We
arrived here in San Salvador, El Salvador only four days ago. The 15 of us live
under one roof in a bed and breakfast, which for the time being is home. We
have a beautiful backyard/courtyard area, along with many other cozy living
areas around the house. Though we have only been here for 4 days, it feels like
we have learned so much and there is still a wealth of information to be taken
in.
In our few days here we have had a
couple different meetings with professors from the University of Central
America (UCA), first to get the history of the country, then to get the more
recent events and current issues. The class that coincides with El Salvador is
Liberation Theologies. In order to understand the current political, economic
and social situation, we have to learn about the past. El Salvador, like
Guatemala is now just 20 years out of a very brutal civil war. Also very similar
to Guatemala, now 20 years after the peace accords have been signed, nothing
much has really changed. The oppressive economic, political and social
structures that sparked the brutal war are still in place. Though the military
may not outright be slaughtering its people it kills them economically and
politically.
While the war here “officially” started
1980 the situation here was a very brutal hostile one leading up to its
beginning. Liberation Theology Started in Central America during the 1970’s.
The whole idea behind the movement was the people (the lower class/impoverished
peoples) rising up and deciding that simply praying, and waiting for “God” to
save them wasn’t going to fix their situation, they needed to be proactive in
changing their government. Throughout Latin America there were many different movements
of Liberation Theology, but El Salvador has one of the richest histories (We
met with Oscar Romero’s secretary at the time of his assassination!! How cool!).
There was this large movement of the people joining together to fight for their
rights against their greatly oppressive government. It mostly started out as
small pockets of people forming groups around the country, but would later form
together to become the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front aka
the FMLN. This group of people fought against the brutal Salvadorian Army, an
army who was responsible for some hundreds and hundreds of massacres all around
the country.
As I mention
before we have been speaking with professors from the UCA and we had to opportunity
on one of those two occasions to go on campus for a lecture. Which was cool to
get to see a college campus here, but the most powerful of all, is the fact
that one of those massacres happened on the campus of UCA. Six Jesuit Priests were brutally slaughtered one
morning, along with two other innocent bystanders, “No one was to be left to
testify”. We were able to take a tour of
the museum there on campus, and tour the sight where the murders occurred.
Having that opportunity to be there tour the campus was moving to say the
least. Among other things, the museum contained
the clothes the priests were murdered in, photographs of the scene of the crime
and part of the tour is even the room the two by standards (a mother and her
daughter; of the lands-keeper to UCA) were murdered in.
Obviously
all of this was very hard to take in, and very gruesome. However, I think what
sickened me the most is the fact that my own country U.S.A funded every bit of
that war. The U.S funded the Salvadorian military (along with other L.A
countries) to fights its own people who were accused of becoming communist. It’s a big game of chest, with just a few
million lives at stake. The idea of this
makes me ill, knowing that here and all over the world we have funded and are
funding wars were we don’t fully understand the whole impact of our choices.
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