It was a Saturday night. The meal was over, and everyone had gone into the living room to talk. The radio was tuned to a music station. Shortly after 8 p.m., an announcer broke into the program with a bulletin. Leftist rebels were attacking several neighborhoods throughout the city.
This isn`t the sort of thing that happens at dinner parties in the United States. But this was taking place in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where the intrusion of violence has become commonplace during the last decade. For Dr. Donna Harper, a 29-year-old physician from the Chicago area, it was an immersion into the fear and bloodshed of that country`s civil war.
When the guerrillas launched their surprise urban offensive on Nov. 11, Harper was among five women and three men who had gathered at a house near the national university in San Salvador for spaghetti and conversation.
All were in their 20s or 30s. They had come to El Salvador as health workers and teachers from the U.S., Canada and Spain and were affiliated with Christian relief organizations, both Catholic and Protestant.
During the next 12 days, Harper would treat wounded civilians, would be wounded herself, would help establish a refugee center and would go into hiding from the Salvadoran National Guard, which had begun arresting clergy and staff members of religious agencies.
Harper went to El Salvador this summer with her husband, a Salvadoran who is a U.S. resident. After completing her internship at a hospital in a western suburb, she had arranged to practice medicine in El Salvador for a year before beginning her residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
She managed to return to Chicago on Thanksgiving Day. Interviewed recently about her experience, she offers a ground-level view of the hostilities in El Salvador, whose ongoing travails have been overshadowed in recent weeks by the stunning events in Eastern Europe.
Most of the victims whom Harper cared for were women and children, and most of their injuries were shrapnel wounds. But others were suffering from emotional devastation.
”Many had stress-related symptoms,” she said. ”I encouraged those who could to let go and cry. One young woman who had been separated from her parents cried on my shoulder for 15 or 20 minutes, until she had no tears left.”
Also interviewed for this article was Ernesto Lopez, 31, a citizen of El Salvador who now lives in Chicago, serving as a liaison for American churches that sponsor assistance programs in El Salvador.
He came to the U.S. in 1978 as a student and has permanent resident status. ”I decided to devote my life to supporting justice and establishing a true democracy in El Salvador,” he said.
His job requires occasional visits there. On the morning of Nov. 11, in a dramatic example of bad timing, Lopez flew to San Salvador from Chicago.
He got out eight days later; he spent most of that time in a house shared by three Catholic sisters. When word spread that the Salvadoran military was arresting human rights activists and church officials, he fled to the airport. ”I took a chance,” he said. ”I was afraid, but I was lucky. I made it.”
Donna Harper and Ernesto Lopez are not their real names. Both asked that their identities be kept confidential for the safety of their families in El Salvador and for their own when they return.
”We have lived with terror for so many years that we have learned to protect ourselves, our family, our relatives, our friends,” Lopez said.
Under a new law, he said, Salvadorans who disagree with government policy are subject to arrest and imprisonment, no matter where such statements are made. ”Just giving a reporter my opinions about the government crackdown against the churches is a criminal activity,” Lopez said.
Harper said that when she arrived in El Salvador, the fear of being caught in combat was not as great as the fear of arrest and ”disappearance.” Right-wing death squads have killed and abducted hundreds of people believed to oppose the power of the military and the wealthy landowners, who essentially run the country.
”That was the real fear for me,” Harper said. ”There`s a constant anxiety. You can`t ask normal things like `What do you do?` or `What do you think about such-and-such?` You assume there are informers around.”
If someone she didn`t know well asked what she thought about government leaders or their policies, she would reply, ”I`m just here visiting. I don`t have an opinion.”
With the Nov. 11 offensive, what had been largely a rural struggle suddenly made battlegrounds of the nation`s cities.
Soon after Harper and her colleagues had heard the radio bulletin on the night of Nov. 11, the government took control of all news operations on radio and television, limiting all reports to its emergency National Network for Peace.
The continuing sound of nearby gunfire dispelled any doubts about the seriousness of the situation, and as the night wore on, Harper watched red tracer bullets from government planes that were strafing surrounding residential areas.
Not far away, Lopez and the Catholic sisters were kept awake by the clatter of machine guns and the roar of rockets.
On Sunday morning, Lopez called a friend who lived near the Catholic church in Zacamil (a neighborhood in San Salvador). ”We wanted to go to mass, but he said don`t come. He said fighting is going on now. There were no church services anywhere that day. The city was paralyzed.”
Also on Sunday morning, Harper finally spoke to her husband by phone. Because he had to work late on Saturday with an adult literacy program, he was unable to come to dinner with her. He said he was safe, and so were his parents.
Harper stayed in the house with her seven companions from Saturday night until Wednesday, sleeping on the floor and eating sparingly.
On Wednesday morning, Nov. 15, an American friend came by. He asked Harper to help at a Catholic clinic in Las Chacras, a shantytown in San Salvador that had been hit hard by street battles and air strikes. At 4 p.m., the waiting room was still packed with wounded, and she was examining a young woman when there was a flash of light and a loud noise. The roof of the building had been shattered by a rocket or an artillery shell, spraying the room with shards of concrete.
”I looked at my right arm,” Harper said. ”It was bloody. There were holes in my jeans, and my leg was bleeding. I went deaf in my right ear for a while. But I wasn`t seriously hurt.”
Harper learned that when the National Guard had occupied the area the day before, they had threatened to bomb the clinic. ”The government troops assumed the poor people who lived in Las Chacras supported the guerrillas,”
she said. ”We decided to leave.”
She and the clinic staff went to a Catholic day-care center not far away. ”We spent Wednesday night there. There were 150 of us who bedded down in the courtyard, although I don`t think I slept 15 minutes.”
Shaken by priests` deaths
On Thursday morning, Harper and Lopez-indeed everyone in San Salvador-learned that six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper`s daughter had been tortured and executed by men in military uniforms before dawn.
”Everyone was greatly shaken by the news,” Harper said. ”This was a Catholic community. Everyone also knew it was done by the military or a death squad.”
Such atrocities had happened before. The Catholic archbishop of San Salvador was shot to death in 1980 by a right-wing assassin; the same year four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers.
Lopez was not surprised by the slaughter of the priests. ”I listened to the government radio for three days,” he said. ”Citizens were invited to call on an open line, but 99 percent of the calls that were put on the air supported ARENA (the right-wing party that controls the government).
”A lot of the callers accused the churches of being communist and of instigating the attacks. There were threats and insults and four-letter words. People called for the heads of the Catholic archbishop and the Lutheran bishop. Some said the trade union leaders and the members of the human rights commission should be killed. When I heard about the six priests and the two women, I knew the caceria-the witch hunt-had begun.”
On Thursday Harper moved again, this time to an Episcopal Church compound that was being converted into a refugee center. ”The Red Cross dumped 350 people there,” she said. ”We had to dig latrines and find food and shelter. Somehow we did it.”
The same morning, National Guard soldiers searched the house where Lopez was staying. They told the sisters they had reports that it was a terrorist headquarters. ”We thought it was a miracle we were not arrested, but we were afraid they would come back,” Lopez said. ”So we left everything we had and went to a Catholic high school that had become a refugee center.”
He stayed there three nights, until Sunday, Nov. 19, when he headed for the airport.
At the Episcopal compound, Harper found a range of feelings about the guerilla attacks. ”But people blamed the massive destruction on the Salvadoran Air Force and by extention, the U.S., because of our support of the military,” she said. ”One woman told me, `It`s not the fault of the muchachos.` ” The word, which means boys in Spanish, referred to the guerrillas.
Harper was reunited with her husband at the church, but they became increasingly anxious about reports of raids on churches by the National Guard. ”We heard the staff at the Lutheran Church had been arrested and charged with terrorist activities, (a charge that) was absolutely untrue,” she said. On Sunday, they left for the house of her husband`s parents. They later learned that Salvadoran soldiers had broken into their apartment and searched it; it`s likely they would have been arrested if they had been there.
The day before Thanksgiving, Harper bought a plane ticket for a flight to Chicago the next day. ”The government was happy to see me go,” she said.
”Many foreign volunteers who worked for churches or humanitarian groups were deported. All but one of the eight people who had dinner on Nov. 11 have gone home.”
Soldiers are victims
If the rebels expected to trigger a spontaneous rebellion on Nov. 11 among poor city dwellers, they were disappointed. Some American journalists detected a widespread weariness with the revolution among the people whom the revolutionaries want to aid, a belief that conflict simply makes things worse. Few predict the war will end soon, although most think it will finally be resolved through negotiations. The country`s oligarchy still rules and still resists reforms that would narrow the gap between rich and poor. In the last 10 years 70,000 people have been killed because of the civil war. (El Salvador`s population is 5.4 million; the equivalent loss of lives for the U.S. would be 3 million.)
”There`s a moment that sticks in my memory,” Harper said. ”I had just bought my airplane ticket, and my husband was driving me back to his parents` house.
”I noticed one of the soldiers who was guarding the city`s military hospital. He seemed to be almost cowering behind a telephone pole, and as we passed, his eyes and mine met. He was maybe 15 years old, and there was this look of terror in his face.
”It made me think about the war. The wealthy and the powerful are fighting the guerrillas because they have a lot to lose. But that boy`s face made me realize that in a sense many of the soldiers are as much victims as the civilians who were caught in the crossfire and have lost their homes. The government is using the poor to fight the poor. It`s sad, isn`t it?”
