Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (22 page)

But no such thing. Instead, we met Ed Alunan, who had given
up a singing career in Manila to save his mother's estate from
bankruptcy. He lived in a city apartment. The estate, like many of
the "big" land holdings in the Philippines, was just a couple
hundred hectares of cane with a peasant village in the middle
where the "haciendero" families had lived for generations. Ed
drove us there in a dented Japanese car.

The Alunans were turning over 10 percent of their land to
Cory's land-reform program. Each family on the estate would get a garden plot to grow cash crops. Tina told me later that Ed was in
trouble with both the left and the right-with the NPA because he
was a landowner and with the landowners because he supported
reform. "He'll get shot, already," she said.

Ed had had some difficulty convincing his hacienderos that
the garden plots were a good idea. "We don't want our children to
be tied to the land," they'd said. "We want them to go to the city.
We want them to go to school." Ed was at pains to show them the
gardens were an investment, a way to have something of their own
so they could pay for their children's schooling.

He sent for specialists from the government's Land Reform
Ministry. The specialists told the villagers how they could buy the
land for a very modest price with a low-interest government loan
that could be paid back over many years and so forth. The villagers
listened politely. When the specialists were finished, they asked
their audience, "Are there any questions?"

"Yes," said the hacienderos. "Does Ed know you're doing
this?"

Ed had to go back to the estate and explain that he'd invited
the government specialists to come. The villagers nodded and
listened to the whole land-reform proposal again.

"Are there any questions?" said Ed.

"Yes," said the hacienderos. "Does your mother know you're
doing this?"

But they'd gotten the idea at last, said Ed. And now they were
full of enthusiasm and had all sorts of progressive projects under
way.

"Like what?" said Kathleen, looking askance at the estate's
primitive houses and boodle of naked children.

"They came and asked if they could decorate the threshing
floor on Saturday nights," said Ed, "and hire a fellow with a
cassette deck and get all the other hacienderos in the area to come
and dance and buy beer."

So maybe there's hope for the Philippines. I'm sure there is.
There has to be hope for people whose first step out of peonage is to
start a discotheque.

DECEMBER 1985

This little country had been nothing but in the news since 1979linchpin of something-or-other, vital this-and-that. Every liberal
crybaby had been screaming about the death squads. Every conservative bed wetter had been hollering about the communists. For
all I could tell we were going to go to war down there. And I didn't
even know what it looked like.

I thought El Salvador was a jungle. It isn't. El Salvador has
the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern
California plus-and this was a relief-no Californians. My flight
came in over the cordillera that separates El Salvador from Honduras. The mountains were crisp and pointy like picture-book Alps
but forested to the peaks. We flew across a wide, neatly cultivated
valley and then turned east above the spectacular volcanic cones
that divide the central valley from beaches as beautiful as any I've
ever tried to avoid at Christmastime. The airport was in the coast
littoral, among green fields. Tidy lines of palm trees stood along the
roads.

Where do we get our information about these places? From a
president who can't remember which side Iran is on? From news
media so busy being terse and fair that the guerrillas might as well
be fighting on the Oprah Winfrey show? I want to know what it
smells like. Are the girls pretty? Do they have little plastic Santas
in the dime stores? (You bet they do, also sandbagged gun emplacements with red-foil Christmas-tree silhouttes on the front.)

I got a taxi into San Salvador. It was a little Toyota station
wagon whose driver had filled the rear window with blinking lights,
dangling Wise Men and FELIZ NAVIDAD in glitter letters. The road
to town runs forty kilometers up through the lava-soil hills. The sun
set with dispatch. The night was warm, but with a dry, cool breeze.
People were sitting down to dinner in the thatched houses by the
roadside. There was an autumnal, back-to-classes, college-football
scent from the burning cane fields.

Nothing particularly sinister was on view, unless you count
armed men-though every Latin country seems to have plenty of
these. In the capital, some of the architecture was a shambles, but
not from war, just from the earthquakes that level everything
periodically.

I expected to see gross, barbaric haciendas owned by the
oligarchy, the so-called Fourteen Families, who control more than
half of El Salvador's industry and agriculture. But San Salvador's
richest suburb, Colonia Escalon, looked like the second-string
good parts of L. A. It could have been Sherman Oaks with walls
around the yards.

The wealthiest 20 percent of the population gobbles up 66.4
percent of El Salvador's personal income. Maybe this is unfair, but
it still didn't look like any oligarch had enough worldly goods to
scare Barry Manilow's accountant. Rapacious as they may be,
there's only so much to squeeze from a primitive agrarian country
smaller than Vermont. Down at the shore, I was shown a beach
house being built by some fabulously corrupt general. It wouldn't
have passed muster as a garage in Malibu Colony. It was interesting
to think about the rich U.S. liberals, the Jane Fondas, the Norman
Lears, the Shirley MacLaines, whining about exploitation in Central America while sitting in houses four times as large as any
owned by the Fourteen Families.

The middle class-usually described as "infinitesimal" or
"statistically almost nonexistent"-appeared to be all over the
place, honking their horns in dusty Jap cars and dented minipickups. At rush hour, San Salvador seemed to be populated not by
1 million people but by 1 million New York cabdrivers, though
Salvadorans speak more English than New York cabbies. All of the
well-off people and many of the poor have been to the United
States.

El Salvador is not nearly so filled with litter, filth and begging
as Mexico. The beach town of La Libertad is supposed to have the
best surfing east of Waimea Bay. There are some impressive Indian
ruins at Tazumal and Chalchuapa. And TACA, the national airline,
lost my luggage, just like airlines do in regular vacation spots.

I went to get some clothes at a new, upscale shopping center.
It looked like a mall in Dayton. Because I'm obviously norteamericano, a half dozen people stopped and introduced themselves. What part of the States was I from? And how was the Ohio
State football team doing? It was a handsome crowd. The conquistadors weren't as civilized as our own founding fathers; they
fucked the Indians before they killed them. Now everybody in El
Salvador is a slight mix, a sort of Mestizo Lite, Iberian of feature
but prettier colored. The women are heartbreaking.

The scene at the mall was less exotic than the Cuban parts of
Miami, except for one mystifying detail. I could find no jeans
shorter than thirty-two inches. I'm five feet nine, a hand taller than
most Salvadorans, and my inseam measurement is only thirty
inches. A salesgirl borrowed a needle and thread from a sewing
shop next door and basted my new trousers at the cash register.
This is a country of beautiful eyes and bad pants cuffs.

You can go to El Salvador, for the moment at least, and see
nothing too dreadful, just some assorted anomalies. The soldiers
guarding the highway to the airport were dressed in full camouflage
but also in Day-Glo-orange road-crew vests. It must have been
tough choosing between guerrilla sniper fire and the way the
average Salvadoran drives.

But when you pick your hotel, you pick according to the kind
of fear you prefer. The Sheraton, outside town on the hip of the San
Salvador volcano, houses U. S. military trainers, State Department and CIA types and oligarchs home on a visit after taking their bank
accounts out for air in Miami. Behind the hotel, running down the
volcano into town, is one of San Salvador's dozens of slum-filled
ravines, or barrancas. This one is known locally as Calle Ho Chi
Minh (Ho Chi Minh Street). The hotel security guards are probably
useless against the left-wing guerrillas who trundle up and down
the barranca. And the guards are probably in league with the rightwing death-squad boys who hang out at the bar. In January 1981,
two U. S. agrarian-reform advisers were gunned down in the Sheraton dining room by pistoleros, who escaped through the lobby at a
slow walk. A month before, a U.S. freelance journalist had been
desaparecidoed there. Gossip has it he was in the bar and asked
somebody who happened to be an esquadron de muerte member
how to get in touch with the guerrillas.

The Camino Real, closer to downtown, houses the press. It's a
friendlier place, but if you make the mistake of buying the reporters drinks, they'll tell you stories of kidnapping, torture and
assassination that will make your guts run like a white-water raft
trip.

In the past seven years, nearly twenty thousand of El Salvador's 5 million people have been murdered by the death squads.
And the army and the guerrillas are bidding fair to kill the rest.
Something like fifty thousand people are dead from the civil war,
five hundred thousand are homeless, and another five hundred
thousand are on the lam in the United States.

There's another kind of horror, not as dramatic but a lot more
pervasive. At any given moment, nearly half the Salvadoran work
force is unemployed. And most of these who are employed receive
less than the minimum wage, which is pretty minimum. Per capita
annual income is $710. The poorer half of the population has a
daily calorie intake that is a third less than what the Organization
of American States considers healthy. Eighty percent of their
children suffer from malnutrition.

Much of this poverty is hidden. It's out in the countryside in
places ignored by central government since before the Spanish
conquest. And the rest is tucked into the barrancas, because rich
Salvadorans, unlike the rich in Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and most of
Latin America, have the sense to live on the hillsides and keep the
gully bottoms and ravines for the squalor.

It's hard to fathom another society, especially a troubled one,
hard to figure its contradictions, measure its attitudes, see it in its
underpants. I thought I had an insight at the Mercado Central, the
market in downtown San Salvador where peasants and artisans
bring their goods. It is a massive, newish cement building that
looks like a parking garage for trolls. The two floors are low
ceilinged and lit by a desultory scattering of single fluorescent
tubes. And the place is packed, a thrashing minnow seine of small,
tan people.

Coming in from the blinding sunshine, I felt a gestalt hit me, a
Jungian race vision-the cruel Pipils and Mayas flaying victims to
the sun, strange, hairy -man-horse conquistadors, the forced labor
repartimientos, the Inquisition, the esquadrones de muerte-the
odor of the charnel house struck me full in the face. But actually
I'd walked into a hanging side of beef.

The market was a jolly enough place, once I'd disentangled
myself from the cow. The interior was labyrinthed with aisles a foot
wide, the floor piled and the ceiling hung with things to eat. There
were eggs in six-foot ziggurats, baskets of live chickens, cheeses
like snow tires, peppers in bundles cute as country-kitchen wallpaper and stacks of fruit like Brazilian nightclub-dancer hats. And
everywhere were young country girls with breasts as beautiful as
little melons and baskets on their heads full of melons as beautiful
as little breasts.

One stall had trussed-up armadillos and a basket of iguanas,
lips sewn shut, foreclaws tied behind their backs-minor deathsquad victims in the food-chain civil war. On the steps down to the
street, an old peasant woman squatted with dozens of little handmade clay figurines, like creche figures. They were all soldiers.