Perquin

Tucked away in the North East of El Salvador, Perkin is a small town with a big past. The centre of operations of the guerrillas during the civil war, it was deserted for almost fifteen years and saw fierce fighting. The war museum, a fairly breathless climb up from the town centre, gives a fairly harrowing perspective from the guerrilla Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) side of the conflict, with countless photos of the casualties of the conflict placed alongside heavy artillery weapons that were either captured from the US sponsored National Guard. Our guide Carlos, an ex-major who served for the duration of the war on the side of the FMLN, tells us that the turning point in the war was when US manufactured mobile surface to air missile launchers arrived from Nicaragua, a keepsake of the contra-revolutionary conflict, allowing retaliation against the constant air bombardments that were levelling civilian villages, assumed to be enemy targets; in short, US funded weapons against US funded weapons.

The surrounding villages also bear the scars of the conflict, one of the most recognised being in El Mozote, about a half hour drive from Perquin. In 1981 on December 11, Salvadorian armed forces trained by the US military killed at least 1000 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. Outside the village church is a memorial garden in which the local guide tells us they discovered the bodies of 147 children below the age of 12 buried in a mass grave.

It is amost impossible to comprehend acts of barbarity of this scale, no matter how impactful the monuments erected to remind us of events. It is also equally difficult to understand the motivations of the Regan administration during the 80s, and the far reaching effects of its foriegn policy that resulted in escalating death tolls of civilian populations in numerous central American countries, and the practical removal of their civil liberties, something the US tirelessly contradicts itself with via its constitution.

Perquin, El Salvador
29th September 2009