Only a Shadow
At a Glance
Section titled “At a Glance”| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2018-01-01 |
| Journal | World Policy Journal |
| Authors | Horacio Castellanos Moya, Julia Sanches |
Abstract
Section titled “Abstract”In the first few pages of Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous novel, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, the book’s protagonist, Sigbjørn Wilderness, travels by plane to Mexico. Alcoholism and paranoia keep him in a state of acute nervous excitement and dread at the prospect of being detained by Mexican immigration officers on his arrival at the airport. Sigbjørn, of course, has a British passport and should have nothing to fear, were it not for his state of mind and, perhaps, for some of his previous experiences in that country.I read Lowry’s novel at least 30 years ago, and yet Sigbjørn’s fear at the thought of reaching immigration remains etched in my memory—and far more deeply than the rest of the narrative—for one simple reason: Throughout my adult life, I’ve been victim to a similar fear, the fear of being detained by the immigration authorities of any country I travel to. Unlike Sigbjørn, this fear isn’t the result of an alcohol-induced paranoia, but of other factors, among them the Salvadoran passport I carry with me, which has raised suspicion in the eyes of the many immigration officers I’ve had to pass by.I’m certainly not the only Salvadoran with countless anecdotes about being treated with suspicion the moment I hand my passport over to the immigration officer, or about being interrogated with distrust, at times asked to leave the line so I can be subjected to a second, more meticulous inquiry. I remember distinctly a Dutch officer at the Schiphol airport who swiftly stamped the documents of the other travelers of other nationalities who stood in line before me but who, when my turn arrived, slowly pored over page after page of my passport, making a point to bend the spine, then taking out a small, charming magnifying glass and fitting it on his eye so he could scrutinize every stamp—as if he were a jeweler bent on discovering the falseness of a particular diamond—then calling a colleague over to discuss the situation and, finally, indicating that I should step aside into a small room where I would await a more in-depth review. All of this despite the fact that I’d showed him my green card and my credentials as a university professor. None of that mattered; the simple fact of holding a Salvadoran passport had made me potentially guilty. But of what?I understand that it may seem tactless or futile to discuss the fears of one privileged traveler when you’re from a country where tens of thousands of people don’t have passports and, instead, cross the border illegally, on foot, putting their lives at risk; where a journey might begin as an epic adventure but will oftentimes end in drama or in gross tragedy. I don’t know the exact number—if one exists—of the thousands of Salvadorans who in the last two decades have been murdered or have disappeared in Mexico or in the deserts of the United States on their exodus to that northern country, but testimonies on the subject are chilling.I also understand that there are tens of thousands of Salvadorans whose experiences passing through immigration have been different to mine because they are traveling with a passport from the United States or Canada or Australia, or from another affluent country that elicits respect in the receiving officer. There are tens of thousands of perceptive and intelligent people who, when they had the chance, knew to separate the important from the superfluous and took on the nationality of the country that harbored them, telling themselves that their national identity—that feeling of belonging—was determined not by a simple travel document but by a set of values, attitudes, and ways of seeing the world.I’ve often asked myself what my interlocutors—be they immigration officers or not—think when they hear that I am from El Salvador; what idea or picture comes to their minds.It is violence, above all, that determines how Salvadorans are perceived. People who for the past four decades have suffered widespread violence. Violence in its most extreme form, that of cruel and even horrific crimes. Who has administered this violence and what destructive forces have this country and its people been victim to? Well, ones from within. One group of Salvadorans killing another group of Salvadorans in long and constant carnage, generation after generation. The dominant stereotype is that El Salvador is a country of victims and of aggressors.Starting in the late 1970s, El Salvador began to be known across the world for news of farmers, students, and workers being killed by military and paramilitary groups, as well as for the murders and kidnappings carried out by burgeoning leftist guerrilla forces. Then, in March 1980, the world was shaken by the assassination of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador. The country was in the grips of something truly awful, so awful it eventually turned into a decade-long civil war in which tens of thousands were murdered or disappeared and a million Salvadorans were forced into exile. And yet there was a more or less happy ending to that war, one in which both contending parties, under pressure from their respective patrons (the United States and the Socialist Bloc) and the United Nations, reached a peace agreement that would pave the way to democracy. This took place in early 1992. From that moment on, El Salvador ceased to be newsworthy and nearly vanished off the map of world media.It’s striking to me how, in our memories, the civil war has lost all its epic qualities, yet its greatest tragedies somehow remain intact. The majority of El Salvador came together and waged war for more than a decade against a military that, with the support of the United States, had furiously usurped the country’s political power for six decades, yet only traces of this history remain in old testimonies and academic research. The ingenuity of Salvadorans, their astuteness and daring, their efficiency, courage, and capacity for survival are, somehow, no longer part of the war’s living memory. Of that time, we remember only the crimes committed—especially against religious representatives, against Monsignor Romero and six Jesuit priests—and the massacres. We do not celebrate the war’s epic qualities, nor the dynamic and creative spirit of its people in the face of fierce challenges, but its tragedies.There could be a simple enough explanation for this: On the one hand, the epic tenor of the war has paled in our collective memory because many of those who had a role in it—now that they are in charge of the Salvadoran government—are viewed as no more than a band of corrupt and inept politicians. But on the other hand, the fight against impunity requires key cases to act as proof that justice has been served.It seems old-fashioned to speak of national identities in our globalized world. What we have now are hybrid or—depending on the theorist you speak to—liquid identities; or, rather than identities, what we have are virtual communities that obliquely traverse culture and language. The national should have ceased to hold any meaning.But reality is stubborn. Nations refuse to disappear and the human conglomerates that are from them or live in them insist on clinging to these bonds of identity, symbols that anchor their sense of belonging.If we were to consider that a nation’s identity is founded largely on its collective memory, then it would not be unreasonable to refer to El Salvador’s identity as a tragic one.Tragedy as a collective historical fact is at the core of Salvadoran identity. Thinking back on the past 40 years, we have had the tragedy of the civil war, the tragedy of the 2001 earthquake, and the current and most perverse tragedy of them all: the gangs, or maras. Each of these—whether political, telluric, or social—has produced a massive stream of migration, above all to the United States. This mass exodus has been covered in countless news stories and films, and it has been analyzed in various reports on violence and migration in El Salvador. A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau calculated that, in 2013, 1.6 million Salvadorans were living in the United States. This was before the arrival en masse of unaccompanied minors in the following years.It was the tragic earthquakes of January and February 2001, which destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and exacerbated this exodus to the United States, that led the Bush administration to grant Transitory Protection Status (TPS) to Salvadorans who were entering the U.S. illegally.Now, 17 years later, the Trump administration has decided to revoke the TPS status of the 200,000 Salvadorans who were under its protection, and will begin to deport them in 2019. This decision marks the beginning of another tragedy, not only for those who will be robbed of 20 years of their lives—because of their legal status, they’d started families, bought houses, founded businesses, paid taxes, and contributed to social security, like any permanent resident—but also for the country that will have to take them in, a country that has been defined precisely for its capacity to drive out its citizenry, to whom it can offer only poverty and violence. According to the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Relations, 276 people leave the country illegally for the United States every day.If, for the past four decades, violence has been the lens through which Salvadorans have been viewed, then the figure that currently dominates this perception is that of the gang member, or marero. According to a December 2017 report released by the International Crisis Group, there are approximately 60,000 gang members (1 percent of the population) in the entire country, with a social base of approximately half a million people (8 percent of the population). It is significant that the perception of a nationality, that a country’s international image, should be dominated so decisively by such a small share of its citizens. More significant, of course, is the fact that in two decades the government of El Salvador has not been able to come up with any effective policies to contain or reduce this phenomenon of social decomposition.I have no doubt that those who, in different walks of life and on different latitudes, have interacted with the 99 percent of Salvadorans who are not gang members have an image of them that is a far cry from those of the soulless criminals depicted in the news. Despite this, the global perception of El Salvador has been dominated by the figure of the gang member, a figure that is in itself tragic, both because of its root causes—a product of abandonment or family violence, of marginalization or lack of opportunity, of repression or any of those other related causes—and his actions, his crimes. One’s sense of belonging to a gang is granted by murder; this is the rite of passage through which the young men and women that make up that 1 percent are admitted into the mara, a criminal community that has taken the place of the family, of school, of the church, and of various state institutions.Each murder constitutes a tragedy—for the victim, for the family, and for those around them. Each murder generates a tidal wave of pain that eats away at the social fabric of a community. And the story of each and every murder reflects the conditions of violence, marginalization, abandonment, and poverty of a country’s people. Every time I watch a documentary in which a journalist has managed to infiltrate the heart of the maras, the first thing I notice is the gang’s lack of resources, the extreme poverty its members live in. If violence is the hard face of a tragic identity, poverty is the blood that keeps the body alive.It can feel disconcerting to read the news coming out of El Salvador. Murder numbers are cold, like all numbers. Yet, the fact that El Salvador has been repeatedly crowned the country with the highest number of murders per 100,000 people is shared with a perverse excitement, as if, deep down, we are proud to be the country with the highest murder rate in the world; as if we, Honduras, and other countries in which murder also prowls are all competing in an athletic tournament, and overtaking the others should be announced with fireworks and ringing bells. Being the country that assigns the least value to human life is part of our tragic identity; elites who boast or profit from it would be grotesque.I am part of a generation that was marked by the civil war. The plots and characters of the many novels I’ve written are, in one way or another, connected to the event that so deeply affected my and my contemporaries’ lives. For the new generation, however, that war is a distant thing: To them, what is current, what is present, is the mara. These two very different periods of collective violence are nonetheless similar in that the thousands of murders, forced disappearances, and mass migrations have torn apart families, communities, the very fabric of society; and also in that the turmoil the community suffers after every life lost prevents us from seeing in its people such qualities as the capacity for survival, for humor and organizational talent, for solidarity, entrepreneurial spirit, and courage—qualities without which it would be impossible to have any real sense of Salvadoran identity.I’ve sometimes thought that what I experience as I go through immigration—officers eyeing me with suspicion—might be due to the tragic expression that has settled on my features, and that this unconscious expression is not the product of an individual fear but of the collective burden of terror that infected the land I grew up in, a burden that with time has grown increasingly heavy. And so you could say I suffer from a state of psychological and emotional disturbance similar to that of Sigbjørn Wilderness, Lowry’s character. Not because of alcohol poisoning, but because I am from a country in which fear and tragedy have long been our daily bread.