Last weekend I had the privilege of being amongst a group of people dedicated to remembering the past. Perhaps I have commented before, or maybe not, I forget, but here in El Salvador people remember. They remember the war, they remember their lost ones, they remember their triumphs and their defeats. And most of all, they make it a case to remember those who the rest of the world want us to forget. Or better yet, they remember those who the powerful and the rich and the oppresors want us to never even believed existed.
Last weekend I went with a group from work to Mozote, El Salvador--a small, peaceful town nestled within the mountains near the Honduras border. Beautiful, yet tainted with blood. We were there to celebrate (or perhaps that is not the right word) the 25th aniversary of the massacre committed by the El Salvadoran armed forces in 1981 against the campesino population. 1,000 people, the majority women and children, were corralled into their houses and then all killed. The army was working under the stategy that if you get rid of the water, then the fish can´t live. Meaning to say that since the guerilla survived amongst the rural campesinos, if they could kill off all the campesinos, then the guerillas would be rendered impotent. An interesting strategy no doubt, learned by the army leaders taught at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia and trained and counseled by the U.S. army commanders in El Salvador at the time as purely ¨logistical¨help.
And obviously it should be found by all of as evil and sickening that people could do such a thing. But what brings me the most sadness is that 25 years later neither the government of the U.S. nor the government of El Salvador have admitted to the massacre ever taking place. One woman survived, and she was there last weekend as a lone voice trying to convince the world of what her eyes saw and of what so many want her to deny ever happening.
I always thought it was rather useless when I hear of governments this day in age apologizing for what they committed in the past. For example, when the U.S. government apologizes to the Native Americans for the largest genocide ever to take place or when any number of European governments apologize to the Jews, it seems so symbolic and useless. But I am realizing now that it is a first step. If one refuses to realize and admit to the reality of the past, then nothing changes. Santanya once wrote that those who don´t know history are condemned to repeat it. And I look at El Salvador, and I know that it is true because it continues to happen to this day. Perhaps the violence has changed. Perhaps now there is no opèn civil war for the whole world to see, but the government continues to oppress a large part of the population through economic, political, and social policies where the millions of dollars of the rich are seen as more important than the bread on the table of a poor campesino family. And the same thing is happening today. The government is refusing to acknowledge that their policies are bringing millions of people into the violence of poverty. Rather, they proudly announce that El Salvador and it´s new economy has lifted it out of the status of the Third World. And that does not only deny the reality that so many live, but it also directly hurts them. The Global Fund for HIV-AIDS is denying El Salvador needed funds to combat the growing HIV pandemic because of the government´s self published statistics as a modern country.
But within this country, the people refuse to forget. They refuse to let the powerful and the rich erase their history, and thus it is them and them alone who have the ability to not continue repeating the sad history that this country has lived. With them, hope resides, because they refuse to forget.