Losing All the Best Bits...Of Your Country

Soft spoken and rather unassuming, you wouldn’t really think much of Ron Brennenman. Until, that is, you find out one of the countless facts that seem to nonchalantly crop up, like when the FMLN guerrillas organised a major offensive on his kitchen table during the civil war. Ron (seen here modelling a very fashionable cowboy hat and the even more fashionable Whitaker Sisters) has seen El Salvador go to pieces during the 80s, and then try and pull itself back together again, with fairly lacklustre results.

This has, in a nutshell, prompted him to start Amun Shea, an educational project run out of Perquin up in the remote wooded hills of the North East. The project is an inspiring attempt to provide a heavily subsidised private education for the local children which is not subject to the fairly unsatisfactory rigours of the public school system. The short term aim, which is to generate significant academic success in comparison to national results and thus force education reform, is well underway. The much harder long term goal of building and retaining desperately needed community leaders to stop the incessant traffic of talented individuals out of the country (who mostly head to the US illegally looking for a better life) is proving much more elusive; results, if any, won’t be seen for years.

It is incredible to hear Ron describe what is happening in El Salvador, and to see quite clearly how the country is a shell, hollowed out by war, leaving the resulting wasteland of possibility for the population. With the option of living hand to mouth indefinitely in a country that stalls its progress of international development or leaving for faraway lands of golden opportunity, which would you choose?

Perquin, El Salvador
30th September 2009

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