Human Rights in El Salvador

Sorry it’s been so long since I wrote. I reentered the US at the end of July and I’ve been home in MN since then. I’m working now on transcribing, oh joy. I got a lot more done last year than this year, and I think part of that is that last year I genuinely thought if I just worked hard enough I’d finish them all. Well, I worked damn hard and didn’t even get halfway through. I often feel kind of hopeless about the task at hand—we’ve gone down three times, we’ve gotten a lot of information, but I feel like there’s still so much I don’t understand fully, and so much left to be done, and how will it ever possibly get done, especially since I have no clue what I’m doing or how to go about it. I try to get myself psyched up to transcribe, and I just feel like it will never get done, and we’ll never have a book, and what’s the point in even putting forth the effort.

Right now I’m transcribing the part we lost last year of Alicia’s testimony. She was captured (that is, before being processed by the judicial system) for about 20 days, and in that time she estimates she got about 4 hours of sleep because they were torturing her NONSTOP. So, the work is heavy. I mean, literally, I finish for the day feeling like I’ve been carrying around a 50 pound pack all day.

I haven’t put up pictures. It’s bad, I know. I don’t know which to put up. Do I put up the pictures of the mountains and the clouds? The Madres cooking lunch and teaching us how to make tortillas? The mangled bodies? I have over 350 pictures from this trip, including about 70 from their archives, so you can imagine it’s a little hard to know where to start. In the mean time, I’m just hoping if I ignore the task, it will go away.

Last year, on our last full day in the country, Ruby took the testimony of one of the founders of the Committee. I was incredibly sick so I stayed at the house. Unfortunately, incredibly unfortunately, something went wrong and Side B didn’t record. That is, after the point in which she was put in a truck and captured, there was nothing recorded.

So on Monday we redid it, her testimony. The worst part of the hardest testimony we’ve heard. I want to talk about it, but it seems inappropriate on something as impersonal as a blog. I don’t know who’s reading and who’s not and what they’re getting out of it, but I want to say this: this shit is not easy. It weighs on me. You may have noticed my lack of details in writing these posts? Maybe you haven’t, because you haven’t heard it and don’t know what I could be telling you but am not. Well, it’s not because we’re not being told details, it’s because I don’t think about the details. While I’m here, I don’t name the details. Right now, as I’m writing this, only one detail from her testimony comes to mind unbidden, and it’s the one detail I’ve spoken aloud: that of the soldiers who captured her, before taking her out of her house, burning her underwear and raping her with their rifles. This is before taking her, this is the precursor to her capture.

I’m really glad it’s my last week. I don’t think about the details and I don’t talk about the details while I’m here because I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can think about it in the evening and then get up in the morning and do it again. But, after three weeks and a lot of details, I can’t not think about it and I can’t not talk about it and I need to go home and sleep on a mattress which isn’t box springs and I need to not eat meat every day and I need to talk about it.

This morning I said goodbye to Ruby and Alex, who both fly today. I wanted so badly to go with them. I don’t want to be here alone and I don’t want to come in to the office tomorrow and I don’t want this work. Someone else, take it, please. Write this book for me, carry these details for me.       –Which is of course precisely why I don’t talk about it in detail with 99% of people I know: no one should have to hear these stories and carry them every day. I don’t want to put that on anyone.

There’s a woman, another gringa, who’s been coming into the office some days. I think she’s doing a project about maternal–I forget the word she used, maternality or something. Different human rights groups, but focusing specifically on mothers in some form or another.

Ruby and I had been asking about their (Co-Madres’) archives and telling them specific things we were looking for, and they were like, Look, here’s the thing, and then they told us where their archives were and what the situation is, because they took a lot of them out of the country to keep them safe (their office was bombed numerous times, and at least once it was taken over by the military for a period of time and everything in it was confiscated). My point is that they told us exactly what was what without us really having to ask.

On the other hand, this other woman came in and was asking about their archives and where they were, etc, and Pati just wasn’t going to tell her anything except that they were out of the country. Then later she said to me, “When I’m here, you can take out the archives [that are in the office] and look at them, but when I’m not, don’t. Because I know you, but I don’t know her.”

So today Ruby said to me that sometimes she gets frustrated to come in and not really do much, but that’s just what it takes– that showing up every day and being with them is what it takes to gain their confidence so that they can tell us the things they tell us.

This is from my mom, Ruby, who is doing this work with me (edited slightly to account for the keys she couldn’t find because the computers here are set up to recognize a Spanish language keyboard, but the keyboard itself is English language. For example, a forward slash is Shift+7):

Well, conversations here are so interesting sometimes. Like take conversations with Alicia, the director of Co-Madres. She is a well educated and very grounded woman.  So the other day she told me that global warming was caused by all the space ships going to the moon. She said they punched holes in the atmosphere, and that’s the main cause of it. I said I didn’t think so. “Oh yes,” she said, “it is.”

Inez and I use bug spray frequently because the Salvadoran version of mosquitos are tiny but omnipresent and carriers of dengue. Sometimes the spray bottle doesn’t work, and sometimes the spray itself seems ineffective, in Inez’s case at least.

So yesterday I realized that sometimes the bottle doesn’t work because I hold it upside down to spray it, and then the tube leading to the sprayer sucks up air and you have to pump it a bunch of times before it works. So I told Inez, Hey I think the bug spray doesn’t work sometimes because I hold it upside down to spray it. She looked at me like I was crazy, then asked, “Do you mean the bug spray or the bottle?” I told her the bottle. “Oh,” she says, “I thought you meant the spray itself” and I was gonna say, “you’ve been in El Salvador for too long.” Like, that’s just the kind of thing you might hear a Salvadoran saying causes the spray itself to be ineffective.

Less interesting is sometimes feeling like an escapee from the zoo, or maybe an attraction at a freak show. I would love to be able to walk down the street without getting stares from half the people we pass. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but a LOT of people look at us, and many openly stare. Kids point and tell their parents, “Look look! Over there, look! The gringas!” The population here is just so homogenous, and there is almost no tourism. So I gues we’re a curiosity. The other day I reached up and touched the top of my head to be sure I hadn’t sprouted horns. Which gave me chuckle. Nope, no horns yet.  Although I’m sure the pastor of the Evangelical Friends Church of La Reyna would be convinced I’m in the hands of the devil if only he knew about my life. In a sermon he gave on Sunday he told his congragation that if they didn’t come to the church on their appointed day to pray, men on Saturday, young adults on Friday, women on Wednesday, that it was because surely they were in the hands of the devil. That they were just choosing to not obey God. I’m not sure, but I don’t remember ever hearing any mention of these specific days for praying when I used to hear the bible read when I was a kid and raised Catholic.

Sometimes I wonder what we say and do that hits them the same way, like … how wierd is that? And I think about violence, and how easy it is to think of people as the other, which protects us from the pain we would otherwise feel when we commit violence, or when we simply lack compassion.

They are blinking the lights in the cyber, I have to go.  Thanks for listening.  

Ruby

This past weekend we went up to visit some [evangelical] Quaker friends in La Reina. That was lovely, except for the Catholic church 2 doors down feeling entitled to use a loudspeaker system for music, prayers and announcements at 6 AM on Saturday and 5 AM on Sunday. Alicia and Daniel took us to this town in Guatemala called Esquipulas which is famous for having a gorgeous colonial church and a black Jesus figure. I took about a hundred pictures. You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.

Today we finally had a meeting with all the women to tell them what we wanted to do, and figure out a rough schedule. This is coming with 5 working days before Ruby leaves, but that’s how it is. By the way, I want to say something before I continue. I know I said I would put pictures up, but I think that probably won’t happen until I get home in a week and a half. I keep forgetting to bring my flash drive to the cyber cafe.

Anyway, we got a fair amount done today. I scanned about 15 pictures, and Ruby spent some time asking Alicia about them. I don’t know what Alicia told her because I was listening to Cloud Cult, but Ruby took a lot of notes, so we’re set. We also finished asking clarifying questions on the last transcription we have down here, so we’ve done as much as we can on that front. The next step is to reprint them (not sure where that will happen) and then go over what is okay to publish and what isn’t. For example, regarding one woman’s capture, they’ve told us that it’s okay to publish that the military was looking for a relative of hers, and when they couldn’t find that relative they took her instead; however, even though they told us the specifics of this incident, we’re not supposed to go into more detail in the book. I think we should spend some time talking to them about the situation today and how to protect them, because that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me if Alicia hadn’t said, “But you’re not going to put that in the book, right?”

In other words, progress is slow, but existent. Tomorrow we’re doing an interview and making pupusas, and Thursday I think we’re going to a church that housed a refuge during the war with hopes that someone will still be there who was there in those days. We’re also going to go to the monument for the disappeared and assasinated. We visited it 2 years ago, but they’ve come much closer to completing it since then. Money is always a hang up.

Next weekend we’re going to Suchitoto, this lovely town in the northish of El Salvador. We’ll get to see Alex and also Alvaro, who was Ruby’s teacher at CIS (Center for Exchange and Solidarity) and also works for an organization called Seeds of Learning. He’s responsible for leading delagations of North Americans who come down to help build schools and learn about El Salvador.

One more thing before I go– we moved on Sunday to stay for the rest of the time with Flor and her 2 kids (Antony, 11, and Johana, 19), with whom we stayed last year. The highlight of this transition has been that they have a very very cute 7 month Boxer pup (who I think is also part Dalmatian), and I’m so happy about that. For those of you who haven’t been around me lately, I’m dying to get out of school and live somewhere I can have a puppy. So I’m very content to have one to buy chew toys for and play tug-o-war with and teach the meaning of “suelta!” (“drop it!”) to. Yes, I know that was bad grammar. Hush.

Until next time.

I’ve been in El Salvador for almost a week already (and I’m not sick yet!!), but I’ve had little time and even less time on the computer. I’ll do what I can to give a not too lengthy update.

We got in last Wednesday at 11:30 am (which should tell you something about how early we left) and got all our tapes and transcriptions and transcriber and computer and scanner through customs no problem (Ruby was worried) because it happens there was no one manning the customs station when we went through. When we went through immigrations there was a woman at the next station over who was already there when we came up. They were asking her why she was visiting, and she, stupidly, said that it was because a friend of hers had been deported from the US and she was here to visit him. Then she tried to pay her $10 entry fee with a $100 bill. She was very distressed and obviously didn’t know a thing about traveling in El Salvador– there’s just no need to divulge information like that (also that $100 bills are virtually worthless because no one can take them). She was still there after we collected our bags and went through customs, and who knows if they let her into the country, or if they did, what kind of trouble they gave her before they did.

Anyway, work is going. Slowly, but it’s going. Ruby and I have had very conflicting schedules which makes it next to impossible to do things like review old interviews and come up with topics/questions for this year, so we’ve been playing catch-up somewhat. Also we’ve been getting help on the spots in the transcriptions I wasn’t sure about. This is of course fairly boring work, but ncessary and helpful. The Madres are wonderful as ever, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about the work, probably in part because we haven’t started really interviewing yet, just reviewing old information. We spent some time reviewing photos to get some we might want to put in the book, but we’re waiting (with some dread) for when the compañera who took them comes back to the office (her family has been sick) so she can help us find them and tell us abut them. I say dread because the majority of their photos are photos they took to document asesinados they found. That means a lot of cut off heads, bodies burned with acid, blood, body parts cut off/cut up, women with their shirts and bras pulled up around their chests, etc. I felt nauseous looking at any one photo for longer than a few seconds.

One of the things Raul (who I mentioned in my last post) does with some people from his church (a program he started) is to give food to people on the streets of San Salvador. Last night we went with him to do this– he and his girlfriend, sister, brother in law, and two other young women from the church. We got to Raul’s sister’s house at about 4 and then left their house not until 8:30, I think. Then we just drove around the city to places they know people are at, from a couple to a dozen. Also any time they saw people on the street, especially digging through the garbage, they would stop and offer them food. We were in a pickup, Ruby and Raul and I squished in front and then the others in the back with the food. One of the first stops we made was at a corner near a gas station where there were about a dozen kids, probably age 12-18 or so, all of them with their glue.

[Parenthetical remark] There’s a huge problem here (and in Nicaragua and, I would imagine, in many many poor countries) with street kids sniffing glue. When they lick it is takes away their hunger pangs, and when they sniff it it gets them stoned. Sometimes mothers with no money give it to their young kids to take away their hunger pangs when the mothers have no food and the kids get into it that way; sometimes the get into it on the street. [End parenthetical remark]

Anyway, before we got there Raul told Ruby and I to roll up our window and lock the door because the kids are manejado (I’m not sure how it would translate– sort of like managed or controlled) by some other people who make them rob people and give them the stuff in exhange for glue. Raul said something about because they’re young it’s hard for them to buy glue straight up, so they do it that way. It was really distressing and kind of scary, just because we had no idea what they would do, if anything. But Raul got out of the car to go talk to them and everything (although he left the car running). He said the kids know them and know if they do anything bad (like rob them or get violent in any way) they’ll never come back to give the food again. The kids were really happy when we showed up, they were clapping and yelling ”La comida! La comida!” (“The food! The food!”), but they were all really messed up (from the glue). There were a few who could barely walk they were so drugged out.  Raul said to those kids they just give coffee and bread. They used to give food, but many times the kids threw it out because they’re on the glue which takes away their hunger. More than anything they just want something hot to drink take away the cold.

I was asking him about it later, I asked him if glue was as much a problem with adults or mainly just with kids. He said from what he’s observed, often by the time kids are 15 or so they switch to crack because the glue isn’t hard enough any more and crack is really cheap and really fast acting and intense. Almost all of the people we saw seemed pretty messed up in one way or another, whether it’s from mental health issues or drug issues (or both), I don’t know. But everywhere we went the people were really happy and really grateful. They were always saying “Muy agradecido” and “Que Dios te bendiga” and “Que le vaya bien, muchas gracias” (“I’m very grateful,” “May God bless you” and “May things go well with you, thank you very much”). Ruby and I stayed in the car the whole time except for one stop we made for 4 men who have jobs, they just don’t pay enough for them to be able to rent a house. They were really really nice, very clean and polite. In total, we served food to about 45 and coffee and bread to another 30.

Well, I apologize for this monstrously long post. I’ll try to update more frequently so that I don’t have as much to say. I’ll also try to get some picture up when I’m on Raul’s computer (rather than in a cyber cafe). For now, thanks for reading and thanks for your comments.

Our flight left at 5:30 this morning which meant getting up at 3. At 3:10 I woke up with a start and got up, only to realize my parents were still in bed. The alarm had gone off, but it was set much too quietly for 3 in the morning, so it’s only because of luck (nerves, call it what you will) that we caught the flight at all. Travel was uneventful and we got in at 11:30 in the morning. Alicia from Comadres and her very kind son Jose picked us up from the airport and took us to the office. We’re staying the first 2 weeks with a f/Friend, Raul, and the second half with the family we stayed with last year. They still don’t know not to expect us, though, because we’ve tried and tried but haven’t gotten a hold of them. We only have their cell phone number and calling cell phones from land lines is very expensive here, so we need to buy a phone card before we can call her. Ah well, that’s just how it is. Tomorrow we’ll go back to the office and figure out a theoretical game plan (to be quickly abandoned, no doubt) and then we’ll figure out how to get back to Raul’s place outside of the city by bus.

That’s all for now because his mother is preparing dinner for us as I type this. Thank you, Rosa.

Well, I haven’t left yet for El Salvador. I’m going with my mom, so I’m working around her schedule. I’ve checked a few books out from the library; one is an Amnesty International report on death squads from 1988, the other is a general civil war history book. Also I’m trying to get through a really helpful book, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, which starts out with a great general chronology.

Also, I’ve been working on transcription backlog. The first year there we produced one tape, and last year we produced 10. I got through 4 and a bit in August of last year and learned a lot about transcribing. The first thing I learned is that it’s awful. It’s boring and tedious and requires an incredible amount of focus. It’s very very frustrating and makes me wish I spoke Spanish better, or that I could turn the job over to someone who really knows the language. I spend so much time looking up words to see if I’ve heard right, and I’m completely convinced that if I just spoke the language as well as I pretend I do, it would take a lot less time because I’d just know the words they’re throwing at me. Although I’ve never transcribed anything in English, so I have no basis for comparison. Right now I’m at 10:1 (10 minutes spent transcribing to 1 minute of tape), but last summer I was down to somewhere around 5-7:1, so I’m hoping I can get there again. Here’s what I wrote about transcribing last summer (edited for language):

“Transcribing is so hard.

There are the obvious reasons– it’s in Spanish, it’s such a slow and tedious process, it takes so much concentration… I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated on anything so hard for such a long period of time. It’s like when you’re trying to thread a needle, and there’s that one little bitty strand that’s [messing] it up and you keep trying and keep trying and it’s not working and you have to squint and get your face up all close because the needle is so small and the thread is so small and if anyone says anything to you you want to scream ’cause you were about to get it but they ruined your concentration and now you have to start all over… are you feeling sufficiently fidgety and drained? Okay, well it’s like threading the impossibly small needle, for hours and hours, every day.

Of course the other reason is that it’s just so damn depressing. Not only are you threading an impossibly small needle, you’re threading an impossibly small needle with a picture of someone being raped or tortured– and you have to keep looking at that little picture because if you take your eyes off the [freaking] needle, well then, how are you going to thread it?”

“I’ll be in El Salvador, most of the time with my mother. This will be our third summer working with the Comité de Madres, a Salvadoran human rights organization. This organization was founded in 1977 and was very active in the years leading up to, during, and after El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. They remain active to this day, but they have never had their history written. My mother and I, at their request, are collecting information to write a book of their history.”

- Inez Steigerwald ’09