Revolution Read Free

(visit the islands! see the ruinas , cheap!), we were still there at the consulate, every day, with our passports, but that hadn’t done it either. Finally we figured out a trick they were playing on us involving the papers we needed to get into the country. And even then we hadn’t gotten normal visas. El Salvador wasn’t giving out plain come-as-you-are visas—what do you think this is, a party? We had overland visas with a three-day window for entrance, which meant you had to come through the land, not drop in from the sky or swim the sea, and you had three days to make it. But either by coincidence (unlikely) or in yet another round of diversions, they’d given us the visas on the very day the rebels of El Salvador—the FMLN, the leftist guerrillas of the mountains—had announced on the radio that their plan was to halt any vehicle they found on the road and blow it up. This was called a “paro,” a “stop,” because things that move stop moving in the face of threatened destruction. Buses, cars, trucks, everyone stopped and stayed home, the roads were tenantless as housetops. We’d gone anyway. (Not my idea.)
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    The FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Named for Farabundo Martí, that Marxist, radical, peasant leader of the thirties, whose greatest achievement was the botched revolt of 1932—half aborted at the last moment, half carried out in confusion, entirely crushed by the National Guard and resulting in thirty thousand deaths. He rose again in the form of these rebels who took his name, a clear vote for human striving over (or in the absence of?) strength, proof of the poetic (quixotic?) mind of the Salvadoran campesino.
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    George had a plan as to what we would say if the FMLN stopped the bus. I spoke better Spanish. I’d spent time in Mexico as a child. I would do the talking. The theory was that the guerrillas would shoot Americans or take them hostage. I was supposed to explain to the guerrillas that George and I were on their side and that we’d been trying to find them. That we had meant to put ourselves in their way. We wanted to interview them with our tape recorder and take their pictures. We wanted to join them. But I didn’t want to do the talking. I’d mess it up and get us killed and then get blamed for it.
    â€œThis is never going to work,” I said.
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    The men on the ground strayed around the sides, stringing the bus, moving like night creatures. We couldn’t see their garb, only their figures and the silhouette of their weapons pointed up. Then the front door sighed open and the people around us quieted. The men got on. At last we could see: they had on military uniforms. It was not the FMLN. It was the other teenagers with enormous machine guns, the ones who happened not to be assigned to attack civilians today, the militia, checking papeles , searching bags, asking questions. We all got off the bus.
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    We found machine guns disturbing in El Salvador, more so than in Guatemala, where we heard only twigs of rumors of killings. But in El Salvador people were always talking about bodies—the bodies found nearby, the lists passing around of the bodies by name, the lists hidden in a film canister and run over the mountains to Honduras, the lists read aloud in the U.S. Congress, and the counts made, the separate counts for the same set of bodies: the militia’s count, the embassy’s count, the FMLN’s, the villagers’, the counts reported in the papers—“two found with hands removed,” “ninety-six found beneath a church.” The counts made no sense, they were off by a hundred, two hundred. They always had to be redone, but already the bodies were gone, no one knew where. The number of bodies was tracked like the stock market. Is the number of bodies growing or