Didion's poetic description of El Salvador is able to capture both the natural beauty of the land and the perversion that occurs on it. It is because of her status as a gringa writer, that she is able to eavesdrop into conversations at the American embassy, hence the appeal to American audiences. However, while serving as a warning against American foreign policy, it does little more than serve as a cynical, depressive portrayal of El Salvador that is not shared by the Salvadorian people.

Didion fails utterly to do any real reporting in a foreign country, sitting in her hotel room and having lunch at the American embassy. She fails to engage substantially with the Salvadorian people. I can be sympathetic to a point, in which the Civil War made it such that ordinary people were too scared to talk about the war for fear of being outed by the other side, but even this perspective was not considered or discussed.

She does a fairly good job of capturing the situation in El Salvador from her perspective-- a scared American in a land she has no ties to nor any experience in. Though beyond the some of the beautifully written pages, I can't say I learned anything substantial. In Paul Theroux's words, Salvador is "an excellent account of being nervous,” and useless as a piece of reporting.

I must say that the fact that I live in the opposite side of the world, and the fact that I don’t have any serious knowledge about South American politics, made this book a more literal, exotic reading, rather than a chronological turn of events which took place and probably influenced the lives of millions.

Joan Didion's journey in El Salvador is described as some kind of a “heart of darkness” or “apocalypse now” experience. I was shocked from the describing of terror, and most parts could imagine the scenes from the book as if it’s some kind of a crazy film by Copola.

Like always, Didion's ability to suspend her judgment and cut to the points in sharp sentences, makes her a wonderful author and reporter. When reading this book, one must remember she’s in the practice of new journalism, so don’t expect an Amnesty report.

It’s also another lesson in the complicated subject of American foreign affairs.

Joan Didion was a rancher's daughter from Sacramento who voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. She appeared to be wavering until she went to visit El Salvador in the 1980s. In her short book Salvador, she comes face to face with the profound disconnect between what the Ronald Reagan administration is saying and the ghastly realities of the murderous Roberto D'Aubuisson and the widespread massacres of Salvadorans earmarked for death for no apparent reason.

Her writing style is, as usual, awesome:

This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of "color" I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.

The vagaries of U.S. involvement in the Third World did not begin forty years ago, but El Salvador indicated that somehow, Washington did not know at all how to deal with right-wing (or even left-wing) violence.

3.25✪
Salvador is a very short book Didion wrote about American interference with the civil war in El Salvador. It is mostly comprised of three extended essays she wrote for the New York Review of Books. She actually spent two weeks in El Salvador, which she describes as “terrifying.” I had to do a bit of background research in order to understand what was going on, but this was a very interesting book.

Firstly, Joan Didion grasps on to small details. She shows the reader the importance of minute, even mundane facts of life there:

“Roberto D’Aubuisson is a chain smoker, as were many of the people I met in El Salvador, perhaps because it is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote” (30).

The description of “achieving a death” is also pleasing and subversive. It’s a humorous way to talk about something quite dark. Similarly:

“...that the dining room had discontinued its breakfast buffet, a fact often remarked upon: no breakfast buffet meant no action, little bang-bang, a period of editorial indifference in which stories were filed and held, and film rarely made the network news” (49).

Didion shows that something so simple as a hotel breakfast buffet reflects the incredible power of American media. She is just so incredibly observant!! It’s a joy to be let into her mind like this.

I enjoyed her sparse writing about the experience of being in El Salvador:

“As I wanted to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy’s back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all” (36).

I would have really loved more of this. Her forced passivity is chilling. But the scarcity of her experiential writing keeps the reader from getting a great sense of the country as a real environment. I think the only other details that really stood out to me for the environment was her focus on their shifting vocabulary, such as “la solución” and “disappear.” “La solución” is a word she accidentally misuses with locals, not knowing it has gained heavy political connotations with the dictator. She also learns that “disappear” in El Salvador acts as both a passive and active verb: The family disappeared after the death of their son / The guerillas disappeared their son.

To my personal dismay, there are few interviews: one is Victor Barriere, who is “a grandson of the late General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the dictator of El Salvador between 1931 and 1944 and the author of what Salvadorans still call la matanza, the massacre, or ‘killing,’ those weeks in 1932 when the government killed uncountable thousands of citizens, a lesson” (53). Obviously this is a fascinating subject, but an incredibly biased one that will have been more reflective of America’s perspective towards El Salvador. Didion writes about after the interview: “...after I dropped them there it occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presence of obvious ‘material’ and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread” (56). She obviously speaks of him critically, but he gets the most extensive coverage of any individual.

The only El Salvadoran we receive a bit from is one of her and her husband’s workers in Los Angeles, who gave them instructions on what they must and must not do when they go to El Salvador:

“We must stay off the street whenever possible. We must never ride in buses or taxis, never leave the capital, never imagine that our passports would protect us. We must not even consider the hotel a safe place: people were killed in hotels” (77).

The primary information we receive is that “any situation can turn to terror” (105). The experiences she describe sound incredibly terrifying, but without more interviews, it was hard to get a sense of the fact that this terror is an everyday condition for residents of El Salvador.

from my "reading every joan didion" project --> https://open.substack.com/pub/whitney...

syntactically confusing at times, this book still prevails as 1.) a testament to the incomprehensible commitment some journalists have to the truth and 2.) the absolute ridiculousness, almost comedic (but with mortal consequences), of US Foreign policy. It is sickening to think that such negligence extends beyond Latin America to the entire globe.

With the earthquake, I began to see Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a new light, as a social realist.

Didion wrote Salvador in 1982, which was relatively early in El Salvador's civil war. But even in this early period its brutality was well defined, and made even moreso by the involvement of the US and the death squads they unleashed on the populace.

The title struck me as as somewhat ironic considering, of all things, the one thing missing from the novel is exactly that: Salvador (or Savior), and it echoes throughout. Just a couple of examples:

One reason no one looks back is that the view could only dispirit: this is a national history peculiarly resistant to heroic interpretation. There is no libertador to particularly remember.

and also:

The cross on the altar is of bare incandescent bulbs, but the bulbs, that afternoon, were unlit: there was in fact no light at all on the main altar, no light on the cross, no light on the globe of the world that showed the northern American continent in gray and the southern in white; no light on the dove above the globe, Salvador del Mundo. In this vast brutalist space that was the cathedral, the unlit altar seemed to offer a single ineluctable message: at this time and in this place the light of the world could be construed as out, off, extinguished.

This is a great piece of literary journalism; my Didion rest in peace.

“

A Celebrity Journalist's Travel Notes on El Salvador in 1982

I recently moved to El Salvador and picked this book up on a friend's recommendation. Though a little shallow (the author was only there for two weeks), it offered some interesting and rare insights into life in the country at one of its low moments.

*Brief Synopsis: This is the first-person narrative of a U.S. celebrity reporter who traveled to El Salvador for two weeks during the violence of the 1980s and wrote what equates to an extended magazine article about the hopelessness and stagnancy she perceived there. She visited hotels, villages on the outskirts of the civil war, churches, and various U.S. and Salvadoran government officials. As best I can make out (she never shares the details of her travel plans), she was hosted by the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador and may have been commissioned to write the book as a magazine article.

*Fine, but Suspicious of "Conclusions" Drawn After Two Weeks: I'm more inclined to read this as an individual's travel diary than as a reliable representation about San Salvador in the 80s. That said, it may well be the best we have given that, as Didion reported, much of the academic establishment was in retreat during the time ("The campus of the National University is said to be growing over, which is one way contradictions get erased in the tropics."). Anyway, I took the book's claims with a grain of salt.

*Notable Insights From the Book:
-Government forces reportedly did most of the killing at the time.
-A shopkeeper sold "a plastic bag or two filled with crushed ice and Coca-Cola"--still a very familiar sight.
-A few American companies, like Texas Instruments, continued to keep their facilities in El Salvador throughout the 80s, concealing their managers a few rungs down the corporate ladder and sneaking them away in the middle of the night in rotations.
-El Salvador petitioned the U.S. for statehood in the 1820s! (But the U.S. declined.) Didion reported this as part of an insight that El Salvador's identity has long been in question, since "the great Mesoamerican cultures penetrated this far south only shallowly, (and) the great South American cultures thrust this far north only sporadically."
-No State Department dependents were allowed in El Salvador at the time.
-"The American effort had a distinctly circular aspect (the aid was the card with which we got the Salvadorans do do it our way, and appearing to do it our way was the card with which the Salvadoran got the aid.)"
-"Only seven unidentified bodies bearing evidence of arma de fuego did not in San Salvador in the summer of 1982 constitute a newspaper story worth pursuing."

*Writing Style: I found Didion's writing style a little bit circular and difficult to track, though with some occasionally powerful prose, like when she referred to "the land of the provisionally living" and when she said that "thinking ahead was out of synch with the day at hand." And though someone was apparently "trying to make a point" by leaving a different corpse at the same place every day, "the point was unclear." Also, "El Salvador is one of the places in the world where there is just one subject, the situation, the problema, its various facets presented over and over again." I was also struck by, "this is a national history particularly resistant to heroic interpretation."

I look forward to seeing what else I can find about El Salvador's history--this was a fine introduction.

Okay, it is perhaps unfair to expect of what is clearly a "minor" work like Salvador the same thoroughgoing insight that Didion displays in her major non-fiction books like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. That said, I was not impressed by this book.

Salvador made me realize that Didion is not, in fact, a natural reporter. She is too reclusive, too depressive, and does not seem to thrive on human interaction and experience the way born reporters do. This didn't matter for Slouching Toward Bethlehem, because it was essentially crticism, in which Didion could get by on her brilliant intelligence and total cultural mastery. Not so for Salvador, in which Didion's mordant wit sours into mere cynicism.

In order to be successful investigating a foreign culture, Didion would have to want to actually engage with that culture. But that is not really what she wants to do here. Instead, Didion sits in her hotel room, getting duly depressed by El Salvador and American foreign policy. This is not edifying.

The problem is highlighted in a passage toward the end of the book, when Didion makes a rare foray into the country itself, this time to a sort of improvised "indigenous crafts fair." Didion finds much to be disgusted about here, primarily the phony nature and cultural poverty of the whole thing. This is fine, but at this point I would expect someone reporting on this event, however stage-managed it might be, to attempt conversation with some of the participants. Instead, Didion is content to tell us her take on things--jaded disgust--and render the "indigenous" folk with a sort of murky speculation that failed to illuminate her supposed subject. This was less journalism and more an exercise in kneejerk malaise.

Joan Didion's Salvador, set in 1982 is a trapdoor of sorts to the not-so-distant violent history of El Salvador, the country I've called home for almost two years now.
'Salvador' was born out of Didion's two-week long visit to this small Central American Nation, while it was caught up in the throes of a civil war and fear was a political tool, used indiscriminately and effectively.
Terror was all-pervasive. Joan writes about the United States and their interference in the nation's administration as they desperately tried to keep the big, bad, red wolf - Communism at bay.
She describes body dumping grounds and embassy lunches and make-believe indigenous festivals and political parties and the oppression of the intelligentsia.
It is stark and vivid and a must-read to anyone interested in the region.

However, being in the unique position of getting to see things as they are today in 2014 - almost 32 years since Joan Didion's visit, my biggest complaint with the book is how bleak it is. She almost seems to write the nation off, incapable of bouncing back, of ever shrugging off the shroud of fear that lay on it's shoulders, that it has done admirably well.

I would highly recommend this book for students and practitioners of creative journalism/non-fiction.

Another excellent Didion book. She does a great job of describing the terror and hopelessness of El Salvador during the height of the civil war in 1982. Grisly in a lot of parts but never over the top. It's interesting hearing her analysis of the situation and the United States' role in it. I think, forty years letter she was pretty accurate in her assessment. But, really, the book is about the place and how the war threw the country into a state of absolute terror with no way out. Highly recommended.

Salvador by Joan Didion is compelling, like all of her work, but it rests on a two week reporting visit to El Salvador in 1982 that has its understandable limitations (even if Didion buttressed her book with a good bit of research before and after her trip.)

At this point I would think you could get plenty out of this book if you knew something about El Salvador in the 1980s but if not, all you would get is Didion's sharp writing--perhaps that's enough.

Back then El Salvador and all of Central America were red hot topics. People like myself involved in foreign affairs studied Central America carefully. There were acronyms and personalities and storylines that had Washington riveted in the Executive Branch, on the Hill, and in the media and think tank world. Basically, the plot had to do with "fighting communism" in the western hemisphere, particularly in terms of Cuban support for Nicaragua and the Sandinistas.

El Salvador boiled with violence that was only ancillary to that Cold War scenario. Didion correctly portrays the U.S. as attempting to buttress El Salvador's government and make it strong enough and stable enough to keep the commies out, but the fact is that the military and the paramilitary and the guerrillas weren't necessarily at war over communism in the western hemisphere

The conflict in El Salvador had different roots. There were fourteen family groups who controlled huge tracts of land; that gave them the wherewithal to control the banks and to an extent the government. Poverty in El Salvador was extreme if you weren't born into one of those fourteen families. So there was a socio-political uprising that went on for years and years, and in a very self-interested way the military established itself as arbiter and spoils-keeper, generally supporting the rich, generally not supporting the poor, and always battling with the rebels (let's skip the acronyms, there were different groups of rebels). The U.S. problem was that the military and paramilitary (arms of the government, after all) committed all manner of atrocities. So how could the U.S. funnel money to human rights' violators? Didion catches this question in a basic way and adorns it with the atmosphere of menace and fear that permeated the country. Somehow the U.S. did keeping funneling money to El Salvador's government.

I visited El Salvador even more briefly in 1987. The situation was as bad or worse than ever. San Salvador, the capital, had suffered a terrible earthquake the year before. There was rubble along the roadside everywhere, large piles of dirt and bricks. Napoleon Duarte was president. He was a centrist, a former mayor of San Salvador, and a Notre Dame-educated engineer. I was a member of a small group that met with him. He was attuned to resolving all of El Salvador's problems but lacked the resources to do much, a pretty battered guy who could be shot anywhere and at any time because he knew exactly what was going on. My group then moved to a luncheon/discussion with representatives of business (the 14 families.) We were harangued about the United States privileging human rights over fighting communism. (Again, I don't think that communism really was the incendiary dynamic in El Salvador.) I had the distinct impression that these guys had what they had and intended to keep it; they weren't giving anything away; in fact, they were the source of funding of paramilitary activities intended to guard their riches. Then we met with the Minister of Defense, Vides Casanova. His schtick was that he needed more money, equipment and training so he could deal with both the rebels and the paramilitaries...and squeeze money out of everyone, including the U.S. (which was supplying $100 million a year in military aid at the time.) Of course, Vides Casanova and others presided over thousands of atrocities during their time in power.

Didion basically makes the case for viewing El Salvador as a bad place to spend two weeks and for considering U.S. policies as feckless at best, stupid, cynical and harmful at worst. Basically, she was right, but after so many wars and atrocities and insurgencies and counterinsurgencies all over the world in the ensuing decades, El Salvador has long since disappeared in the rearview mirror.