6 PRIESTS KILLED IN A CAMPUS RAID IN SAN
SALVADOR (30 years ago today)
Lindsey Gruson, The New York Times, Nov. 17, 1989 Six
Jesuit priests, including the rector of a leading university, were killed here
before dawn today by what one witness described as a group of 30 men dressed in
military uniforms. Most of the priests were dragged from their beds in cubicles
in a dormitory at the Jose Simeon Canas University of Central America on the
outskirts of the capital and shot in the head with high-powered rifles,
apparently of the same type issued by the army. The Jesuits' cook and her
15-year-old daughter were also shot to death.
National Public Radio November 15, 2019
Witness
to war: an American doctor in El Salvador: a review essay
Harry R. Targ, Monthly Review,Vol. 37, October, 1985
The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote of the distinction between "personal troubles" and "public issues." Troubles relate to the individual personality and its interaction with an adjacent milieu of limited size. To understand them requires an examination of individual biography. Issues, on the other hand, transcend individual biographies and restricted social spaces, and they relate to the structure and dynamics of societies. Mills suggests that in order to understand and deal with personal troubles, it is often necessary to look beyond them no larger issues and their structures. Marx put the connection between biography and structure, individual and history, this way: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
All this may bear on our understanding of a book by Dr. Charles Clements, called Witness to War: An American Doctor in El Salvador. It is a book about personal troubles and public issues, personal commitment and recalcitrant history. At a superficial level, the book is an account of Clements' one-year stay in the liberated zone of the Gauzapa Front in El Salvador, ministering to the health needs of the civilian population. It also explains why Clements chose to volunteer for such arduous and heartrending service. At a more fundamental level, Witness to War is a personal biographical statement about one man's struggle for identity. It is a generational statement about the efforts of Americans to come to terms with the Vietnam experience. Finally, it is a profoundly significant historical statement that describes how the conduct of the United States in world affairs has shaped and distorted the lives of the people of El Salvador.
Charles Clements was born into a military family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His father, an air force colonel, instilled the virtues, "My early boyhood comes back to me as a kind of endless Fourth of July."
As a successful young student, Clements entered the Air Force Academy in order to benefit from a scholarship. At the academy he evidenced disdain for "hairy and dirty" antiwar demonstrators, but he found himself somewhat discomforted by combat training films. Clements claims he was more the scientist, the technocrat than the macho fighter pilot.
Upon graduation Clements was sent to UCLA for graduate work in operations management. Before completing his studies, he volunteered for flight school and hence training for Vietnam. After pilot training Clements flew transport planes in Vietnam. Within a year he would find himself in a psychiatric ward in an air force mental institution after he had refused to fly C-130s any longer in support of the war effort.
What experiences led this patriotic, ostensibly apolitical, technocratic young man to declare his opposition to the Vietnam war? Clements provides something of a checklist of events, facts, and experiences that reshaped his consciousness of the war.
He recounts a fighter pilot's description of a bombing run that led to a squadrom award. The pilot told of how he spotted, in his words, "a bunch of slopes," that is Vietnamese peasants, in a field. Upon receipt of orders, he was authorized to gun them down; at least thirty-one people died. "Weren't they farmers?" Clements asked. "Who the hell care?" the pilot replied. "They were gooks in a free-fire zone, so I offed them."
Clements tells why he began to believe he was being betrayed by his government. The number of enemy dead was inflated; American casualty figures were manipulated to minimize a negative impression. He was ordered to fly cargo to a location in the morning only to pick it up in the afternoon. When he asked about this, he was told that if he did not fly these worthless mission, he would be called back to the United States, thus reducing warfront capabilities.
Walking the streets of Saigon, Clements noted the prostitutes, drugs, black market sales, slums, and bars. He met CIA agents who described for him the rural pacification program, which involved the execution of alleged guerrilla sympathizers. He remembers how U.S. planes would fly over North Vietnam inducing anti-aircraft fire so that so-called reactive bombing could be justified, or the secret air strips in Laos that were being supplied by C-130s despite disclaimers by President Nixon.
Clements also received information from a bar-hopping CIA agent who told him that "his boys" were negotiating with General Lon Nol about a coup in Cambodia. Further, Clements became aware that Cambodia was being pummeled with bombs, again with official denials from Nixon, Kissinger, and the others.
When Clements finally decided to declare his refusal to participate in the war any longer, the official response conformed to the scenarios that could have been written by Ken Kesey or Kurt Vonnegut. "I recommend that you go see the base psychiatrist," his squadron commander said. Clements may have noted that this is the typical way that Americans respond to public issues--conceptualize them as private troubles.
Clements spent six months in a mental institution learning to ingratiate himself with peers and authorities. Finally he was discharged from the air force in March 1971 with a "10 percent disability."
Nine years later, Clements graduated from the University of Washington Medical School. He became a resident in family medicine at a county hospital in Salinas, California. Again, as in Vietnam, experiences and information were to transform his understanding and concern about a public issue, El Salvador.
A medical research committee returned from that country with a report that death squads were murdering surgeons in operating rooms, shooting patients, and "disappearing" health-care workers in clinics. At the time, Clements was treating some of the 600,000 Salvadoran refugees who had run from the mass murders in their own country. He saw patients missing limbs and other bodily organs that had been cut off with machetes, cases of deliberate acid burns, and other physical signs of torture. Also, "many of the refugees were emotional basket cases: hysterics, depressives, catatonics, paranoiacs--human being after human being whose mind has been tormented by terror."
After a period of money raising and public speaking to oppose U.S. policy in El Salvador, Clements decided to offer his services to alleviate some of the suffering of the kind he had seen. Since he had become a Quaker in the years after he left Vietnam, his support of the Salvadoran people had to be nonviolent. He therefore decided to go to El Salvador and provide medical care to civilians in the zones of popular control, that is, in areas governed by supporters of the opposition to the government in San Salvador. In February 1982, Clements clandestinely crossed the border between Honduras and El Salvador on foot and after hours of walking arrived at the Guazapa Front, an area about two hundred square miles surrounding a dormant volcano, twenty miles north of San Salvador.
Within this region were several villages n which Dr. Clements would visit and work in for a year. Villagers in the Guazapa Front had their own rudimentary political and social institutions, including schools, communal agricultural production, medical clinics, and a militia. The guerrilla coalition, the FMLN or Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement, had a presence in the region, was broadly supported by the people, and had a membership that was mostly from Guazapa.
During the course of Clements' stay in Guazapa, the region was subjected to periodic attacks from Salvadoran ground forces and boming and napalm attacks from the air. However, except for fortified government military installations, the Salvadoran army was unable to establish political control in Guazapa. They could only kill and destroy. Witness to War gives examples of the utter brutality of the army against residents of Guazapa. For instance, Camila, a 38-year-old woman, broke into hysterics when questioned about her history of pregnancies. She had had nine pregnancies. Three children survived. Two others died of fever and diarrhea, a common killer of children in the country. These two died during the years when she and her husband had decided to pay off the mortgage, equalling half their crop, rather than save the money for emergency food needs. Each year Camila had to choose between the threat of their land being repossessed or their children's health being endangered. Two other of Camila's children were killed in a government massacre early in 1980. Clements asked her why the family had not fled from government troops. Camila responded: "Because we didn't know then. We had never been to a demonstration or belonged to an organization. We didn't know we were the enemy."
Clements recounts walking along a trail behind a young woman. She suddenly dropped dead from a sniper's bullet. He ran to the body, grabbed the toddler the young woman was carrying, and dashed for cover. The little boy's father had already been killed. Now the child's aunt, a widowed woman, would have to care for him and his siblings. It was common for families to be formed and reformed as parents and children died. Intact nuclear families were rare in Guazapa.
Frederico was the male elder of a three-generation family in Copapayo. By local standards he was rich, owning several acres of land and some livestock. Clements said the family could have been evacuated to the United States but chose to stay because it "believed that the Christian and patriotic thing to do was to stay and contribute to the struggle." Frederico's wife Isabel headed the local Association of Salvadoran Women. One daughter ran the health-care program in their region of Guazapa. One son headed agricultural production in the same area. The son's wife, a seamstress, administered the village's shop where hats, packs, and uniforms were produced. One of Frederico's daughters was a school-teacher in Copapayo. Two younger children were members of the local militia. Just before he left Guazapa, Clements took a picture of all 14 family members. He expected to have the photograph developed in the United States and sent to Frederico. Before he could develop the film, thirteen members of Frederico's family were slaughtered in a government assault. A single photo, reproduced in the book, "is all that remains of them."
Much of the state violence, the vision of the people, and Clements' own activities are capsulized in a vignette about the eighth of October 1982, the fifteenth anniversary of Che Guevara's death. Che's memory is cherished even by those not engaged or predisposed to take up arms for revolutionary change. As Clements reports: "They remember him not as an ominous threat to liberty, but as the passionate doctor who once spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, challenging the northern industrial nations to share just 1 percent of their gross national product with the Third World." So, as Clements was completing his medical rounds on this special day, he happened upon a tiny village, Plantanares, where a small band played and some two hundred people were dancing. Many guerrillas and members of the local militia danced with guns slung across their backs. The event, of course, was the Fourth-of-July-like celebration in memory of Che.
As Clemens walked among vendors and sipped a cup of sugary coffee, a spotter plane circled over the area a few times, then disappeared. After viewing the celebration, Clements began his travel to another town. About an hour later, planes stormed out of the distant sky, "like a swarm of angry hornets," he remembered. Villages were bombed and strafed in an all-out attack. The village where the celebration for Che was in progress was directly hit. A family of twelve, including the woman who served him coffee, died when their house was destroyed by a bomb.
He ended the vignette with a tale about Che. It seems that as the small band of guerrillas landed in Cuba and headed for the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1956, Che was faced with the choice of grabbing a bag of medicine or a satchel of ammunition. Che, the doctor, chose the ammunition. Clements wrote that he realized he could not make the same choice as Guevara. However, he granted, "I won't presume to judge the moral correctness of that choice or its historical significance. If Che Guevera hadn't existed, perhaps some propagandist or poet might have invented him."
Not all of Clements' accounts of Guazapa are about the victimization of the population. He describes much that can help us understand the Salvadoran people and their attempt to build new institutions for a better life. We are first introduced to Nico, a slight twelve-year-old correo, or messenger, who guides Clements from the Honduran border. He is a cheerful, pistol-toting young man who is matured by the experiences of violence around him, although physically he is underdeveloped because of inadequate nutrition. Nico is like other children his age who serve the revolution as best they can, knowing full well that they will be guerrillas some day. In preparation, they attend school, engage in military drills, and still have time for soccer and other activities.
Ramon was a guerrilla leader in the area. He was also a doctor. During his last year in medical school Ramon was serving his obligatory period of residence in the countryside when the Salvadoran military occupied the medical school and killed many fellow medical students. Ramon decided to stay with the peasants. Clements portrayed him as "a study in contrasts." Before his troops, Ramon would speak in slogans about imperialism and the "fascist Reagan." In private, Clements said, Ramon showed how he detested bloodshed. He never spoke of the many combat exploits that had made him famous in the region. Rather, he would talk of the future, such as building a national health system in El Salvador much like that in Britain or Canada. He would describe efforts to erase illiteracy from among guerrilla volunteers and to overcome their machismo. The companeros, Ramon argued, had to be more than fighters; they had to be examples to the rest of society.
As to rural production, Clements describes what he called "pre-Columbian collectivism." In virtually every village in the Guazapa Front people cooked and washed their clothes communally, as well as cooperatively cultivating their corn and beans and gathering firewood. Time and level of commitment to communal activities varied and was freely chosen by the villagers. These traditions predated Spanish occupation and survive after one hundred years of oligarchic control of the land and the use of violence against the people. In this light, not only the North Americans but the economic oligarchy and the Salvadoran military were truly the foreigners of El Salvador.
Clements' descriptions of village cooperatives, small medical clinics, a public village trial of a soldier for murder, the endless discussions and debates among representatives of guerrilla groups, the eager participation of young and old, men and women, in maintaining village life, and the voluntary participation in guerrilla or militia organizations, are instances of a rich textured participatory democracy at work. Clements' description bears no relationship to the charges of incipient totalitarianism leveled at the opposition by U.S. politicians.
Finally, Clements' descriptions point to the thoroughly indigenous character of the revolution. People don't talk in ideologies but in terms of their oppression and their hopes for the future. They are clearly influenced by their culture and traditions, as with the cooperative agricultural production, by the church, as suggested by discussion of a legendary progressive local priest, by their sense of outrage at the oligarchy, and by their understanding of what economic and political democracy might mean to El Salvador.
Clements' book is weakest in its discussion of the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America. Ultimately, however, these more abstract and historical formulations go beyond, even if derived from, Witness to War. Rather the book is an account of one man's private troubles as he experiences Vietnam and El Salvador.
Ultimately, it portrays Clements' growing understanding of Vietnam and El Salvador as public issues.
The book ends with a description of an encounter the author had with some Salvadorans at a Christian base community. Clements found his hosts uncomfortable with his description of his pacifist commitment. Gabriel, the lay priest in the community, responded to the author's talk about nonviolence with his own understanding of peasant experience. Gabriel said:
“You gringos are always worried about violence done with machine guns and machetes. But there is another kind of violence that you must be aware of, too. I used to work on the hacienda. My job was to take care of the dueno's [landlord] dogs. I gave them meat and bowls of milk, food that I couldn't give my own family. When the dogs were sick, I took them to the veterinarian in Suchitoto or San San Salvador. When my children were sick, the dueno gave me his sympathy, but no medicine as they died.
To watch your children die of sickness and hunger while you can do nothing is a violence to the spirit. We have suffered that silently for too many years. Why aren't you gringos concerned with that kind of violence?”
After Gabriel's speech, Clements said, there was an uncomfortable silence. Then Gabriel added, "Tell your people they could start base Christian communities too."
By citing this incident at the book's end, Clements shows that he had begun to see private troubles as public issues, that people make history not precisely in ways of their own choosing, and that gringos as well as Salvadorans must work as they see fit to stop the violence and the poverty in El Salvador, and wherever else it exists.
Targ, Harry R. "Witness to war: an American doctor in El Salvador." Monthly Review, Oct. 1985, p. 57+. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A3956999/AONE?u=purdue_main&sid=AONE&xid=72ba0217.
