32

p WHEN I WOKE UP it was late afternoon. A cluster of little boys eyed me with curiosity. Slowly, I began to hear a soft but constant slapping sound nearby. I turned to see a group of Salvadoran women patting balls of dough into tortillas and throwing them onto the top of a large clay griddle. Across a dusty courtyard of sorts were six or eight young men sitting around cleaning weapons or lounging while they listened to a radio.

p A swarthy Salvadoran, handsome and thickly bearded, came up to my hammock and welcomed me. He said his name was Ram6n and asked if I was hungry. When I nodded yes, he went over to the women and brought our dinner— two quarter-inch-thick corn tortillas topped with red pinto beans and a little salt. This was the Salvadoran "Big Mac,” their staple meal which, for the next twelve months, would also be the mainstay of my diet.

p We ate together. Ramdn told me that he, too, was a physician and had been in his final year of study when the Salvadoran military occupied the country’s one medical school. A number of his classmates were killed, others fled. At the time, Ram6n had been serving his obligatory year in the countryside and decided then to stay with the campesinos. He said that other responsibilities were keeping him from practicing much medicine now. I wanted to ask about those responsibilities—he was very patient with my Spanish—and a million other things, but I held my tongue.

p I was less restrained with my food. As I gobbled it down, Ramdn ate slowly and deliberately, as if no meal should be taken for granted. Some several minutes after I was done, he finished his last morsel and then asked if I would mind seeing a patient. I was pleased by the request for a consultation, and told him so.

p We walked across the village to a two-room adobe house where I found a young woman, possibly twenty, lying on a low pallet, breastfeeding her newborn infant. There was very 33 little light inside, barely enough to make out the patient and the worn features of an older woman, presumably her mother, who sat by her side quietly brushing flies from the baby’s eyes.

p A dog chased a chicken through the room as Ramdn introduced me and explained that he reluctantly had performed a Caesarean section. That was seven days ago. The baby seemed to be doing well, he went on, but the mother was now feverish with lower abdominal pain and a vaginal discharge.

p There was no soap in the house, so we scrubbed with the bars I’d appropriated from my hotel room in Tegucigalpa. Then I began my examination. Her incision, done with razor blades, was ragged but healing nicely. I saw no sign of infection around it.

p Her uterus, however, was flaccid. I noted the discharge was the color and consistency of melted chocolate. These symptoms, together with her history as provided by Ramdn, pointed to a diagnosis of post-partum endometritis, a simple womb infection that is quite common, especially following Caesarean section.

p Endometritis was Ramdn’s diagnosis as well; he seemed pleased and relieved that I shared his opinion. Better still, I had with me a supply of ampicillin capsules that would be far more effective in combating the infection than penicillin, the only antibiotic at Ramdn’s disposal.

p After examining the baby as well, I asked Ramdn about his decision to operate. There had been no alternative, he said. The mother had endured seventy-two hours of obstructed labor because her pelvis was too small. She would have died had he not surgically removed the baby.

p "Where did you operate?" I asked, expecting him to indicate the direction of his clinic. Instead, he gestured toward the adjoining room and a small table that stood at its center.

p "Our clinic was filled with stretcher cases,” Ramdn explained. “We had to operate here."

34

p He was so matter of fact about it!

p The Caesarean had been done at night by candlelight using only local anesthesia. While he cut into her with his razor blade scalpels, the patient had been awake and alert.

p To me, it was a miracle that Ram6n had saved both mother and child. I couldn’t imagine then attempting such a procedure myself. But this case was my introduction. Within months, I would be performing amputations with a Swiss Army knife and suturing wounds with dental floss.

p This was to be battlefield medicine in El Salvador.

p I ARRIVED THERE in the middle of the local dry season. It hadn’t rained anything but bullets and mortar rounds for many weeks, and it wouldn’t rain again until May. The sun seemed to have sucked the countryside dry. Dust coated everything, and the region’s few stream beds were sinews of baked clay.

p Quipurito had been largely destroyed during a government offensive of the preceding November. Once the soldiers left, its three hundred or so citizens returned to patch up their old houses or build new ones.

p What I encountered was thirty to forty adobe huts, some brand new, others partially rebuilt, a few abandoned entirely to the weeds. Wherever possible, the houses were sited under oak or broad-canopied ceiba trees for protection against the sun as well as from the government helicopters.

p The huts were connected by narrow, winding lanes and rocky footpaths along which grew a smattering of tropical flowers, mostly brilliant red hibiscus and bougainvillea, that lent some color to the otherwise drab landscape. Insects of every imaginable sort kept up a background din of chirps and buzzes. The air smelled of desiccated vegetation and sweat, tortillas and garbage.

p The courtyard, where I had slept the day before, was the community center. Ramon, after our first consultation, revealed that his "other responsibilities" included being the 35 local guerrilla comandante. He held his meetings in the courtyard and maintained his headquarters there.

p The clinic, where Lupe, Francisco, and I slept that first night along with the patients and staff, was located some distance away. It was no more than a converted adobe hut, indistinguishable from any of the peasants’ houses except for the amount and type of trash strewn around it. Quipuritans, like most campesinos, were casual about sanitation.

p The building was alive with fleas. As soon as we had strung our hammocks and had settled in for the night, they swarmed and skittered all over us. Luckily, I received few bites. Francisco and Lupe, however, awoke the next morning covered with them, especially in places where a band or strap of their clothing had been tight against their skin. I assumed I was spared because I slept naked. They angrily assumed I was spared because I used a private hoard of insect repellent.

p At daybreak, we learned that a Honduran border patrol had captured and killed the two corrects sent to retrieve Francisco’s and Lupe’s packs. A third messenger entrusted with my duffle of medicines had managed to elude the soldiers. Lupe, Francisco, and I were stunned. We had taken our own safe arrival for granted.

p While I made it my first task to find a shove! to start cleaning up around the clinic, she led its staff of young sanitarios (peasant health workers) to the courtyard where she undertook to explain a battlefield tracheotomy. Never mind that Lupe had never performed one herself, her clear intent was to upstage me.

p Ramon, I remember, regarded us both with amusement. There we were, two-thirds of his medical-relief column, and the first thing one of us did was teach tracheotomies while the other attacked the trash. He was too much of a gentleman to tell either of us what fools we were making of ourselves.

p At midday, the sanitarios returned with bewildered looks; one appeared worried and kept rubbing her throat. They, and Lupe, found me in a circle of campesinos, who were 36 equally confused by my primitive Spanish and pantomime of someone shoveling garbage.

p I would later wonder at their patience with me. I came into their midst thinking I was well-prepared to help civilians living under primitive conditions. Part of my medical training included a year of work with villagers in India, and I had taken a master’s degree in public health. The theory and practice of preventive medicine, the importance of sanitation, the organizational approach to community health were all very familiar to me. It seemed only logical to apply these lessons to their situation.

p What I didn’t then understand is that in El Salvador medical treatment is viewed as a semi-mystical affair in which every ache or pain is treated with a pill or an injection, if possible. The practice is not fostered by doctors; most rural Salvadorans have never seen a doctor. It is a result of medicines of every type being urged on the people by over- the-counter diagnosticians. Product safety regulation is unknown in that country.

p Typical of the abuses is the widespread use of steroids among the peasants. Most steroids are powerful and quite dangerous to use without supervision. Yet Salvadoran pharmacists routinely suggest one such drug as an appetite stimulant for children. A mother whose child might be malarial or full of parasites will be advised to give the youngster this product to make him eat better, which is a little like prescribing chemotherapy for a common cold.

p A real doctor with a bagful of medicines, then, is practically a shaman to the peasants. The residents of Quipurito were understandably perplexed when I tried to hand out shovels instead of shots.

p There was also the question of priorities. After repairing and rebuilding their shelters, the villagers had begun to dig bomb shelters and to fortify their earthen battlements. Another government offensive was imminent. It made no sense to tidy up the clinic just so the government Hueys could bomb it again.

37

p The sanitarios saved the situation by telling me that the assembled campesinos had come great distances to be treated. Unless I started seeing patients soon, many would have to return to their villages without having received any care.

p THE AFTERNOON INTRODUCED ME to a fair sampling of the range of medicine I’d practice over the next year. In varying order of importance, the campesinos’ health problems were a function of inadequate diet, chronic disease, woeful sanitation, lack of education, and warfare.

p Obstetrics and pediatrics were important because of the high birth rate. Having many children is typical of Third World nations where children are a poor family’s insurance against old age. As I had seen in India, the peasants of El Salvador routinely expected half their children to die before reaching their teens. As long as this continues to be the case, the women will continue to bear as many children as they can lest they and their husbands attain old age with no family, especially sons, to care for them.

p Many of my patients were pregnant women suffering from obvious anemia. Beans and tortijjas are poor sources of iron. The little iron they get, they lose to pregnancy, malaria, and parasites. The children, too, were anemic from malnutrition and parasitic infections. Many of them suffered from chronic diarrhea and, consequently, dehydration.

p There were several wounds to attend to, including that of a woman who had recently delivered a baby after walking six days with a grenade fragment in her leg. Her baby was fine by local standards; it was underweight for its age, anemic, and covered with lesions caused by scabies, a kind of mite. The mother’s leg wound, which had abscessed, was even more serious. I had to make a channel for it to drain.

p Like Joaquin, the campesino whose torture wounds I had treated in Salinas, there were several depressives at the clinic. Years of fleeing government offensives, watching each other die, and struggling in the interim to find enough to eat 38 had left these people mentally disorganized. One moment they would stand listlessly before me. The next, they would (all into spontaneous sobs.

p The clinic exhausted me. I was overwhelmed by my sense of inadequacy before the challenge of easing their tragic burden of disease and trauma. After treating fifty or more of them, I ate my beans and tortillas and retired to my hammock where not even the fleas could distract me from the sadness I felt.

p I conducted another clinic the next day, then toured the village. Everyone seemed occupied with some task. Most of the men were working on bomb shelters or digging trenches. Many of the women were busy grinding corn for that night’s dinner. Some of the adults attended a prayer meeting, while others were gathered in literacy classes.

p When the children’s school let out, I found Nico drilling his squad of corrects. They listened in sober silence as he delivered a little speech, no’doubt in emulation of the ones he had heard Ram6n deliver to the guerrillas. At his command, they all saluted and then broke for a soccer game. For the next two hours, they could be heard laughing and shouting a half mile away.

p AFTER SUPPER, everyone joined in the courtyard for a sort of village sing-along. The songs were all revolutionary numbers that sounded, to my ear, like a cross between Mexican and U.S. country-and-western music. The words to one of them went something like, "We’re not Russians, and we’re not Cubans, too. We are the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front.” In Spanish, it all rhymed.

p Several guerrillas, or companeros as they are called (a term that combines our sense of partner and friend), were standing near me. I asked one of them why they would sing such a song that seemed to repudiate their leftist allies.

p He was puzzled that I would ask such a question. According to him, the guerrillas resented that every newspaper they 39 saw or broadcast they heard seemed to credit the Cubans or the Nicaraguans with supplying them arms. Their victories were being wrongly credited to foreigners. The.y were irritated by the inference that they couldn’t fight for themselves, and they even suspected the Cubans or Soviets didn’t mind this propaganda.

p In one of my several long conversations with Ram6n, he explained that the sensitivity over foreign involvement in their civil war was partly a matter of pride and partly a question of practicality. Accepting Soviet-bloc weapons or allowing a Cuban or Nicaraguan to fight alongside the companeros would be inviting even more direct intervention by the United States. The guerrillas were not about to give the Reagan administration a pretext for sending U.S. troops against them.

p Ram6n was a study in contrasts. His rhetoric in front of the guerrillas was heated and full of obligatory slogans and epithets. He referred to the president as "the Fascist Reagan" as mechanically as you might say, "my brother-in-law Bob.” In private, he was reflective and compassionate.

p He clearly detested bloodshed. Several campesinos had told me of his daring in the last government offensive, how Ram6n and his companeros had fought very bravely to hold off the enemy soldiers long enough for several hundred civilians to evacuate into the hills. But he declined to discuss these battlefield exploits.

p We talked one night about my conversion to non-violence and on another about Ch6 Guevara, the Argentinian of Cuban revolutionary fame who, like us, was a doctor. On a third occasion, he outlined his ideals of a future Salvadoran health care system not dissimilar from the socialized medicine of Britain or Canada. When he spoke at all of his military duties, it was only to explain his efforts at erasing illiteracy among the volunteers and to overcome their machismo. A guerrilla had to be more than a fighter, he believed. The companeros had also to be examples to the rest of society.

p J dwell on Ram6n because he, like Nico, was my 40 introduction to the revolutionary ethos, the character of this insurgency. They did not just oppose the old order, they were fighting for a new one.

p It would be easy to romanticize the two of them, the traumatized orphan and the heroic comandante, especially when their principles and dignity are contrasted with the terrorism wrought by the Salvadoran right. But a truer portrait would be of a man and a boy caught in the vortex of revolutionary violence.

p In a rational world, Nico would have a kite and a pet dog and his mother’s lap for comfort. Ramon, then thirty-two and married, would have been a contented country doctor. Instead, Nico will probably catch a bullet and die with a revolutionary slogan on his lips. Ramon is already gone.

p Months later, a sanitaria told me Ramon was resting in his .hammock when the pin from a grenade on his hip fell to the floor with a tinkle. There was no time to heave the device out the door. As three of his men looked on, Ramon threw himself into a corner and absorbed the full impact of the exploding grenade with his body.

p They rolled him over to find him barely breathing, clutching his lacerated liver and intestines. A call went out for a medic, but the comandante refused any treatment. He said that to operate was a waste of equipment and anesthesia. Then, for the last minutes of his life, Ram6n spoke of the future. For his death to mean anything, he told them, they were not to mourn him but to carry on.

p I WAS SEVERAL DAYS IN QUIPURITO before being told of my ultimate destination—Guazapa. To my great dismay, it was not free of civilians as I’d been led to believe by the radio reports I’d heard in Managua. There were 9,000^ campesinos there and they had sustained extensive casualties in the recent offensive. Ram6n told me the government body counts were comprised almost exclusively of slain civilians.

p Cuazapa, like the region around Quipurito, was referred 41 to by the guerrillas as a "control zone.” Nowhere in the country were they yet strong enough to actually hold territory or to engage the enemy in set battles. Control zones were rebel-occupied in the sense that death squads did not operate in them, and the soldiers entered only during invasions.

p The bulk of controlled territories lay in the north and eastern sectors of El Salvador. Cuazapa was more isolated, an area of about two hundred square miles surrounding a dormant volcano twenty miles north of the capital, San Salvador. It would be a three-day march south from Quipurito, across government-held territory.

p Ramdn’s last words to me were a request. An American film crew had come to Quipurito, and they wished to interview me for a freelance documentary they were producing. At first I refused them, but Ramon urged me to reconsider, suggesting I might accomplish much if Americans heard me explain why I was there.

p I did so with great reluctance; my commitment did not include propagandizing for the revolution or for myself. I was not in El Salvador to endorse killing under any banner, or to imply any individual courage. I’d seen enough of heroes in Vietnam to eschew the notion of becoming one myself.

p The film team, headed by a Californian named Frank Christopher, agreed to focus on medical issues. When it was over, Christopher and his cameraman, the late John Chapman, surprised me with the announcement that they were coming along to Cuazapa. We left the next morning.

p Thirty of us made the trip. Along with myself and Lupe (Francisco remained behind in Quipurito), there were the four U.S. filmmakers, a campesino family traveling to Cuazapa for a reunion with their sons, and our guerrilla escort.

p The trail was steep and serpentine as we marched down from the highlands of Quipurito and across the dry hills of Chalatenango Province. Our column leader, a martinet, kept up a murderous pace that soon had myself and most of the older campesinos gasping for breath.

p Endlessly, it seemed, we’d plod down one side of a hill 42 only to grope our way up the other. Because it was the dry season, fresh water was as scarce as the sun was merciless. What little water we did find came from foul mudholes.

p The vegetation was mostly tufts of grass poking through the rocky soil and a few isolated scrub trees. On a couple of occasions, we came across a native fruit tree that the guerrillas would expertly strip of its plum-like fruit. Otherwise, I saw only a few patches of corn stubble and parched bean fields.

p We saw more vultures than people until we neared Cuazapa. Since El Salvador is the most densely populated country in the western hemisphere, I wondered where all the people had gone.

p The answer lay with the government Hueys we saw from time to time that day. For months, they had ferried invasion forces in and out of Chalatenango, bringing scorched-earth devastation to the entire region. We passed gutted village after gutted village, uninhabitable ruins whose owners had long since fled to Honduras or guerrilla-controlled zones to the north and east. Not only were the houses ruined and the livestock butchered, but objects as benign as fruit trees were often, apparently purposefully, destroyed. What I didn’t see first-hand were the ruined granaries. The government soldiers had seen to it that starvation would set in before the May rains brought, another planting season.

p The column leader allowed us but three brief stops during the first day’s ten-hour march. Juanita, a middle-aged (that is to say, old) peasant, complained from the first hour of chest pains and shortness of breath. It might have been angina or asthma, exhaustion, dehydration, or all four; there was little time to diagnose and treat her on the trail. John Chapman, the American cameraman, collapsed about eight hours into the march with vertigo, nausea, vomiting, and teeth-rattling chills: heat exhaustion. By the time we stopped that night, fully a third of the column, guerrillas included, were stumbling and straggling.

p For me, it was the beginning of many months of foot 43 agony. The pack of equipment shifted my center of balance and with its added weight put tremendous pressure on the balls of both feet. As a result, I later developed plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the connective tissue. In time, all ten toenails turned black and fell off.

p WE BIVOUACKED THAT FIRST NIGHT in a ravaged and deserted village. John Chapman’s symptoms had worsened throughout the day to the point where he had to be carried in a makeshift stretcher. After seeing to Juanita, and the less severely disabled members of the column, I stayed up with John all night. He could not take liquids because of intractable vomiting. The only available remedy for nausea was in suppository form and long since gone liquid. In desperation—and hope—I injected him with an anti-psychotic drug because I vaguely remembered it had a strong anti-emetic side effect. It worked and its use marked the beginning of much seat-of-the-pants medical care.

p From midnight on, I rehydrated him with spoonfuls of a Tang mixture. The column leader told me to “make” him well by morning because we had a rendezvous with a ferry in forty-eight hours and there could be no more delays! Several other members of the column collapsed before we made it.

p The next two days of marching differed little from the first except for the random gunfire we began to hear. Most of it was far off and indistinct. Save for the unmistakable staccato of the machine guns, it sounded like deer-hunting season in the mountains of Colorado.

p The last and most difficult part of the journey had to be accomplished at night. We made it to a point overlooking the north shore of Lake Suchitlaii, a distance of about forty miles north of San Salvador and about twenty miles from the Cuazapa volcano. To our left, I could make out the lights of the giant Fifth of November dam. Ahead, across the lake and to our right, I could see nothing. There was no moon yet and all of the Cuazapa "control zone" was blacked out.

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p As we began the long descent down to a gravel, eastwest highway and then to the boats that would take us across the lake to the village of Copapayo, my only sensation besides fear was the electric shocks of pain running up my legs from my abused feet. Silence, I thought, seemed paramount; it was from the shore below us that we’d heard the machine gun fire earlier that day, and there was no way of knowing if enemy troops were still in the vicinity. But I didn’t know then that the army troops try to avoid fighting at night. We came crashing down the slope like a herd of buffalo. A couple of the companeros even stopped to light cigarettes! The author of the "Night-fighters’ Manual" would have blanched at their recklessness.

p Across the deserted highway, we passed several adobe houses that had burst like egg shells from the impact of five-hundred-pound bombs. A phosphoric ash, presumably from rockets used to spot the targets, glistened in the dark like snow on the ground.

p We made Copapayo by midnight and at dawn pushed immediately on to the village of Tenango directly east of the volcano. We rested there and ate before leaving at nightfall on the last leg of the trip. In the dark, we traversed an enormous chasm I would come to call the "Grand Canyon."

p The moon came out that night, casting a soft blue light on us in the canyon. There was a short briefing held, in which we were given instructions for crossing our final obstacle, the heavily patrolled, paved road that connects San Salvador to the south with the town of Suchitoto and its garrison five miles to our north, near Copapayo. For the first time, I sensed battle tension among the guerrillas; unlike our pellmell charge down to the lake, this crossing would be dangerous.

p After we climbed up the western slope of the abyss, we walked single-file toward the road, keeping a distance of five yards between us. Once there, the companeros fanned out on both sides and then with hand signals sent us running, one by one, across the road.

p Once reassembled on the far side, we resumed our march 45 up the volcano itself, a black, forbidding mass in the moonlight. Since I knew we were nearing the heart of the control zone, I expected to see fortifications. If this were Viet Cong territory, there would be trenches and tunnels and bunkers honeycombing the mountainside. Nothing of the sort was in place on Cuazapa. Along the winding trail, the only structures we saw were three- and four-house settlements called caserios smouldering in ruins. The air was thick with the stench of death—livestock, I hoped—from a government attack-just a few days ago. I had to hold a handkerchief over my nose as we skirted the bombed-out settlements and moved north along the side of the mountain to our destination, the village of Llano Rancho. As the sun rose behind us, I saw the first tiled roof. A collective sigh went out of the column. We had made it.

p Someone handed me a cold tortilla that I sat chewing while staring up through the mists toward the volcano’s summit. I was suffering acute fatigue, a boneweariness lightened only by the satisfaction that after nearly half a year of trying I had made it to this village on the eastern slope of an extinct volcano in El Salvador. Ironically, after all that trouble, I was within an easy hour’s drive of San Salvador and, had I wished, might have made it to the airport and back to California for a late lunch that day.

p The view from Llano Rancho was magnificent. Far below the coffee bushes that surrounded us, I beheld sugarcane fields together with low brush that gave way to a panorama stretching north to Lake Suchitl&n and east into the heart of El Salvador. As I swallowed the last doughy morsel of my tortilla, I reflected on the somber, primitive beauty of the country.

p Later that morning, I was introduced to Jasmine, the medical responsable (director) for the Guazapa Front. Jasmine was a stout and stolid Salvadoran who did not invite familiarity. She wore her hair in two utilitarian braids and kept her smile, which was lovely, mostly to herself. I imagine she was somewhere in her late twenties.

46

p Her expression did become considerably brighter when we went through the pack of medical equipment and the duffle of medicines I brought. In total, the supplies and medicine were about what a rural general practitioner in the United States would need for a week of routine doctoring. But they were twice the total Jasmine had on hand to minister to 9,000 civilians and 1,000 combatants in Cuazapa. She fingered several of the instruments as if they were rare and precious objects; to her, they were.

p After a day’s rest, she had me brought to Palo Grande, a village a short distance from Llano Rancho where their central “hospital” was located. It was a small adobe structure divided into three rooms and outfitted with a porch. The hospital was a pathetic, dusty affair with no electricity or indoor plumbing. I counted six beds.

p There was also the same inattention to basic sanitation that I had seen in Quipurito. Used syringes, moldering wound dressings, discarded ampuls—the septic refuse of medical work—lay strewn around the ground. This time, I ignored the mess and followed Jasmine into the building to meet her patients.

p One was a silent companero with a palate injury and a great jagged hole in his skull. He lay motionless while a young girl, one of Jasmine’s nurses, spoon-fed him some liquids. Another patient had been blinded. His left hand was amputated, and his right hand was a burnt and mangled stump. The other two patients were a little girl and an old man, both with several leg wounds from mortar fragments.

p Only the absolutely immobile, Jasmine explained, were kept in the hospital. All the rest of her cases were seen on an outpatient basis. If they couldn’t walk, their families or friends brought them to the hospital on stretchers, often over very tortuous terrain.

p Elsewhere on the Front, her network of sanitarios ran small clinics where the care was even more haphazard than it was here. This was make-do medicine. With her limited formal education, Jasmine said, and with limited supplies and 47 limited time, she couldn’t begin to address the basic health needs of the people, let alone see to the sick and dying left after each enemy offensive. She was plainly very grateful I’d come to help.

p THE GUAZAPA FRONT, at that time, was filling with guerrilla columns as the rebel command prepared an offensive to disrupt the March 28, 1982, national elections. On about the sixteenth, or a couple days after I’d arrived in Llano Rancho, I heard U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton on my pocket radio. "The forthcoming elections,” he told an interviewer, "will be the most revolutionary event in Salvadoran history.” He went on to encourage the guerrillas to lay down their arms and to participate in the elections.

p Hinton was being either naive or disingenuous. Any election in El Salvador was a sham as long as the death squads remained unbridled. Only eighteen months earlier, six FDR leaders tried to hold a press conference in San Salvador. They were kidnapped by a truckload of uniformed soldiers and several men in street clothes. The next day the mutilated bodies of the six were discovered strewn outside the city. Thousands more trade unionists, teachers, doctors, and peasants had been murdered since. Under those circumstances, campaigning for office under the FDR banner was tantamount to suicide.

p The guerrillas quite naturally took Hinton’s call as evidence of U.S. treachery. It is difficult to trust a man who invites you to walk into a bullet. Unfortunately for me, their suspicion wasn’t confined to the Ambassador. Any norteamericano was apt to be viewed with hostility.

p A note about norteamericanos. Many Latins see it as a sign of cultural arrogance for us to assume the term " American" applies only to ourselves. To underscore that point, they call Mexicans Mejicanos, and Canadians Canadienses. Americans are norteamericanos or, sometimes, fanquis.

p I felt shades and varieties of their aversion the moment I 48 stepped into Jose’s Cherokee. Few of the others were as overt as Lupe, but many of the companeros were distinctly cool or avoided my company altogether.

p My decision to keep a diary did nothing to allay this distrust. But I felt it important to maintain a record of my time there for several reasons. For one, I have forgotten much of what happened around me in Vietnam. If I was to bear witness to what I saw in El Salvador, I wanted to retain details, not just impressions. I also did not know if I’d leave Cuazapa alive. The revolution could swallow me the way it had so many others. If it did, I wanted some tangible artifact by which my family and friends might understand what I’d done.

p It turned out to serve another function, as well. There were so many obstacles t<5 open communication in Guazapa, my poor Spanish, the culture gap, the need for secrecy, etc., that I needed some outlet for my thoughts, especially complaints. Had I not deemed the diary a necessary exercise as well as a therapeutic one, I would have dumped it after the first few baleful stares. The best I could do was to try not to seem too secretive about it and to hold my peace the many times I knew it had been taken and read.

p Jasmine wasn’t nearly so paranoid as the others, or so spontaneous, either. Hers was an extremely sober nature. She wasn’t an automaton; Jasmine was as compassionate as she was earnest. She simply had no time for distractions.

p She also knew nothing of the terms of my service. Either Jaime and Carmen in Mexico City hadn’t troubled themselves to pass along this information or, as was likely, the rebels’ tenuous system of radio relays and codes, which changed daily, was overburdened by the several sentences it would take to explain Quakerism.

p It didn’t occur to me to repeat my conditions when I met her; it was difficult enough with her poor English and my worse Spanish to discuss the simplest issues. Had I thought to bring it up, I might have saved myself a tremendous amount of distress.

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p But I didn’t.

p When Jasmine suggested I go southwest around the volcano to El Salitre, I assumed it was because the civilians there needed me. She said that since we were the >only two doctors for 10,000 people spread over two hundred square miles, it made no sense for us both to be stationed in Palo Grande. Unaware of my moral preference for working among civilians, Jasmine didn’t add that Salitre was one of the staging areas for the guerrillas’ election day attack on San Salvador. She didn’t tell me that I’d be expected to accompany them.

p SALITRE WAS NEAR THE SOUTHERNMOST BORDER of the Control zone, an irregular area that would have appeared on a map as a great runny egg. Its yoke, the volcano peak, was held by government troops and resupplied by helicopter. They launched periodic raids from this base, as well as random mortar attacks and sniper fire.

p From Llano Rancho, located a mile or so down the eastern slope from the base, the Front’s farthest reach was twelve miles northeast to Copapayo on the southern shore of Lake Suchitlan. Due north from Llano Rancho was the farm belt, several square miles of flat, arable land where campesino collectives grew corn, beans, and sugarcane that once belonged to the local dueno (landlord). Northern Guazapa’s principal villages, Delicias and Chaparral, were the most prosperous of all the Front’s communities. The countryside just west of the volcano was rugged, largely uninhabited, and of little consequence to either the guerrillas or the government.

p The southern sector was nearly as forbidding as the west. Much of it was on a thirty to forty percent grade and is covered with dense underbrush. The trails were no more than footpaths laid out not for convenience but for the best cover from surveillance. To the soldiers in the volcano-top bunker, we’d appear as ants dodging among pebbles and leaves below them.

p El Salitre itself was well hidden from the garrison, the 50 only positive thing I noted upon arrival. After four and a half hours of steady pounding down and around from Llano Rancho, plantar inflammation had made balloons of my toes. The few children who greeted us in Salitre found my limp highly entertaining.

p None of the Front’s villages differed significantly from the rest. Each, like Quipurito, consisted of a handful of widely spaced adobe houses connected by dirt paths. In some, the people cooked and washed communally. The cultivation of the local corn or bean patch or the gathering of firewood was also communal. An individual’s responsibilities in these various tasks reflected his or her interest in collective life. Not everyone chose to join the collectives or, if they did, devoted themselves full time to them.

p This was pre-Columbian collectivism, a loose form of social organization that has a far longer history in Central America than do the coffee bushes or even the Spanish language. The native tendency to dwell together in this way has always been an obstacle to the imposed system of huge plantations. To overcome it, the duenos had to destroy it. They legally expropriated or stole the communal lands and then turned the population into landless workers.

A hundred years ago, the landowners planted the country with the indigo bushes for making dye. When that market collapsed, they ripped up the indigo and replaced it with coffee. For a time, the plantations produced handsome foreign revenues for El Salvador. Per capita income was high by Latin standards. But the cash crops didn’t require nearly the labor that thousands of milpas (corn patches) did, and, since the indigo and then the coffee bushes had replaced the milpas, there was less food to go around. Later in this century cotton and grazing cattle displaced more campesinos. Where once the peasants ate regularly, if not well, and enjoyed a measure of tranquillity, vast numbers of them began to crowd San Salvador looking for work. The rest fled to Honduras or -stayed hungry in the countryside. The goal of both twentiethcentury campesino rebellions has been to win back what the duenos have taken from them.

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