Santa Marta, El Salvador

“We are very poor” Hotche told me my first night in his house. We sat in a rough circle on plastic restaurant chairs as the candles flickered and the rain pounded steadily onto the corrugated roof. The power had gone off that evening and we knew we’d have to wait for morning before the line was repaired. To pass the time the whole family sat looking over old pictures from the few precious albums kept hidden in the back room. Their story, told through a few old pictures, is one that seems typical of the region, at least to an outsider like me, in that they were seemingly apolitical till the army attacked their village and they were forced to flee. The El Salvadoran military seemingly never learned the “hearts and minds” ideology adopted by their U.S counterparts and so, through their vicious tactics against civilians, successfully managed to create far more guerillas than they killed. The men of Santa Marta mostly went to the mountains to fight while their women carried possessions and children across the fearsome river Lempa and into a refugee camp in Honduras. “That’s me in Honduras” Hotche told me, pointing to a faded shot of a man in shirtsleeves standing expressionless over a grave, “we had to leave my grandmother there.” Fifteen years later Hotche and his wife have returned, plus three children all of who were born in the camp.
They’ve come back to a land only marginally better from the one they knew ten years ago. The poverty is still there despite the red FMLN’s Plastered on every surface and the sleazy guarantees broadcast through television by the ARENA party. There is still mostly bean puree for breakfast in Santa Marta, a town actually far better off than many in the region. That clinic there has some drugs and though they’re few in numbers it’s a far site worse in nearby San Sunte’ where most citizens can’t afford the medication their forced to buy. The violence also is not over, vicious gangs have taken over the place of the death squads and armed boy-soldiers with M-16s almost as big as they are patrol the streets of quiet Victoria. As Dr Perez once told me, “I think now is much more dangerous than in the war. In the war there were two sides and you knew who they were, now anyone could kill you.”
For Hotche and his family the worst seems to be behind them, but others are less sure. According to one former guerilla I met they’ve kept large amounts of their former weapons hidden in the mountains, should the conflict start again one day. If it did, if the war between left and righ started tomorrow, the most shocking thing for one to realize is that it would change very little. There would still be thousands of pirate DVD merchants scraping a living on the streets of San Salvador, international aid organizations would continue to dump millions of Dollars, Euros and Pounds into the country to see it quickly disappear. The social and geo-political issues in El Salvador are so complicated and the roots so deep that, if anything, it will take a major push by the entire country to get to some compromise between the haves and the have-not’s. For now Hotche continues to live in abject poverty in a small town that remains invisible to many, even inside El Salvador.