El Salvador was given its name by the Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado who dedicated the land of his conquest to Jesus Christ, The Saviour (El Salvador). The capital of the city is San Salvador which means Holy Saviour.
The country is in dire need of the help of The Saviour. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world and is notorious for deadly gang wars. The country has been traumatized by civil war and the right-wing military dictatorships which massacred thousands of indigenous people and leftists. These days, the country keeps hitting news headlines in the US with the caravans of Salvadorians seeking asylum, giving more fuel to Trump’s anti-migrant vitriols. It is in this context that we get a Salvadorian perspective of the issues from Roberto Lovato, a Salvadorian writer living in the US, in his memoirs Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, published in September 2020. He narrates the history of the tragedy of violence through his personal life story and that of his family.
Lovato has the unique real-life experience of having lived as a Salvadorian mara gang member in the US, a guerilla fighter in Salvador against the dictatorship, a redeemed evangelical and finally as a writer, journalist and human rights activist for the refugees from Central America coming into the US.
Lovato’s father Ramoncito was an illegitimate son of a rich coffee planter. His mother was a poor Indian woman Mama Tey who worked for the planter. Roberto is traumatised at the age of nine after witnessing the 1932 Matanza—the cold-blooded massacre of the indigenous community in his village by the military death squads. After the massacre, Mama Tey flees to San Salvador, the capital where she makes a living by stitching clothes for low-class prostitutes. Ramoncito gets his first job as a receptionist in a brothel, receiving customers and serving coffee for them. He takes to alcoholism and crimes in the company of his other poor friends. Later he and his mother move to Los Angeles, which has the largest Salvadorean community in the US.
His son Roberto Lovato is born and brought up in Los Angels. Lovato and his Salvadorean friends are taunted and attacked by the bigger Mexican and local white gangs. Life for Salvadorian youth in the US is as insecure and dangerous as in El Salvador. For protection, Lovato joins a small Salvadorian gang, Los Originales, which steals cars and distributes drugs. But despite this gang involvement, Roberto finishes his university studies successfully and becomes a professor and writer. Moved by the tragedy of the massacre of innocent people, he travels to El Salvador and joins the FMLN (The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) guerilla movement fighting against the military dictatorship. He gets guns and supplies for the guerillas from the US arranged by his father besides others. After the end of the civil war, Lovato returns to the US and resumes his academic career.
Lovato goes back to El Salvador to investigate the old massacres and the new gang wars. He goes to Ahuachapán, where his father was born and learns that his grandfather (from father’side) was one of the active participants in the massacre of the Indians. He meets ex-guerrilla leaders of FMLN who have now come to power through the ballot. He interviews members of the two notorious gangs MS 13 and Barrio 18. He visits the places where leftists and Indians were executed and buried in anonymous mass graves. He sees the working of the forensic laboratories which work with the bones and skulls to identify and analyse them for the government and family members.
The Salvadoran military death squads had run “counterinsurgency” programs that starved, shot up, and bombed indigenous communities they perceived as supporting the FMLN, the main guerilla movement. As a former Guatemalan president and School of Americas (at Fort Benning, Georgia) graduate José Efraín Ríos Montt put it, “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” Ríos Montt was eventually convicted of genocide but was not sentenced due to his poor health.
In the infamous El Mozote massacre of 1981, Colonel Monterrosa and his troops mistook nearly one thousand Campesinos for FMLN guerrilla—sympathizing civilians and slaughtered them. Investigations by forensic specialists have revealed that many of the victims were women and children. Of those killed, 553 were minors, 477 of whom were under twelve. The majority of the children were six years old or younger.
The US supported the right-wing military dictatorships of El Salvador and gave counter-insurgency training in the School of the Americas to Salvadorian and other Latin American military officers. Of the twelve accused in the El Mozote massacre, by the UN Truth Commission report, ten, including Monterrosa, were graduates of the School of Americas. Counterinsurgency is a multi-billion-dollar industry for US arms dealers and military contractors who supply weapons, helicopters and other equipment to Latin America. The guns used by the Salvadorian gangs are illegally supplied from the US.
Those killed in the massacres were buried in mass graves throughout the country. The cruelty of this can be seen from a letter from the country’s director of public health, who advised the governors and mayors “to take necessary sanitary measures in the face of reports of growing numbers of unburied bodies and mass graves. It is necessary to make the dimensions [of the mass graves] uniform for reasons of health. The accumulation of no more than fifty corpses in a single grave allows for better decomposition and less absorption into the soil. Even better would be isolated graves, in which no more than eight to ten corpses would be placed”. The land of El Salvador made fertile by a natural mix of volcanic ash and minerals, there is a new fertilizer, the decomposed bodies of thousands of indigenous people.
Lovato falls in love with an FMLN guerrilla fighter and diplomat who comes to LA to work with the Salvadorean community. Born to a poor Indian family, she studied to become a nun. But when her family was killed by the army, she joins the guerrillas. She surprises Roberto saying that she loves operas and her favourite one is ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana,”. She says calls it as her ‘música de combate’, the music she listened in times of personal and political combat. She says, “Whenever we would march in protest against the government policies and death-squad killings, they would often kill many protesters. And then, to make things worse, they would play opera music in the government radio to mock us. So it became the music for us to remember our martyrs, our música de combate”.
After all these adventures, Lovato is now settled in his postwar identity as a writer, journalist and human rights activist. He has finally found peace after almost twenty-five years of clandestinity, secrets, and fear. He is critical of the US police which treats all the Central Americans and Mexicans as gangsters and drug traffickers and harasses the whole community.
Lovato says, “Throughout my life, our family has been divided by the border between memory and forgetting. Where most see the refugee crisis as “new,” I see the longue durée of history and memory. Where many see the story beginning at the border, I see the time-space continuum of violence, migration, and forgetting that extends far beyond and below the US-Mexico border. Where others see mine as a Central American story, I see it as a story about the United States”.
True. It was the genocide and atrocities of the US-supported right-wing Salvadorian military dictatorships which made people flee to the US in the beginning. The US trained the Salvadorian military in counter-insurgency and also sent its own advisors to guide and observe some of the operations. The US gave billions of dollars of military assistance which was used by the Salvadorean dictatorships to fight its own people. Young Salvadoreans in the US were forced into gang culture by the US drug gangs. The notorious MS 13 and Barrio 18 gangs of El Salvador were originally formed in Los Angeles. When the US deported the Salvadorean gangsters back to their home country, they formed bigger gangs and caused mayhem with more deadly US weapons. This has made more Salvadoreans flee and seek asylum in the US. It is a vicious cycle with clear US complicity and culpability as the exporter of gang culture and illegal weapons to El Salvador.
Lovato ends the book saying, “My Salvadorean journey from being half-dead to more fully alive has begun”. He quotes the poignant lines of the famous Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton who also took up guns as a guerilla fighter and took bullets becoming a martyr in 1975.
Ser salvadoreño es ser medio muerto
Sobrevivimos pero medio vivos
To be a Salvadorean is half-dead
We survive but only with half living
