Today is another touring day, but this time we will stay around San Salvador. Setting off a little later, we go to an enormous downtown mall with an underground garage, and a marble building actually embedded inside it that used to be an embassy. Our mission is to buy postcards, surprisingly hard to find, and mail them at the post office here.
As an editorial note, here is precisely where we can start to appreciate the nearly unbridgeable gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in El Salvador. This mall would be perfectly at home in New York, London or Paris and is doing a very brisk business, full of shoppers with high disposable incomes. Contrast this with the situation in the rural areas of the country, where the majority of the population scrapes along in grinding poverty on a few hundred dollars a year, and we start to glimpse the profound inequities that drive most of the problems here (or on the entire planet, for that matter). It is perfectly possible in any modern city, in a mall like this, to convince oneself that the poor either do not exist, or do not have it that bad. After all, life is good here.
Next we make our way through the central market to the Cathedral. This street market is a fixture in the city and for decades was frequently a site of protests, violent crime and street riots. Today things are busy and colorful.
Passing the Palacio Nacional, in view of the Cathedral, we see the area where several notorious massacres took place. Arcelio tells us of the demonstration in 1979 during which his father was killed on the steps of the Cathedral along with 1500 people. The military brought tanks and opened fire on the crowd from the roof of the Palacio Nacional, killing people as they fled for refuge in the Cathedral.
Arcelio was two; his father died the day after his second birthday. His mother's house, used by the guerilla, was later burned along with all of the family pictures. He has never seen a picture of his father.
By chance the lower level of the Cathedral, where Archbishop Romero is entombed, is open to the public for a little while. This is where the common people celebrated the mass and where, we are told, the Archbishop insisted on celebrating as well, endearing himself forever to the common people, but not to the upper classes. There are scraps of paper with prayers on them left around the tomb and addressed to Archbishop Romero, considered a saint by many. A number of people stop at his resting place in silent prayer.
Upstairs in the ornate main sanctuary completed after the war, there are breathtaking frescos and a vaulted, domed ceiling. We can see that here, in this church, some of the same inequities continue to exist. It is undeniably beautiful, however.
Our next stop is a pretty park across town to visit the Wall of the Disappeared. This is a very moving granite monument, not unlike the Vietnam Wall in Washington. It lists the names of those who were killed or disappeared from the seventies until shortly after the end of the war. Arcelio shows us his father's name and that of his two cousins. Only about 30,000 names appear; the rest of the 70 to 80,000 believed to have been killed are unknown and have their own panel dedicated to their memory. One entire section lists just the massacres alone: several hundred. The names are arranged by year and by whether they were found killed or reported disappeared. There is an unimaginable loss of life commemorated here.
After lunch at around 2:00, we visit the chapel of Divina Providencia, where Monsignor Romero was assassinated at the altar by a single bullet through the heart. We see where he fell and the doors through which the assassin fired. We are shown where the car pulled up right out front. Romero was the only witness to the identity of his killer, since the congregation was facing him. He is said to have paused silently so that no one else would turn and possibly be killed.
Unfortunately, we are unable to visit Romero's house, a few hundred feet away, where his personal effects are kept, along with photographs and the clothing that he was wearing that day. The nuns who oversee the building are short-handed and cannot open it for us today. We also find that the University of Central America, where the Jesuit martyrs are commemorated is closed today as well. We will try to return on Monday.
Our last stop for the day is at the artisan market. This is pure pleasure as we browse the colorful handcrafts and are invited "adelante" into each stall. We bargain happily for trinkets and gifts, keepsakes and souvenirs, spreading our business around.
We head back for a nice dinner, cooked by Doñas Mercedes and Blanquita, and find ourselves getting very silly. Yet, at the same time we are trying to process some of the difficult things that we have seen and are feeling. It helps to talk about these things and get them out where we can deal with them. Some of us find that we are falling in love with this country, yet it also breaks our hearts.
0 comments:
Post a Comment