Evocative of the the government's barbarous menace at the time. And maybe again, now.

Forget Stephen King and Dean Koontz. You are unlikely to read anything as genuinely chilling and unnerving as Joan Didion’s entirely non-fictional foray into early 1980s El Salvador. Didion and her husband flew in to chronicle the progress/plight of an embattled Central American society and came abruptly face to face with a government-induced crime scene that is the stuff of which nightmares are made.

Didion’s metier was dread, and here she unflinchingly describes how much she flinched and trembled while forcing herself to bear witness to the charnel house and dystopia in our very backyard. A hundred pages portraying a nation as true crime story that equals Orwell at his very best.

A quick little read from the neighborhood "free little library" once again. This book is an account of a reporter's time in El Salvador in the early 80s, when a civil war was raging across the country. I knew nothing about this period of time in the least, and I like when I read books that drop me into a very specific slice of history.

Basically you can tell this was written during the absolute depths of the depression that comes from living in a developing country for a while. The author was obviously frustrated with the indirect way of doing things, the corruption, the "fluidity" of reality and the seemingly unending U.S. aid that accomplished nothing. Having lived in Cambodia for a while, I CAN RELATE.

However, with a third of the book to go the author starts throwing a ton of acronyms and events at you that are difficult to determine the chain of events from, and then the book ends rather abruptly. Up to that point, the author had done a good job explaining the various sides in the conflict there and the atrocities each side was doing. She also presents a scathing observation at how problematic U.S. intervention is in troubled countries. The U.S. to this day takes a very black/white approach and demands that countries set up "democracy" where such a system has never been tried before, and then get upset and either pull all funding or bomb the hell out of countries having trouble with "democracy". I would have liked this book to be about 100 pages longer so the author could go more into this stuff, much like Orwell does in "Homage to Catalonia", another record of a similarly obscure conflict, but which Orwell explains and illustrates with ease. I don't know what happened but it was enough to knock 2 stars off.

If nothing else, it will lead me to research this period more and see if there is any other art or accounts published from this era.

Very good and taught me a lot of new words !

I can't say I enjoyed reading it because "enjoy" is the wrong wrong, but I found it very interesting. It had a little bit of a how I spent my summer vacation feel, but when the smartest person in the room tells you about their trip to a war zone, you listen. She doesn't really lay out the history of our involvement in El Salvador, I guess because you are supposed to already know that. My favorite part was the analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I really was not expecting that. I thought she might have over interpreted how people felt or how much experiencing something helped her understand how people must feel. She doesn't seem to have talked much to the people around her. But most of her analysis of how things were seems legit.

During the Reagan administration the United States committed itself to a policy of rollback as regards populist movements, particularly in the Americas. We invaded Grenada and created proxy armies in Costa Rica and Honduras while attempting the overthrow of Nicaragua. Unremarkably, we supported the dictatorships of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador against popular insurgencies.

During this segment of the eighties I was very active politically, both with the Socialist Party and with solidarity groups at my school, Loyola University Chicago. It was like VietNam all over again, like high school and college, except this time, with the draft inactive, people were generally less concerned. As during our adventures in Southeast Asia, I read quite a deal about the history and politics of Central and South America during this period.

Didion's book was purchased in the eighties, but sat unread for over a decade. It was not a history or a work of political science, so it didn't seem so vital. Besides, Didion was just a name to me, not someone I was into reading. Getting around to it years later was in part an exercise in reminiscence, in part the result of having befriended a Salvadoran temporarily resident in Chicago.

In fact, although based only upon her own reading and a mere two weeks in the country, Salvador is a good, albeit impressionistic, book. Short, it reads like one of the current events essays one appreciates in the New York Review of Books. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it had appeared in some form either there or in The New Yorker. Most memorable at this juncture is her description of the cliff outside the capital below which were the tossed, bloated bodies of suspected communists.

Just finished this guy. A fast read. Not sure if Joan Didion's detail oriented style is best put to use on this sort of subject. In the end I didn't know if the precise lists of details left me with a better understanding what it was to live in a deteriorating, terror-filled country. In flashes and pieces it worked but I was still keenly aware of her privilege and the ways her lens was not "their" lens.

Thinking this was a travel
Book, it was a surprise to read of El Salvador’s political instability in the early 80s. Inspired a lot of you tube video watching as I read.
An interesting part of the world.

Joan Didion as war correspondent, in the 1980s civil war in El Salvador, is an intriguing proposition. And for me, I found her work revealing -- it revealed:

* the ghastly human death toll and misery coinciding with (caused by?) America's involvement;

* the hypocrisy of official Reagan Administration dispatches, testimony, and upbeat reports of the "improving condition of human rights" while citizens, whether "enemies of the U.S.-backed Government" or innocent bystanders, were beaten, murdered, or simply "disappeared;"

* the less than claimed "value" of the Reagan crusade against any communist foothold -- by the USSR and Cuba -- in Central America, right on our doorstep. When the details on the ground in El Salvador indicated at that time a revolving door of American frustration and failure, the US nevertheless deceitfully promoted the geopolitical "value" of our involvement. It is now clear that this campaign was essentially hogwash; and

* the failure of American political and military leaders to evaluate the real results of the execution of our Central American Policy in El Salvador, while they instead chose to uphold the policy even though the real results should have given them pause (at a minimum).

Didion puts herself right in the middle of the story, describing her fear, her abject terror in trying to just exist day-to-day, collecting facts, while others are murdered in the lobbies of hotels, corruption reigns, and sorting the "good guys" from the "bad guys" is not as simple as one would think.

In a weird way, the Didion reporting style brought to mind the work of Hunter S. Thompson (without, in Didion's case, the LSD, peyote, mescaline, firearms, and author-destroyed hotel rooms).

I liked it.

This book is about the repressive and oligarical government of El Salvador and its reactionary treatment of it own citizens and dissidents. Salvador is largely a collection of facts that are woven around and among the author and her husband’s 1982 two-week visit to the country.

The shocking events that Didion describes in El Salvador are what makes the piece so successful. She presents these events in great clarity and often does so without being overly verbose. Consider the following passage about the actions of the Atlacatl Battalion as it swept through the village of Morazan.

“… At noon, the men were blindfolded and killed in the town’s center. Among them was Amaya’s husband, who was nearly blind. In the afternoon the young woman were taken to the hills nearby, where they were raped, then killed and burned. The old women were taken next and shot… From her hiding place Amaya heard soldiers discuss choking the children to death; subsequently she heard the children calling for help, but no shots.” Page 37, Paragraph 2 & Page 38, Paragraph 1.

The essence of what Didion describes can produce a profound emotional impact on a reader in itself. She didn’t have to use descriptive language to evoke an feeling of revulsion because the facts themselves were adequate. Here is an army of cowards that knows only cruelty and terror, the vilest form of criminals that the American dollar can buy. Didion didn’t have to say these things because her writing lets us say them to ourselves.

There are times in Didion’s Salvador where she does use strong language in her renditions of what the government of El Salvador does to its people. Consider the following passage about the pictures that are taken of bodies of the “disappeared” by a photogra­pher who works for “the Human Rights Commission.”

“These bodies he photographs are often broken into unnatural positions, and the faces to which the bodies are attached (when they are attached) are equally unnatural, sometimes unrecognizable as human faces, obliterated by acid or beaten to a mash of misplaced ears and teeth or slashed ear to ear and invaded by insects.” Page 16, Paragraph 3

The bodies are “broken” into “unnatural” positions and the faces are “obliterated” or “beaten to a mash.” All these words and phrases evoke revulsion in a reader, but they also elicit a concomitant feeling of indignation. We are left wondering who could do such terrible things to other anyone else. In consideration of the context Didion in which puts these passages, we are also left wondering why the American government funds the deviants who do these things.

I know nothing about El Salvador, completely ignorant. It was my first read of Didion nonfiction and her words made the landscape of Salvador appear to me in my waking hours between reading, sentences in full form blooming from subconscious. Over the course of my first read of this, I went into work one morning and my boss told me we “needed to speak” about something with looming seriousness. I was paranoid for half the day about what I could’ve done wrong and felt so foolish when it was simply a question about an end or a shift report. I was aware that my boss likely had a stick up her butt for presenting the issue as something that could derive in serious consequences. Yet I immediately reflected on Salvador, when Joan and her husband eat at the Sheraton, and share a frightened moment resulting in nothing, though still feel the full extent of humiliation from fear. I felt it that morning at work, though humiliated by far lower stakes, I felt gratefully surprised to hear Joan.

Paused reading 10/28/2021