Erik Ching

Stories of Civil War in El Salvador. A Battle Over Memory

The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Cover illustration: Photograph of soldiers courtesy of Colección Fotográfica del Museo de la

Palabra y la Imagen, San Salvador, and used strictly by permission of Museo de la Palabra y la
Imagen.

Put to press with an award

Figure Foundation
reading blueprints of belief

To Cathy
Acknowledgments

In the prologue to Rodrigo Guerra y Guerra’s 2011 memoir about the 1979 coup, the Salvadoran
writer and journalist Rafael Menjívar Ochoa says, in reference to the many life stories that have
appeared in El Salvador since the end of the civil war, “these materials need to be processed and
placed in their proper context, within the framework of history yet to be written”. Menjívar Ochoa
has since passed away, but had he lived to read this book, I hope he would have seen it as helping to
fill those abscences.

I began to conceptualize this study in the late 2000s while working on other projects about recent
Salvadoran history. One of those projects was the translation of La Terquedad del Izote, the war
diary of Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, a.k.a. Santiago, the main voice of Radio Venceremos, the
FMLN’s clandestine radio station during the war. My involvement in that project, which was
translated as Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador, allowed me to discover that vast numbers
of life stories were emerging from El Salvador and that they had not been subjected to rigorous
academic inquiry. I also realized that the study of the historical memory of the civil was in its
infancy.

Another project that helped me to conceptualize the present one was my involvement in the study of
the contested memory of an earlier trauma in Salvadoran history, the peasant uprising and military
massacre of 1932. In Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador, my coauthors and I learned that in
the decades following the events of 1932, Salvadorans separated into diverse memory groups that
narrated the events of 1932 differently, and that their narrations changed in accordance with
contemporary exigencies. It seemed that with the end of the civil war more than two decades in the
past, the time was right to investigate Salvadorans’ remembrances of it.

I’m deeply indebted to many people who made this study possible. First and foremost I wish to
recognize my home institution, Furman University, which granted me a full-year sabbatical leave
that provided me with the time and opportunity to complete the bulk of the present book. To various
colleagues who read some or all of the manuscript in various stages, or who provided me with
advice, I would like to offer my thanks, especially Paul Almeida, Jeff Gould, Terry Lynn Karl,
Héctor Lindo, Michael Schroeder, David Spencer, Ralph Sprenkels, and Knut Walter. The two
anonymous reviewers commissioned by UNC Press proved very knowledgeable about the
Salvadoran case and provided me with helpful thoughts that improved the final text. Colleagues in
El Salvador have aided me in diverse ways throughout this project. They include, but are not limited
to César Acevedo, René Aguiluz, Ricardo Argueta, Fidel Campos, Carlos Henríquez Consalvi,
Carlos Gregorio López Bernal, Sister Peggy O’Neill and Alfredo Ramírez. María Mayo worked
with me as a research assistant during a summer thanks to funding provided by the Furman
Advantage Program. The image that appears on the front cover was graciously provided by the
Museum of Word and Image in San Salvador, under the direction of Carlos Consalvi. I would also
like to thank the University of North Carolina Press, its editor Elain Maisner, whose suggestions
very much improved the manuscript, and her assistant editor, Allison Shay. Thanks also to Carol
Noble for an outstanding copyedit, and to Carolyn Ferrick for the followup edit.

I could not have completed this project without my family’s support. So to my parents, Harriette
and Woody Ching, my sister Nissa Ching, and my in-laws, Matt and Carlos Stevens and Rob and
Jaime Stevens, and our extender family member, Blanca Castaño, I extend deep gratitude. My most
heartfelt appreciation goes out to my immediate family: my spouse, Cathy Stevens, and our three
children, Anders, Halle and Evan; I owe this to you.
Abbreviations and Acronyms in the Text

ABECAFE: Asociación Salvadoreña de Beneficiadores y Exportadores de Café

ARENA: Alianza Republicana Nacionalista

BIRI: Batallón de Infantería de Reacción Inmediata

BPR: Bloque Popular Revolucionario

BRAZ: Brigada Rafael Arce Zablah

ERP: Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo

FAL: Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación

FARO: Frente Agrario de la Región Oriental

FMLN: Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional

FPL: Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí

FRAP: Fuerzas Revolucionarias Armadas del Pueblo

FRTS: Federación Regional de Trabajadores Salvadoreños

FUAR: Frente Unido de Acción Revolucionaria

FUSADES: Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social

MERS: Movimiento Estudiantil Revolucionario de Secundaria

MNR: Movimiento Revolucionario Nacional

OLAS: Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad

ORDEN: Organización Democrática Nacionalista

ORT: Organización Revolucionaria de Trabajadores

PCN: Partido de Conciliación Nacional

PCS: Partido Comunista Salvadoreño

PD: Partido Demócrata

PDC: Partido Demócrata Cristiano

PR-9M: Partido Revolucionario 9 de Mayo

PRAL: Patrullas de Reconocimiento de Alcance Largo

PRTC: Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos

PRUD: Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática

RN: Resistencia Nacional

SRI: Socorro Rojo Internacional

UCA: Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas

USAID: United States Agency for International Development

Introduction

Something remarkable happened in a Boston courtroom in August 2013. El Salvador’s former vice
minister of public safety, Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano, was held partially accountable for his
actions during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. Unable to be tried criminally for those
actions in a U. S. court, even though he was living here, Montano was found guilty of lying on his
application for protected status, which granted him humanitarian status to remain in the United
States after having left El Salvador in 2000. Among other falsehoods, he failed to indicate on his
form that he had served in the military or received military training. In order to prove that Montano
lied, the prosecution had to demonstrate not only that he falsified his application by failing to reveal
his military service, but also that he had engaged in activities that would have contradicted his
request for humanitarian status. Therefore, in a roundabout way, Montano’s case became a public
accounting of El Salvador’s civil war.

The expert witness for the prosecution was Terry Lynn Jarl, a professor of political science at
Stanford University. She provided a painstakingly researched exposé on Montano and the
Salvadoran army during the war. The cornerstone of Karl’s argument was that the Salvadoran
military had perpetrated heinous crimes during the war, and that it had done so under a strict chain
of command. She showed that troops followed the orders of their commanding officers, and that
those officers had the authority to curtail their soldier’s abusive actions. One of the pivotal events
under examinations was the assassination by the military of six Jesuit priests in November 1989 at
the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador. Karl argued that
Montano was part of the military’s Alto Mando (high command), which had ordered the murders,
and that he was present in the meeting when the decision to execute the priests was delivered.

The key witnes for the defense was retired General Mauricio Vargas, another high-ranking officer in
the Salvadoran army, who had both commanded troops in the field and served in the Alto Mando.
The crux of Vargas’s testimony was that any questionable activities, which perhaps were perpetrated
by some soldiers, did not occur under the orders of their commanding officers. In an ironic twist,
Vargas’s testimony rested upon the same premise as Terry Karl’s. He claimed that the army was
indeed defined by a functioning chain of command, and that Montano would not have been in
position to give in the orders to the unit accused of killing the Jesuits. He claimed that the army was
indeed defused by a functioning chain of command, and that Montano would not have been in
position to give the orders to the unit accused of killing the Jesuits. Furthermore, Vargas claimed
that any orders coming from Montano would have been given to him originally by higher
authorities, so responsibility would reside on them. Technically, Vargas was correct, however the
prosecution never claimed Montano gave the order, but rather that he was present when the order
was given and that he had the authority to countermand it.

In the end, Judge Woodlock ruled in favor of the prosecution, concluding the trial with a biting
critique of Montano and his defense. In short, the judge declared that the relationship between
Montano’s evidence and his narrative was spurious and that the evidence and narrative presented by
the prosecution were more accurate. Montano received a sentence of twenty-one months in prion,
and faces the prospect of being extradited in Spain to stand trial for the murder of the Jesuits, five of
whom were Spaniards by birth.

What makes Montano’s trial remarkable is the fact that it did not occur in El Salvador, nor will
anything like it happen there in the foreseeable future. An amnesty law passed at the end of the war
makes it impossible for anyone to be prosecuted for their activities during the war. Courts, like the
one in Boston, are hardly perfect arbiters of truth, as they are subject to bias and influence, but at
least a courtroom is a potentially neutral setting where rivaling versions of the past can be
contested. A court allows for evidence to be introduced and evaluated, and for witnesses to be cross-
examined, and it allows for ostensibly dispassionate assessors -a judge or a jury- to rule on the
validity of the competing narratives that rival parties present. Not only does El Salvador have an
amnesty law that prevents such adjudication, it lacks anything like an ongoing truth and
reconciliation commission (TRC), a “confessional space” in which people receive immunity from
potential prosecution in exchange for full confessions about their activities during the conflict in
question. Even if a postconflict country like El Salvador had an ongoing TRC and no amnesty law,
the court of public opinion would play a tremendously important role in constructing collective
memories about the civil war. But because El Salvador has an amnesty law and does not have any
other formal truth-telling process, the war is being tried exclusively in the court of public opinion,
without a judge or jury, without peer review, simply through the citizenry’s freewheeling injection
of its often contradictory narratives into the postwar public sphere. The sociologist Elizabeth Jelin,
who specializes in the study of historical memory in the aftermath of state repression, notes that
“when the state does not develop official and legitimate institutionalized channels that openly
recognize past state violence and repression, the conflict over truth and over ‘proper’ memories
develops in the societal arena”. Jelin’s description applies well to what has been happening in El
Salvador since 1992.
This book looks at the process of memory-making in postwar El Salvador through published life
stories that have appeared since the end of the war in 1992. The premise is that a narrative battle is
occurring in El Salvador between four memory communities, each of which advances a distinct and
mutually exclusive version of the past. The shooting war may be over, but the existence of these
four communities and their rivaling narratives demonstrates that the contest for the story of the war
is just getting underway.

***

The civil war in El Salvador was as brutal, twelve-year-long affair (1980-1992) that left an indelible
imprint on the nation’s psyche. The statistical consequences of the war testify to its devastating
impact. In a country roughly the size of Massachussetts, with a population of around five million
people at the time, approximately 75,000 were killed, another 350,000 were wounded and around
one million were displaced from their homes, many of whom fled the country and ended up in the
United States. Many tens of thousands more people were tortured, incarcerated, raped, conscripted
and/or abducted. The number of people suffering debilitating psychological trauma remains
impossible to determine, although anecdotal evidence suggests that it is widespread.

Since the end of the war, Salvadorans have responded to the trauma in diverse ways. Some are
trying to forget it, aided by the existence of the amnesty law. Others are trying to remember it, in
hopes of making sense of it. The latter are finding remembrances in diverse “memory sites”, or
what Oren Stier, a scholar of collective memories of the Holocaust, calls “the media of memory”.
Memory sites include, but are not limited to, monuments, murals, museums, literature, film, music,
personal testimonials and, in the case of El Salvador, a planned television drama about the 1989
murder of Jesuits.