?"
"He's probably a dead motherfucker."
Friends
Lenny came to my house one afternoon, drank ten beers in an hour, then
asked me if any of us had anything to cure the clap (gonorrhea). The
Embassy nurse and his wife knew each other.
The gardener
We had a maid and a gardener.
The gardener approached me one day, to tell me that we needed
a new water pump, that the lawn mower was out of oil, that the
exterminator had dropped by to say he would poison the opossums in the
ceiling next week, and that the old clothes in the tool shed needed to
be gotten rid of because they smelled bad.
I was going to work, so I let my roommate know that I would
request the pump and the oil, and could he get rid of some old clothes
that were stinking up the tool shed?
No problem.
When I came home that night, my roommate turned off the porno
movie he had on the VCR, and told me to come with him to see something.
He turned on the carport light and pointed to the clothes. The
clothes were stiff as canvas with stains and dirt, and bore a peculiar
faraway stench.
"What about them?" I asked.
"Look close at 'em," he instructed. "They got blood all over
'em."
"It's probably paint," I assured him. "They've been in the
shed."
"It's blood."
It was blood.
We carried the clothes to the embassy the next day, and after
some discussion and mental backtracking, it was determined that these
were the clothes that four American women had been discovered dead in a
few years earlier, in December, 1980. They were the clothes of the two
nuns and two lay church women who had been raped and murdered by death
squads. Their inconvenient deaths had almost jeopardized the sweet
relationship between the Carter and Reagan Administrations and the
government of El Salvador.
The clothes were sent off to be burned. A discussion developed
between the Regional Security Officer and one of his assistants about
whether the women had asked for it. They summarily agreed that all four
were "commie bitches," involved in gunrunning to the guerrillas.
The orphans
Zona Rosa, the site of the Marine deaths, was put off limits to the
Marines, and to regular Embassy people. The idea was, I guess, that
once someone is killed somewhere, as long as people don't frequent the
same places, they will be less apt to be killed themselves. Like ZONA
ROSA killed the Marines. I ate there at least five times a week. I
didn't figure the same people would come back to the same place to do
the same thing when the whole country was at DEFCON 4. And I was a late
blooming adolescent, often characterized by my teenage peers as less
attractive and popular, which caused me to compensate for my feelings
of inadequacy, long after my tortured transition into adulthood, by
rebelling against authority. That, or the food was good.
Chili's, which is all over the States now, served up good
burgers, and The Mediteranee was so chic that I couldn't resist
carrying an occasional street urchin in there with a dirty face and
bare feet, and making the staff wait on them. The host hated that. So
did the other clientele. It was perversely funny.
Sometimes, for a couple of dollars, I could line up every
beggar kid in the area at the sorbet stand and buy them a cone. They,
in turn, watched my International Harvester Scout, and promised to let
me know if there was danger about. I called them my guardaespaldas, my
bodyguards, and they called me jefecito, little chief. They could be
found at three in the morning, sleeping in the shelter of doorways and
alleys.
I started throwing the kids in the face of the ricos
(rich) in Zona Rosa and Mas Ferrer (another hangout for the
overindulged), after taking a bus (also forbidden by the Embassy)
downtown one day.
On the bus, a blind man came begging, and people who could ill
afford it gave him a coin. In the street, I saw an old woman dragging
herself down the sidewalk with a gangrenous leg, a crazy man shrivelled
in a corner, bone skinny kids who played music for coins with a pipe
and a stick. The only people who stopped to drop a coin with any of
them were calloused, very modestly dressed, with Indian still in their
cheeks. To the slick, manicured, roundeyed, well-to-do, these people
were invisible, as invisible as the blackened carboneros
(charcoal vendors), the wormglutted market babies, the brooding teens
with raggedy clothes, prominent ribs, and red eyes glaring out of the
spotty shade. I didn't understand it clearly at the time. But I just
wanted to plop the grubby little orphans in the middle of all that
indifferent arrogance, so the insufferable rico brats, stuffing
themselves with shrimp and tenderloin, could not, for a few minutes,
treat them like they were invisible.
It was a little childish, really, the only thing I could
contribute to a failed revolution...one I had just begun to understand.
Sources:
The Prism - July 1996
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