Well…
Aren’t you curious? I like you already.
You probably came here looking for content and it is currently cooking, I hope it will be worth the wait but since this is the first post (of this iteration) of this website then let me reward your curiosity by telling you a story.
All of these words are true:
Just the other day I was having a quiet dinner with my loud mother when she mentioned in passing, with the calm indifference of someone talking about the weather, that I had survived a massacre. This was news to me.
“We were driving home and we ended up in an ambush between the guerrillas and the army and they just started shooting at each other on the highway. I had to throw myself on top of you to make sure you wouldn’t get hit by any bullets. Eventually the shooting stopped and we just got out of there. You would have been about six months old so you probably don’t remember.”
I was stunned, beyond stunned. How had she kept this from me? Of course I didn’t remember but I would have thought that at some point during the last 42 years she would have mentioned this and maybe not so casually.
“This sort of thing happened all the time mijo” she said between mouthfuls. “I had completely forgotten about it until now.” My mother also survived two other massacres, that I know of.
Speak to any Salvadoran who lived through the war and they have stories just like this one, or worse. The violence was so brutal, so senseless and so devastating that surviving a massacre was as pedestrian as misplacing your keys. It was something so unremarkable that you simply forgot about it either out of necessity or circumstance and this is the world I come from.
In 1983 alone, the year of my birth, 6,096 Salvadorans had died as a result of political violence- including Marianela Garcia Villas, the President of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador. The death squads and the army had killed a further 4,700 people while 1,300 army and security forces personnel were themselves killed. Some 400,000 Salvadorans were displaced internally and 700,000 others fled to Mexico, other parts of Central America and the USA- this was 20% of the country’s entire population at the time. This brutality continued for 12 years.
And this is my starting point. This blog won’t be stories about the war or stories about El Salvador necessarily, although as a Salvadoran it’s arguable that all of the stories I tell are Salvadoran stories. But the war, whether I like it or not (I don’t) is my foundation story. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened to me and could ever happen to me and I want to honour that somehow. Welcome to AfterSalazar.
One final thing, on the homepage there are some pictures that I think deserve an explanation.
El Libro Amarillo or the Yellow Book was a secret Salvadoran military intelligence document from the Civil War that identifies hundreds of Salvadorans who the state considered ‘delinquent terrorists’. The book lists 1,915 entries, including photos and known aliases, of suspected guerrilla fighters but also of unionists, teachers, academics, lawyers, human rights activists and ‘leftists’. The people listed were just like the person I have grown up to be.
The original Libro Amarillo is a photocopy of an unknown master copy that was donated to a civil society organisation by someone who claimed to have found it. The finding of this book challenged the years of stonewalling by the Salvadoran security forces about their role in the brutal civil war that killed about 1.4% of all Salvadorans and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The book was the first confidential Salvadoran Military document to be made public. However not all of the images on the homepage are from El Libro Amarillo.
Images in order of appearance
Front cover of El Libro Amarillo. The front cover has a handwritten note that says, in Spanish: Use it. “Make copies of the photographs and put them on your bulletin board so you will know who your enemies are.”
Photographs from El Libro Amarillo of: Jose Abrego, Jose Abrego Quinteros, Julio Acosta, Pedro Acosta, Alfredo Acosta, Ramon Acosta, Jose Acosta, Oscar Aguirre, Carlos Aguirre, Victoriano Aguillon, Ernesto Aguilar, Mario Aguilar, jose Aguilar, Jose Alas, Florentino Alas, Maria Alas, Andres Alas, Francisco Aleman. These images were chosen randomly.
Photographs from El Libro Amarillo of: Rafael Contreras, Lucia Constanza, Teresa Constanza, Santos Cortez, Daniel Cortez, Fermin Cortez, Maria Cortez, Maria Cortez Ostorga. These images were also chosen randomly.
My visa to travel to Australia: I came to Australia as a refugee from the war, this is the front page of my visa. I was five years old.
The opening page of From Madness to Hope, the final report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador. Which says, in Spanish: “All of these things happened among us…” which is where the title for this blog comes from: “todo esto paso entre nosotros…”
There, that’s all the story I have for now. There will be others and I promise they won’t be so heavy. Thanks for reading and for being here.
