Salvador: Film Narrative Challenges US Myths About El Salvador in the 1980s

DISPATCHES FROM MIKE KUHLENBECK
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working to impede war and social injustice through simple truth

Picture from the video El Salvador War Documentaries

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hirty years since the release of director Oliver Stone’s film Salvador, the tragic events depicted onscreen have largely been forgotten. Collaborating with rogue journalist Richard Boyle, Stone attempts to treat America’s deadly case of historical amnesia by telling the shameful history of the United States government supporting the fascist death squads against the people of El Salvador in the 1980s.

Poster for the film “Salvador”

During the Cold War, the US supported right wing terrorists in Latin America to make the world safe for capitalism. Salvador is based on the experiences of journalist Richard Boyle in El Salvador in 1980-82. By the late 70s, he had left journalism to take up various lines of work. He returned to the profession in 1979 to cover the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for NBC radio and CNN, as well as producing a documentary called Below the Volcano.

For over a century, an oligarchy of wealthy landowners ruled over the poverty-stricken masses of El Salvador using intimidation and violence. Rumblings of revolt against the landowners had been reverberating throughout the country, leading to the outbreak of a civil war that lasted 12 years. The US government sided with the landowners and by the mid-1980s El Salvador became the largest recipient of US military aid.

In the original theatrical production notes, actor James Woods, who portrayed Boyle in the film, said, “[Boyle] goes back to El Salvador just to make some money. But then he gets swept up on a personal level and becomes truly interested in finding the truth.”

This was not the first time the intrepid reporter was exposed to the disastrous folly of American foreign policy. During his career Boyle has reported on Cambodia, Laos, Israel and Vietnam, where he obtained firsthand accounts of the horror as it unfolded. He wrote the explosive underground exposé The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, published in 1972 by Ramparts Press, based on these experiences.

Boyle found a kindred spirit with fellow veteran Oliver Stone, who served in the US Army from September 1967 to November 1968 in the 25^th Infantry Division and the 1^st Air Calvary in Vietnam. Returning with a Bronze Star for Valor and a Purple Heart, Stone studied film at New York University. He graduated in 1971 and went on to pen the screenplays for Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, for which he was honored with an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

In December 1984, Boyle handed Stone an unpublished manuscript about his experiences as a reporter in El Salvador. Upon reading it, Stone said it was a “good story” and was determined to adapt it for the big screen. He initially wanted to focus on Boyle rather than the political side of what Boyle was covering. But when Stone visited El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica in January 1985, he was struck by an eerie sense of déjà vu. Recalling his experiences in Central America, Stone had a kind of “flashback on the order of a Back to the Future Spielberg movie.”

“I thought I had returned to Vietnam, 1965, Saigon. It was hot, wet, and the American kids were 19 again in green uniforms…We were ‘saving’ Honduras. Some of these people were women now, and I suddenly felt like a forgotten older man who was wandering around wondering how this could happen again so quickly in my lifetime.”

Jim Belushi played Boyle’s friend Dr. Rock, a radio disc jockey in San Francisco. Belushi said his character represents a kind of vessel for the audience to discover the heart of darkness: “My character is ignorant of Central American issues, [as is] most of the American general public. So I feel I’m a touchstone for the audience at the beginning of the movie. My character discovers El Salvador as the audience does.”

Media critic Carl Jensen (and the non-profit group Project Censored) writes:

“The U.S. media coverage of the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador was dangerously misleading. Either through willful misinformation or ignorance, the major media supported a misguided U.S. foreign policy that threatened to embroil Americans in another Vietnam War.”

Hollywood, serving as an extension of the US media, helped perpetuate the myths fashioned by The Pentagon. This was, after all, the Top Gun generation. Ronald Reagan was president and the Soviet Union was “the Evil Empire.” Pro-war propaganda disguised as entertainment proved irresistible to studio executives, resulting in a slew of highly profitable films best described as “patriot porn.”

Needless to say that a film depicting the bleak truth about the arrogance of American Empire and the carnage left in its wake caused many people to even look away from the movie poster of Salvador when arriving at the theater. As a result, the film was met with a disappointing turnout at the box office.

The defeat in Vietnam and the carnage that resulted was a blow to the morale of American Imperialism. Along with the mental illness that compels leaders to declare war, the American people were said to be suffering from “Vietnam War Syndrome” as a result. This sociological vulnerability was exploited by reactionary elements in the US who were not satisfied with the administration of President James “Jimmy” Carter when it came to foreign policy in regions such as Central America, particularly in nations like El Salvador.

Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on April 7, 1987, Oliver Stone said the nightmare in El Salvador climaxed with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan:

“An archbishop, 18 other priests, and 4 nuns were murdered by death squads—founded, as I pointed out in my movie Salvador, by people like José Medrano and René Chacon, who studied with our Green Berets in Vietnam and the International Police Academy in Washington and at the Jungle School in Panama. But this was the time of the Jeane Kirkpatrick school of thought that manages to distinguish authoritarian and totalitarian government, and in the crusading name of anti-communism, from 1980 to 1985, we poured 1.7 billion dollars’ worth of military and economic aid into a military mafia that was, in fact, a death squad responsible for some 30 to 50 thousand civilian deaths.”

In 1980 alone, the US supplied over $5.7 million in military aid to El Salvador to support “moderate opposition” to “leftwing terrorism.” The recipients of this funding (“the moderate opposition”) were fascist goons serving the nation’s plutocrats. The so-called “leftwing terrorists” being opposed were unarmed peasants, workers, students, teachers, small business owners and others who criticized the government.

That year, there were over 10,000 political assassinations across the country. Records from the Legal Aid Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador reported that 80 percent of these were committed by the death squads— not by “leftwing terrorists” or “Marxist guerillas” as originally claimed by the Reaganites.

One such Reaganite was Cold Warrior Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as US Ambassador to the United Nations from 1981-1985. Kirkpatrick justified these actions by saying, “Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.” This is consistent with the widely accepted American credo where “the ends justify the means” when trying to stop the “godless Communists.”

Stone has continued to study the crimes of the American Empire and co-authored The Untold History of the United States with history professor Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. In a chapter titled “The Reagan Years: Death Squads for Democracy,” the authors describe the massacre of civilians in the village of El Mozote by the death squads.

According to Stone and Kuznick:

“The U.S.-trained and armed Salvadoran troops slaughtered the 767 inhabitants of the village of El Mozote in late 1981. The victims, including 358 children under age thirteen, were stabbed, decapitated, and machine-gunned. Girls and women were raped.”

The Reagan administration ignored such reports by deeming them “not credible.” In 1992, the year the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, forensic experts discovered the skeletal remains of children, including babies, in El Mozote.

“The United States government simply lied about it,” US Ambassador to El Salvador Robert E. White (1979-1981) stated bluntly in an interview about the film.

The tragedy of El Mozote has echoes of the My Lai Massacre in the Quang Ngai province in Vietnam, where between several hundred unarmed civilians were murdered in a “Search and Destroy” mission conducted by the Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, American Division in March 1968.

Boyle writes in The Flower of the Dragon, “My Lai was not the act of one man. It was not the act of one platoon, or one company. It was the result of an ordered, planned and well-conducted campaign conceived at high command levels to teach a lesson to the villagers of Quang Ngai province.”

Boyle recognized the pattern. The pattern was not new in El Salvador, nor was it new in Vietnam:

“When I was about eight I used to ask my father what he’d been doing when Hitler rose to power, and he would reply that he’d been too busy trying to earn a living to pay attention. My mother would add that people didn’t know what was going on in Germany.

Now my father’s generation shakes its head in dismay and wonders out loud how my generation could turn away from those values which ‘made America great.’ But they never told us that genocide was an old American habit, that U.S. soldiers scalped hundreds of Indian women and children at Sand Creek and held up their scalps at the Salt Lake City opera house; that hundreds more defenseless Indians were gunned down at Wounded Knee, that General Jake Smith ordered the massacre of 8,294 children, 2,714 women and 420 men on the island of Samar during the American occupation of the Philippines in 1901.

For me and for millions of my generation My Lai came as the final punch in the mouth, the end of our illusions. We could no longer say we didn’t know. The day we learned of My Lai changed our lives.”

The civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992. The United Nations sponsored a peace accords and the rebels formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). More than $6 billion in economic and military aid was given to El Salvador by the US, at least $1 billion of it was channeled through covert funding. This effort cost the lives of over 75,000 Salvadorans, courtesy of the Reagan and Bush gangs. And yet, there are still people who say “we didn’t know,” even as Salvadoran blood dried on their hands.

Salvador was released in February 1986 to critical acclaim and award nominations. As noted by Newsweek critic Jack Kroll, “Central America has become a kind of hell on earth and Salvador scorches us with this infernal truth.” Even if Salvador was then ignored by movie-goers, Stone and Boyle still managed to stun film goers with images of brutality caused by US policies that paved the way for the hell on earth forged by imperialism.

A billboard serving as a reminder of one of many massacres that occurred during the Civil War in El Salvador. The Castilian inscription to the left reads in English: “They tore out the flower, but the roots are returning among us.” (Dave Watson)

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