Joan Didion's Fevered Republic

This is the first part of my Big Books Small Country three-part series. In these articles, I’ll be looking at the impact of the El Salvadar’s barbaric civil war on the country, and how it has been represented in contemporary literature. For more information on this series, click here.

Artwork by Roman Stevens

Just before American journalist, Joan Didion, and her husband set out for El Salvador in 1982 – at the height of the country’s bloody civil war – a Salvadoran friend of theirs provided them with a stern set of instructions:

“We must not go out at night. We must stay off the street whenever possible. We must never ride in buses or taxis, never leave the capital, never imagine that our passports would protect us. We must not even consider the hotel a safe place: people were killed in hotels. She spoke with considerable vehemence, because two of her brothers had been killed in Salvador in August of 1981, in their beds.”

A passage burdened with grief, anxiety and fear, obscurely, even these instructions fail to accurately introduce the reader to the world of terror that Didion will go on to depict. For, what Didion finds in El Salvador and writes up in Salvador, is a tortured hellscape of senseless violence and cruel unaccountability.

Didion was only in El Salvador for two weeks in total, working on an assignment for the New York Review of Books, although, as Tim Adams of the Observer states, “she makes it feel like a lifetime of attention.” The book was published in the US a year later in 1983 by publishing house Simon & Schuster.

Joan Didion in San Francisco in 1967. Photograph by Ted Streshinsky / Corbis

Compiling a number of small essays, Salvador is a reasonably terse, 100-page book, that, like her own length of stay, manages to fit a lot into a small space. It’s a terrifying read that transports the reader to a relatively unknown part of Central America and forces them to witness and experience a myriad acts of barbarism and brutality.

Joan Didion is a celebrated novelist and a well-respected writer who spent years working as a journalist for a number of different publications. Her writings often tend to look at the breakdown of America’s moral compass and the country’s imperialistic tendencies. These explorations are particularly evident in Salvador.

The Mechanisms of Terror

When Didion arrived in El Salvador she was greeted by a strange sight. A glimmering, state-of-the-art airport and a magnificent tourist infrastructure that lined the pacific coastline in the form of an array of hotels and resorts. Yet, at the height of one of Central America’s most bloody conflicts, this whole stretch was left almost entirely abandoned.

She remarks that this is just another “tourist industry in yet another republic where the leading natural cause of death is gastrointestinal infection. In the general absence of tourists these hotels have since been abandoned, ghost resorts on the empty Pacific beaches…”

This strange emptiness generally resides at the core of the ensuing narrative. Didion’s Salvador is a book of juxtapositions; the juxtapositions between war and peace, life and death, and purity and corruption. And it’s in the space between these definitions that Didion conveys the terror innate within every society that teeters on the verge of collapse – and the awful violence that accompanies it.

“Terror is the given of the place.” Didion writes, “Black-and-white police cars cruise in pairs, each with the barrel of a rifle extruding from an open window. Roadblocks materialise at random, soldiers fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, safeties clicking on and off. Aim is taken as if to pass the time. Every morning El Diario de Hoy and La Prensa Grafica carry cautionary stories… A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight desconocidos, unknown men. The same morning’s paper: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyed by bayonets, one face carved to represent a cross.”

Didion depicts a society that is so fundamentally broken that it can essentially only express itself through the use of violence. A conflict between US-backed government forces and left-wing guerrilla opposition groups, this is an ideological conflict that has become far more about the sheer conflict than about the ideologies at play – it’s a power struggle in its rawest form.

Later, Didion writes, “In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land tide, stuffed with some of the dirt in question. One learns that hair deteriorates less rapidly than flesh, and that a skull surrounded by a perfect corona of hair is not an uncommon sight in body dumps.”

Just to put the magnitude of this conflict into context, records aren’t perfect, but, in total it is believed that between 70,000 and 80,000 people lost their lives during the civil war, 8,000 people disappeared and around 550,000 people were internally displaced. It has even been claimed that during the late 70s, death squads were killing around 10 people per day. Although, Adams notes, “Facts, in a country where the numbers of the dead shifted according to your point of view, were impossible to come by.”

Yet, undoubtedly, the most horrifying tale of violence that Didion talks about is the Mozote Massacre in the country’s Morazan region in 1981:

“The apparent sole survivor from Mozote, Rufina Amaya, thirty-eight years old, escaped by hiding behind trees near the house where she and the other women had been imprisoned. She has testified that on Friday, December 11, troops arrived and began taking people from their homes at around 5 in the morning… At noon, the men were blindfolded and killed in the town’s centre. Among them was Amaya’s husband, who was nearly blind. In the early afternoon the young women were taken to the hills nearby, where they were raped, then killed and burned. The old women were taken next and shot… From her hiding place, Amaya heard soldiers discuss choking the children to death; subsequently she heard the children calling for help, but no shots. Among the children murdered were three of Amaya’s, all under ten years of age.”

Salvador is disturbing, not because it portrays violence, but because it portrays violence and savagery without anger or hatred. And, this lack of emotion is exactly what makes Didion’s narrative so chilling. Although, there is an undertone to the passage above that makes it all the more alarming. The Atlacatl Battalion, the group that were behind the Mozote Massacre, were trained by US advisors.

American Interference

American interventionism across Latin America is nothing new, in fact it has been happening for centuries. American historian, John H. Coatsworth, once wrote, “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century.”

The recent example of this trend would be the Trump Administration’s interference in Venezuela. Interestingly here, there is a common denominator between the recent events in Venezuela and America’s involvement in the El Salvadoran Civil War – the yen to eliminate all forms of socialism from Latin America.

Mass anti-war protests in the US implored the Reagan Administration to withdraw military support in El Salvador. (ira schwarz/ap)

American presidents often tend to view Latin America has their own backyard – a region well within the sphere of their own influence – so when socialism began to spread across the Atlantic during the latter half of the 20th century, it became a high priority to promote the values of capitalism, democracy and global commerce. Yet, this often involved backing a reprehensible array of tyrants, warlords and dictators – meaning the US was frequently left with blood on their hands.

It is exactly this sense of hypocrisy and self-interest that weighs heavily on Joan Didion’s mind during her time in El Salvador. Adams writes, “No situation she had been in before matched her sense of the paranoia and vacancy at the heart of wider American ‘progress’ so exactly.”

Speaking to a United States embassy official in San Salvador, Didion writes, “There are a lot of options that aren’t playable. We could come in militarily and shape the place up. That’s an option, but it’s not playable, because of public opinion. If it weren’t for public opinion, however, El Salvador would be the ideal laboratory for a full-scale military operation. It’s small. It’s self-contained. There are hemispheric cultural similarities.”

For me, this is the book’s most chilling passage – it is soulless, inhuman interventionism from a representative of the US government. This generally encapsulates the Reagan Administration’s attitude toward interference across Latin America. And this extends to what the Trump Administration are doing with Venezuela today. What extent is America willing to go to weed out communism from their own backyard?

Didion goes on to write: “At the heart of the American efforts there was something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but “sick,” a temporarily fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy needed only to be encouraged, in which words had stable meanings north and south (“election,” say, and “Marxist”) and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will.”

In terms of Salvador’s political significance in the western world, Didion actually refrains from a full-on condemnation of US backing. As an objective, journalist essay, Salvador remains impartial and detached, yet her work provides readers with the chance to draw their own conclusions about one of Central America’s most bloody conflicts.

Which is precisely what Adams goes on to do: “As a primer in the repetitive self-delusions of American foreign policy, Salvador could hardly be bettered. Reaganite placement propping up murderous anti-communist regimes could look at themselves in the mirror and convince the face there that it was engaged in encouraging ‘nascent democratic institutions’. Everything, even daily mass-murder, torture and disappearance, was to be taken as evidence if the steady advance of freedom, and the pursuit of justice.”