Crime and Fatigue

Awareness of crime – especially violent crime – is pervasive in El Salvador, a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world.  Houses are surrounded by walls topped with razor wire.  Armed (which is not necessarily the same thing as “trained”) guards stand outside banks, jewelry stores, even ice cream shops, and security is big business.  A people that clearly prizes hospitality as a virtue (more on that in a later post) seems also hesitant to open doors.  When in a car, we drove with doors locked and windows up.

When I visited in July, the newspaper reported that the Department of Sonsonate with a population of about a half million people, had already endured 300 homicides for the year.  While I was not directly affected personally, my visit to Chalatenango was complicated by violence.  Apparently a refusal (or inability?) to pay extortion fees to organized crime led to two workers on that bus route being assassinated.  The drivers’ perceived reluctance on the part of authorities to protect them adequately, which led to a bus drivers’ strike that lasted a few days.  I was fortunate that Crispaz was able to arrange for a driver to get me there and back; most people do not have that luxury.

The US State Department calls public transportation “risky and not recommended.”  On the other hand, buses, though hardly comfortable, are frequent, convenient, and inexpensive – within San Salvador, fares are 20 cents.  Tens of thousands of people ride the buses daily, the vast majority without incident.  I first took some bus rides with Salvadorans, then alone – and also without incident -- but always to friendly warnings that I should keep my pack on my lap, be home by dark, and, if mugged, just cooperate.  Standard advice, I suppose. 



A dirt road up the gorgeous volcano of San Salvador rises up out San Ramon, through the community of Las Nubes – still without safe drinking water in 2011 – and high above the capital.  I mentioned in passing that, if time permitted, I would love to walk to the top.  Several people – both Salvadorans and North American expatriates alike – told me that it would not be safe, and the likelihood of being mugged, even up there, would be very high.  My friend Gustavo eventually offered to take me up with a group, but more out of generosity than because he thought it was a good idea.  So, we never did go all the way  up.



Maria Teresa, Sarai, Gustavo, Hector, and Sylvia took me part way up the volcano.



All of this kept me wondering just how cautious I should be.  Was I too worried?  Not worried enough?  I certainly did not feel worried on the 20-minute daytime bus trips to San Ramon.  On the other hand, when my poor sense of direction left a couple of women who had escorted me taking the bus home after dark, I was desperately nervous until I got their call that they had arrived home safely.

I started to think that maybe my worry had been overblown, that I had listened to the warnings too attentively.  I thought with some shame of my undergraduate days in New Orleans.  As a freshman, I had been warned not to take the bus downtown, but to stick to the streetcar – which, by the way, is considerably slower.  I followed that advice for three years before I was willing to brave being the only white person on the bus downtown.  I was self-conscious and nervous.  You can bet that I kept my pack on my lap, planned to be home before dark, and was prepared to cooperate with any muggers.  Nobody on the bus, however, seemed to have any reaction to my presence whatsoever.  I felt stupid, alarmist, and racist.

On the other hand, the risks about which I had been warned are all too real in El Salvador.  The fact that Salvadorans face them daily does not make them less dangerous, just common.  I had the chance to put this dilemma to Brian Rude, a Lutheran minister from Canada who has been working in Salvadoran prison ministry for years.  He related that he has been mugged a number of times, and his apartment robbed on other occasions.  He addresses the situation by having a policy of never carrying with him anything he is not willing to give up.  I thought of St. Francis of Assisi, who justified his order’s vow of corporate poverty on the grounds that if they owned property, they might feel the urge to defend it, and therefore to harm those who were trying to take it.

So, there is legitimate reason to feel concerned about security in El Salvador.  It also must be, I would imagine, really exhausting to maintain that level of vigilance over the long haul.  The long-term effects of this vigilance cannot be good for the psychological health of individuals or of society as a whole.

Swatting Flies

Early on in my stay in El Salvador, I was fumbling my way through the daily newspaper.  I came across a startling headline that placed the Salvadoran unemployment rate somewhere in the seven percent range.  The old saw still holds true.  There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.  While there a small number of Salvadorans are without any work, a large number are dramatically underemployed, so the seven percent rate is misleading.  Official employment numbers include work in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, and it is in the informal sector – which accounts for something like half of all non-agriculural employment in El Salvador – that so many people can be categorized as “underemployed.”

The informal sector is broad, and includes street vendors of all types.  Young men hop on and off buses selling gum and candy, or canvas cars at stoplights with any number of wares.  One item being heavily “marketed” when I was there, I noticed, was the battery-powered flyswatter.  The zapping power of those big old purple bug-killing lamps folks in the US used to hang in their back yards during the summer, but in the shape of a small tennis racquet.

For my first couple of days in El Salvador, before heading out to the community of San Ramon for two weeks, I had the opportunity to tag along with a delegation from Cincinnati (including the Executive Director of Crispaz, Dennis O’Connor) as they visited a few of the country’s significant organizations and cultural sites.  One of these visits was with Comadres, La Comite de Madres, Mons. Romero.  The organization was founded in 1977 as a means of uniting the relatives of people who had been “disappeared” amidst government repression.  The women there spoke for hours about the traumatic events that led to their own involvement in the group.  One woman recounted the details of her search for her daughter – whose corpse she eventually found – as if had all happened in the past week, not in 1979.  Without melodrama, she frankly admitted that she did not believe that she would EVER get over the pain of those events, but that she knew she had to share them nonetheless.  That was a motif that shot through my entire visit, in fact.  The enduring legacy of trauma for so many people has not been wiped away by a couple of decades of (comparatively speaking) peace and stability.

We all sweltered in the humid July afternoon air.  The heaviness of the air, though, was nothing compared to that of the reality being recounted.  Amid the intensity of the long afternoon, Alexis, the delegation leader from Crispaz who translated the proceedings, asked to take a break.  If we thought that the hiatus would provide much respite, though, we were wrong.  It simply gave us the opportunity to view some of the hundreds of graphic photos of murdered, often mutilated, victims of the repression that Comadres had managed to collect.

As we ground through a fascinating, exhausting, perhaps disheartening afternoon, someone would occasionally pick up the bug zapper and swat at a fly.  In most instances, I would hardly have noticed such an action at all, but on this day it seemed filled with importance, however unintentional.  It gave ME a tiny jolt, too.  Juxtaposed with a picture of a power structure that had systematically engaged in the wanton killing of thousands of people, the casual swat at a couple of flies became for me a startling symbol of what happens when we slip into thinking of others not as human persons but as pests.

A Short Introduction to a Month in El Salvador

In March of 2011, I made my first-ever visit to El Salvador as a member of a Crispaz delegation from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.  In fact, it was my first trip to Latin America at all.  We visited significant sites and met with people and organizations doing the kind of work that interests Crispaz – Christians for Peace in El Salvador.

Crispaz emphasizes the concept of “reverse mission.”  A delegation trip is less about doing some kind of social service or missionary work than it is about meeting people and being moved by their realities.  The hope, then, is that delegation trip members, on their return home, will look for ways to teach others about the Salvadoran reality and engage in activities that allow them to accompany the Salvadoran people.

After my delegation trip, I, like the rest of my group, spent some time thinking and praying about what a next step for me would be.  How could I take this experience and let it affect my daily life as a schoolteacher, student, and person?  In fact, I was at the Easter Vigil Mass about six weeks later when I experienced a strong urge to ask Crispaz about returning to El Salvador for a longer trip.  (I think Ignatius probably would have called it an experience of “consolation without previous cause.”)  Having had such a positive experience with Crispaz for a one-week delegation trip, I decided to ask them about their Summer Immersion Program.

When I got in touch with Dennis, the executive director of Crispaz at their office in Cincinnati, I laid out some of my practical obstacles to doing this: my Spanish is poor for one, and I was going to have to take a summer class that would only leave me 4 weeks for the visit.  The Summer Immersion Program is generally designed more for a seven or eight week stay.  Dennis reassured me on both counts – I had enough Spanish to get by, and four weeks was long enough to have a meaningful experience accompanying the Salvadoran people.

Crispaz set to work organizing people for me to accompany, and I prepared by starting to watch soccer (futbol) on the Spanish channel.  It did not help.  I only learned how to say “foul,” “corner kick,” and “Gooooooooooooool!”  In any case, I did arrive in San Salvador in late July and stayed for four weeks.  Herein I’d like, somewhat belatedly, to reflect on some of that experience.