A week without rose-colored glasses

Hello again!

I’ve started writing this several times now and never seem to finish it because something always comes up or a bunch of people come home and my few moments of silence are again interrupted.

When I started to write this I was listening to the haunting chords my friend invented on the guitar. He is 15 and sometimes comes over just to have to have a space away from the chaos and abuse that has characterized most of his life. He didn’t want to talk this time… just cry below the snow hat he’d pulled down over his face and strum a sorrowful series of guitar chords.

Perhaps it was out of this space that this reflection (warning it’s not very up-beat) was born…. Or it was more likely born out of the reality that people live and I encounter here (though always with one degree of separation from the threats and fear by nature of the fact that I have a US passport and the means to leave).

I didn’t write about the violence here in my first reflection, mostly because I know that’s what’s all over the news about this tiny country, nor did I want to worry those who tend to do so :) El Salvador has recently named by the UN the most violent country in the world as far as homicides per capita are concerned. Yet there is so much more here beyond, between, and beneath the violence that I didn’t want to start there, but I’ve had so many encounters with it, especially in this past week, that to neglect to write about it would be to deny the magnitude of the violence here that is entrenched everywhere yet enveloped in silence.

First, here’s a very generalized attempt to contextualize the current violence a bit, for those of you who aren’t extremely familiar with El Salvador.

Violent repression has been an ongoing occurrence here since Spanish colonization. Indigenous persons have always been treated as if they were less human, and their existence essentially became a crime in 1932. In response to a farmer’s movement uprising (led by Farabundo Martí), there was a massive massacre of thousands of indigenous people. At this point, indigenous clothing, customs, etc. became punishable by death. In the coming years, a series of US backed military regimes then ruled the country, slaughtering anyone involved in resistance movements, be it university students, priests, or pregnant mothers. In the late 1970s the five resistance factions organized under the single banner of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and fought against the US backed Salvadoran army from 1980-1992 when the civil war officially “ended”.

Over 70,000 people were killed throughout the course of the war, and thousands more were disappeared. Despite the thousands of human rights violations perpetrated during this time, the peace accord package included a general amnesty, leaving Salvadoran army officials free to live their lives on beach resorts in Miami and thousands of Salvadoran farmers with open wounds and no hope for justice.

In addition, those between 20 and 40 years old in this country  lived childhoods where violence was the norm.

In the early 1990s, as Salvadorans from Los Angeles began to be deported back to El Salvador, having sought asylum during the war, they brought with them influences from both the MS 13 and 18^th Street gangs. The combination of this influx of gang members, the abundance of arms in the country, and a high level of unemployment following the civil war provided an ideal breeding ground for gangs and organized crime. Yet some attempts to bring peace to post-war El Salvador have largely been based on retributive justice and shaped by polarized political attitudes. Despite these attempts, violence has persisted and now stifles Salvadoran economic growth and creates a culture of fear in which 3 million Salvadorans have emigrated from the country in search of security and employment opportunities.                   

                 

The previous right-wing ARENA government’s approach to dealing with this violence has been to instate the Mano Duro (hard fist) and Super Mano Duro laws

which essentially made it legal to arrest anyone with baggy clothes, or any male youth in a group (including the pizza delivery man on his motorcycle in the community where I work) to hold them for 8 days and beat them in cold cells without food while their records were checked for past crimes. Meanwhile, the people in the legislative assembly, police force, security companies, and armed forces who are making huge profits off of the insecurity and drug trade here continued living their lives as youth were criminalized for their supposed involvement in gangs, the puppets of those higher up who profit from their crimes.

This past year, despite all of their talk of violence prevention and creation of employment opportunities, the first leftist government in the history of this country has passed the anti gang law.  Side effects include NGOs pulling out of violence prevention work in prisons for fear that their work could be considered under this new law as the “financing of gang members”….woo! President Mauricio Funes has also militarized the streets and the prisons, forcing mothers to strip naked each week and be fingered in order to visit their sons who may very well be serving their 2^nd year of prison time without having had a single trial, because the supposed witness (who was killed shortly after the supposed crime) has surprisingly not showed up to testify, and the case has been continually suspended (this is the case of my friend’s brother… Witnesses are everything here, since scientific crime scene data isn’t used and less than 3 percent of crimes are ever brought to justice).

It is really complex, and I could write about this for pages and pages and still never unravel it because I certainly don’t understand all of it….

So there’s a scrambled look at the big picture. To speak more about my experience of how this plays out every day here would require a Lord of the Rings style series of chapter books since I haven’t written about this since August. Rather than attempting that, I’ll just give a glimpse of my past week, as it relates to violence in this country, though I usually hate blogs that give a play by play of each day…

Last Monday I went to visit a friend of mine here who we’ll call Samuel. I first met him last year via the letters that we exchanged while he was being detained in Texas. He lives with his sickly grandmother, other-abled cousin, and her 10-year old son. His home is situated in the middle of a concrete labyrinth of homes… I could never find it on my own. Samuel is 24 years old and has lived more heartbreak and tragedy than I can imagine. As he explains, where he’s from (a very rough part of San Salvador), when you turn 18 you have three options: you can join the military (and provide the gangs with arms), join the police (and cover “rent” money for the gangs), or join the gangs themselves. What these three parties do not want to see is that someone should succeed in life and not join their forces. Samuel, however, had studied through high school with the help of scholarships and did not want to take any of these three routes. Beyond that, he began to work with youth from the area on karate and violence prevention projects.

Shortly after his decision not to join any of these three options, his sister was kidnapped. Samuel was later taken from his house and told that there was a “surprise” waiting for him. He was held down and forced to watch as 150 men raped his sister, including uniformed police officers, uniformed army officials, and neighbors in the gang.

They then tied her to the back of a pick up truck and scraped her around the whole town as an example of what would happen to those who did not obey the gang’s orders. They cut her open from her chin to her vagina, and threw her over a bridged as they laughed and forbid the family from having a wake or a burial for her. 

            When he denounced her killing to the head of the police at the time, he was nearly murdered later that day.  He decided to join the army to protect the rest of his family, after various other family members and friends were killed. Various members of the police and the gang escorted him to enlist, and they made sure he was in the right cartel to assist with their corrupt operations. When he was going to be forced to participate in arms trafficking, he left the army, denounced publicly all of those he knew had been involved in this corruption and with the killings of his sister, aunt, and friends, and was subsequently shot twice.

He fled to the US as a last resort to file a political asylum case where he spent two years and seven months in prison waiting for the case to be processed. He was finally given a work visa in prison, but was deported two weeks later when his asylum case was denied. He was told in court that the conditions he described could not possibly be true because El Salvador is now a peaceful country with a leftist president.

He’s now back in this country with a warrant not to leave because they want his head, since it holds too much knowledge, according to telephone threats he’s received. He continues pushing for his asylum case as well as his sister’s case, yet legal organizations here have no witness protection programs and he continues living in the same home surrounded by the same fear. He has to pay rent for his family’s protection yet can’t get a job for having “deserting” the military on his record.

 If I were to express my rage at an asylum system that lets individuals like “Samuel” be deported in spite of the imminent dangers that await them upon their forced return to their countries, I would just end up cursing for pages on end, so I won’t do that here….. But it infuriates me and is yet another of countless examples that leaves me feeling angry and shameful about the country of my birth and its egotistical immigrant policies that literally mean death to so many people fighting to survive. If anything, the way I’ve told this story has drastically under-exaggerated the intensity and gravity of Samuel’s struggle, resilience, and current danger.

I left Samuel’s house in disbelief, having finally heard his whole story in person, and closed my eyes to a night of violent dreams. Tuesday I woke up and decided to walk up the volcano behind my house, since part of my job includes walking up the volcano that rises above this city in order to try to recruit youth from the volcano’s rural outskirts to become involved in our youth programs. I love doing this and I go much more than I am told to (actually I’ve never been told to go, I just decided that this was going to be part of my job and no one has stopped me yet). It’s really shocking that just above my neighborhood there are so many families without light or water who live in conditions of abject poverty, yet if people stay in the barbed wire concrete world below they’ll never have to think about this reality that sits just above them on the volcano (the one that has landslides every rainy season because promised works of mitigation just never seem to happen year after year in the dry season, and landslides just get chalked up once again to unpreventable acts of God….).

Anyway on one such walk up the volcano two of the kids from the current group that is a part of the vocational training/life skills/community collaboration project accompanied me up the volcano. Somehow as part of the small talk on our long journey up one of them shared the fact that he’d gone shopping with his cousin and while his cousin waited for him on the corner, he’d been shot in the face and killed. Edwin went over to him and told him to wake up, thinking he’d passed out, until he saw the blood covering the concrete. He says he’s been traumatized ever since. Carlos chimed in with the fact that his little brother was shot and killed at age 11 for supposedly gossiping about the gang. The normalcy with which these topics emerged and disappeared from conversation shocked me. Everyone is affected by the violence here and with its normalcy it’s as if it’s seized to be chilling.

Wednesday I went to the girls prison, where I have been spending time two days a week with some really amazing women who have anywhere from 1 to fifteen year sentences. Shortly I’m going to post a poem that one of them wrote about justice that is quite telling and compelling. My friend Maria and I work with the girls individually to assist their creative process as they write poetry or prose. In the process we are invited to bear their stories and accompany a tiny fraction of their time behind bars. There are about forty girls and a one-month old baby who live in the detention center…. and each of their stories shocks me and breaks my heart a little bit more. 

This particular day I spoke with one of the girls whose sister is next door in the women’s prison, two of her brothers are in prison, and one of her brothers was already died because they wouldn’t attend to his bullet wounds at the hospital because he had tattoos, so he died in his fathers’ arms outside. She told me that she felt so much for her brothers, and that she wishes she could serve the 35 years one of them has been sentenced to for him so that he could get out of prison. I’ve found that if someone is in prison here, chances are they have multiple siblings, lovers, parents, etc. in jail as well. They likely come from communities like Samuel’s with few alternatives economically or socially to joining in on criminal activities. Others admit they had good upbringings, and that they just messed up.

One of my friends in prison is serving 2 years for using false papers to be able to see her boyfriend in prison, since due to the recent law changes only family members over 18 can visit inmates. Even so, many don’t have the money to get the paperwork done that they would need before visiting a prison in any event. As a sidenote, there is about a 1 social worker to 2500 inmate ratio (in prisons with 5000 inmates with a capacity for 800)… It’s no wonder no one leaves prisons transformed and the recidivism rate is through the roof.

Thursday rolled around and just when I thought I’d gone the whole day without getting rocked by the intensity of the violence in this country, I came home late and my neighbor was sitting on our front stoop. I asked him where he’d been, since I hadn’t seen him for so long, and he explained to me that his cousin had gotten shot and killed when leaving his birthday party, and when they went to find the body there was a letter by it stating that he (my neighbor) was next. His eyes filled with tears and he told me how furious he is that they’d go after someone like him, who’s just a kid, who doesn’t have anything to do with the gangs, just because they know that if they go after each other there will be consequences.

He goes to school in his friend’s tinted car now and stays in his house otherwise…. He’s 18 and now lives in hiding. He explained to me that his only sister is in the States when he needs her support the most, and he can’t tell any of his friends for fear of the word spreading. All I could do was hug him and let him know once again that I am always willing to listen to him whenever he needs anything….

We’re almost through the week if you’re too depressed by now you can stop…. This is exhausting retelling but it’s obviously nothing writing or reading it compared to those who live this each and every day.

The sun rose once again on Friday, and I went back to the prison. On the bus on the way home we saw a woman juice vendor doubled over with caution tape around her. She was a chubby elderly lady with her apron still strung around her neck. She’d been shot and killed at her juice stand in broad daylight… The news article the next day said they didn’t know why since she’d always paid rent to the gangs in charge of that territory. The most unreal part of the whole incident for me was the way in which everyone on the bus looked over for an instant as if it were a dead bird on the side of the road, and then focused back ahead. As I got off the bus I asked a woman getting off ahead of me if she’d seen the woman and she said, yes, but that’s really common, especially in this area. I remembered the words of a taxi driver here that have stuck with me…. He said that we are in a war here, but it is so much worse than the civil war because there is no defined enemy and there’s no way to be uninvolved. There are more arms in the country and homicides per day than there were during the war, and there is chilling a distrust between neighbors, families, friends…

Saturday was a really beautiful day because we went on an outing with the youth group in the community where I spend my weekends. We went for a two-hour walk to a river where, thankfully, we didn’t have cell phone service all day long. After a great day of rest and play with some youth who had never been to a river before, the calls began to come in. My friend Yuma was ahead of me and as she hung up the phone her face her eyes filled with tears as she said, guys, they killed Koki.

Koki is one of the kids from the community who had just turned 18. He had been in my English classes years ago and had been in the youth group as well. His family is huge and so we spent the rest of the walk keeping the news from his cousins who are in the group until we got back to the community. Arriving back to our urban reality only to prepare the community center for the wake was surreal. What a welcome back to reality from the day at the river. Welcome back to the senseless violence that consumes this place. Welcome back to the familiar scene of men playing cards and drinking heavily outside all night, awaiting free coffee and sweet bread, while all of the women inside say rosary after rosary for the soul of the deceased and prepare food to feed the whole community.

Koki was shot twice in the face and killed, but he’d been killed a week before and it had taken that long to find the body. His fourteen-year old sister recognized him in the morgue…. Luckily his was the only body they hadn’t thrown into a mass grave mid-week, as is customary with the bodies that no one has yet claimed.

I have seared in my memory the image of Koki’s mother opening up the casket to see the bag over his head, since they wouldn’t let her see his face because he already had worms…. I held his youngest sister Sandy’s shaking body so that she wouldn’t fall as she gripped the iron bars on the window peered in to watch her entire family hold her mother’s falling frame.

In between her shaking sobs I’d hear remarks like, well, he was gay, the Lord always punish hardest…. Which filled me with such deep sadness. Instead of using this experience of shared pain as a time to reflect on the fact that no one had ever accepted Koki as he was … that he was the butt of every joke… Instead it becomes a justified killing under hushed breath.

Later on as we were singing Hail Marys I noticed that they’d propped up a picture with a lotion bottle on the top of Koki’s coffin of the two of us smiling wide with our arms around each other years ago. This image hit me so hard, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had be the last thing he’d said to me was “you don’t talk to me anymore, do you?” because I’d barely been present to him in these past few months. His death for me is an invitation to dive more deeply into the margins… to seek out and accompany those who I know are suffering, even if I have no idea how their situation will ever change in the context of this country… this lifetime.

We accompanied his body all night long, which is customary here, until we marched behind him in the burial procession to the cemetery on Sunday morning. I will never forget holding Sandy up as she sobbed at the gravesite screaming, “I love you Koki, please don’t cover him with dirt!” Every shovelful of dust swirled back upwards with the wind and the morning light’s tracked it’s upward journey. Not even the earth wants to bury him, I thought. He’s too young. He’d just begun…

As I held Sandy, wondering why no one else in her family seemed to worry about her, the youngest sister.  As I stood in this mix of grief and exhaustion, I froze the faces of all of those around me and felt a deep, gritty gratitude for the opportunity to still accompany this community, three years later. To be alongside of them even in the most difficult times… I saw kids from the youth group who previously served to disrupt English class as many times as possible in a day, who put their arms around crying cousins, nephews, aunts, sisters and held on.  I saw nearly the entire youth group stay up all night by the family’s side and donate to Koki’s family all of the remaining group funds they’d raised ($25). In this crazy mixture of emotions gratitude whispered her way in… for the chance to be, and be here, in the midst of this chaos. To take part in the growth of so many young lights who tiny bit by tiny bit are (or at least know they are capable of) altering the patterns of relationships that have proven to be so destructive in their family, community, and country’s histories.

If anyone finished reading this, they get a gold star. If not, at least I finally took the chance to sort through a week of my time here and unpack it a bit, so as not to just coast along the surface of it all here without acknowledging the pain, desperation, and flashes of gritty gratitude that fill many of the pages of my days here.