Salvador

"Any situation can turn to terror. The most ordinary errand can go bad ... There is an endemic apprehension of danger in the apparently benign." Joan Didion makes it possible to imagine living this way, every day, with no escape, surrounded by brutal evidence of violent torture and death everywhere.

By the end of Ms. Didion's narrative, it becomes evident, if the reader did not already have some inkling at the beginning, that "American policy, by accepting the invention of 'communism,' as defined by the right in El Salvador, as a daemonic element to be opposed at even the most draconic cost, had in fact achieved the reverse." "To the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist ... where 'left' may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared ... In other words 'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take."

Reading Ms. Didion's firsthand report of the two weeks she lived in El Salvador in 1982 has made me hungry for more details. Her account is no ranting, "liberal" narrative, despite discussing a highly politically charged topic. It seemed truly a dispassionate observation of a country's life and culture laid to waste--our tax dollars at work. Truly cause for reflection on our government's--and our personal--role and effect on the lives of people with whom we share this earth.


Incisive & Biting: The U.S. & El Salvador's Civil War   October 14, 1997
C. I. McCabe (Philadelphia, PA)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful

For anyone interested in the 12-year bloody civil war in El Salvador and the U.S. complicity in that war, this is a absolute read. It is a slim volume in which Didion lays bare in a matter a pages the U.S.'s criminal involvement in El Salvador's internal political affairs in the name of the war against "communism." There are few books in its class. I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one sitting! It provides a quick study of the U.S.'s complicity in the murderous regimes in El Salvador in the 1980's.


A still life of death   August 31, 2003
Jerry Brito (Washington, DC USA)
8 out of 12 found this review helpful

Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.

Being in El Salvador must have felt like never knowing that at any moment someone could step up from behind you and fire a bullet into your head. Could one ever get used to that? Used to bodies left every day on the side of the road? Used to them laying unclaimed because, if they were claimed, that person would be next? It really made me realize how much I take for granted living under the rule of law. Human life seems to be of such little value almost everywhere else.

The other thing Didion made me realize was that there was hope for my writing. She writes in huge, long, never-ending run-on sentences with scads of parantheticals and comma-separated interludes and explanations, as well as semicolon appendages (many whole paragraphs are only one sentence long), yet she gets away with it; there's hope for me.


Perhaps Joan Didion's most important non-fictional work.   January 27, 2002
9 out of 14 found this review helpful

Didion's uncanny ability to use the words and mechanics of the English language to convey particular meanings is lustfully breathtaking. A fine line between the writings found inside a diary and a journalist's objective reportings, Joan Didion's _Salvador_ conveys El Salvador's civil war in ways that only she could. An outsider to the region, Didion's writings do not attempt to account for the chronological history of the civil war. Instead, she uses this diaretic format to help the reader enter into a world so foreign from the luxury-plagued U.S. that both Joan and her readers are left out of place, struggling to come to terms with the terror then reigning across El Salvador's tropical countryside--all along forcing her readers to confront the odious role played by our nation's then Vietnam Syndrome inflicted CIA. (May I also suggest the movie _Salvador_,...It is based on the diary of another freelance journalist/photographer who covered the civil war in El Salvador at the same time as Didion. These two works will move your mind and your heart, altering the way you look at the world as well as our country.)


A depressive read   August 25, 2007
Donna Di Giacomo (Philadelphia, PA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

... and, unfortunately, it's all true.

This is one of the few books that have the distinction of being one of *the* most depressive reads of my entire life, but it left quite an impact on me. It made me realize how much the people of El Salvador suffered everyday, how they lived in unbelievable fear seemingly each and every day of their lives, how they were (and remain) good people, and how Saint Raygun Ronnie Reagan and Company knew exactly what those death squads were doing to innocent people - and gave them a hefty chunk of American taxpayer dollars and military equipment regardless (along with training some of those squads in American military camps!).

After finishing the book, I'm surprised Joan walked out of El Salvador with her life. Reading about her watching a young guy being forced at gunpoint into a truck knowing what was going to happen to him, about how body dumps were actually quasi-tourist attractions, how clothes were ripped off the dead so the living wouldn't go without (because the citizens were that poor!), of the contrived cultural festival in one town and how young men didn't dare be seen (lest they be taken away later on), of how there are armed men everywhere one goes, and of how she, her husband, and a journalist got out of a very sticky situation one day after visiting a morgue (which, according to her, is very accessible in the country. I don't know if it's the same a quarter of a century later) where rebels (or "freedom fighters" in Reagan's jargon?) surrounded their car and wouldn't move. If the journalist, who was driving, scratched the armed mens' car it wouldn't have been pretty and if they sped away, again, there would have been a problem. (The journalist was able to slowly back up and not hit anything, thereby saving everyone's lives).

I read the book literally (not looking between the lines of what she was saying) and envisioned living in El Salvador under such fear and it was not a pretty feeling. I feel bad for every innocent Salvadoran who has had to live in such fear and lawlessness, only to have one of the most powerful nations on the planet give money and military equipment to the people causing all the misery!

El Salvador and its people deserve *way* better!

Joan did a much better job than anyone at the major magazines (such as Time and Newsweek) could have ever done - and that was to bring the feeling of fear, dread, and misery up close and personal for everyone to experience. - Donna Di Giacomo