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Someone please wish me luck. Between the facts of the story and the drama of submission, there must be lunch.
:)
Innocent of this Knowledge: Finding the Death of Agustin Farabundo Marti
“Be innocent of this knowledge, chuck.” -- Macbeth
One night, taking a break from the on line activism that has become my obsession since the last stolen Federal election, I decided to google my grandfather. My family immigrated to the United States from El Salvador and I’d never used the internet to try and augment the bit of history we brought with us. I found two listings for him.
The first one was a Salvadoran government Executive Order from the 40’s, authorizing my grandfather to establish what amounted to a national traffic court. My grandfather, Manuel Antonio Castañeda, was the Minister of Defense at that time, and apparently he was being given the authority to regulate auto traffic and to resolve its attendant problems and disputes.
Now, my grandmother, Minister Castañeda’s wife, was one of the first women in El Salvador to obtain a driver’s license. She was, self-admittedly, one of the worst drivers ever. My grandfather used to call ahead, whenever she took one of the cars out on her own, to ensure the safety of the populace in the immediate area. My grandmother wasn’t in the least troubled by her failure as a motorist and would tell this story often: “I signaled a left turn and turned right! I signaled to pass and would back up!” and she would laugh at herself and maybe, a little, at the damn car that refused to behave. Maybe the Executive Order was a plea for the Defense Minister to protect El Salvador from the threat of his wife’s driving.
The second entry I found that night was an even older one, from the 1930’s. It was a short account of how one Farabundo Marti, along with two leftist student leaders, Luna Calderon and Mario Zapata, were tried before a military tribunal on January 31, 1932, presided over by General Manuel Antonio Castañeda. They were found guilty, condemned to death by firing squad and were subsequently executed in the Municipal Cemetery of San Salvador.
“La insurrección había sido barrida a sangre y fuego. El 31 de enero, un consejo de guerra presidido por el general Manuel Antonio Castañeda juzgó y condenó a Agustín Farabundo Martí y a los líderes estudiantiles Alfonso Luna Calderón y Mario Zapata a morir fusilados en el Cementerio General de San Salvador, previo traslado desde sus celdas en la Penitenciaría Central. Allí cayeron, bajo las balas asesinas del pelotón de fusilamiento, con la dignidad de los héroes revolucionarios, Farabundo Martí y sus compañeros.”
( AGUSTIN FARABUNDO MARTI, UN REVOLUCIONARIO DE LA PATRIA GRANDE, Fernando Ramón Bossi, from the Official Website of the FMLN, www.fmln.org.)
The month of January 1932, when Marti, Calderon and Zapata were executed, was the month of the biggest massacre of civilians in the history of El Salvador. Historians -- as well as the people of El Salvador -- refer to the event simply as “La Matanza” or, “The Slaughter.” Sometimes called a workers’ uprising, sometimes an indigenous insurrection, there are competing stories about La Matanza but it is estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed by the Salvadoran military’s response. The execution of Marti, Calderon and Zapata occurred after the insurrection was put down; it was a period to the event. This happened under the command of then President Maximilliano Hernandez Martinez, and as I kept searching the net, I remembered my grandfather had indeed worked for Martinez for a time, according to the stories my grandmother told me when I was very young and when she had no one else to talk to.
Its one thing to find out your grandfather was made responsible to secure his country against his wife’s driving. It’s quite another to find out he may have ordered the execution of one of Central America’s most beloved revolutionaries.
So, I kept searching. This could be my mistake, my insufficient literacy in Spanish or one of those internet confusions. The name “Castañeda” is a common one and there was even another general in El Salvador at that time whose name was identical but for a tilde. My own name is not uncommon. There is a professor at Columbia, a PETA activist and a cabinet secretary in Italy who all share it. (I’ve always hoped the PETA activist didn’t get into too much trouble, especially given that the Patriot Act implementers seem to be very bad at making fine distinctions.) Unable to make a determination, I called my mother and described to her what I had found. She laughed and said, “That’s just not possible.”
“How do you know?”
“What year was that?”
“1932. But you know who Farabundo Marti was, right?”
“Yes, I know. What year was it?” She paused. “That’s just not possible. I knew my father.”
“Mom, you weren’t even born yet.”
“I was born that year,” she said, as if that settled it.
It’s difficult to describe exactly what this conversation was like. My mother is an internet adept and here she was, discounting a tool she uses every day. Reflexively and completely. My mother has been an activist for liberal projects since before she became an American citizen. She walked a precinct for John Kennedy and one of my earliest memories is celebrating his election by jumping on our three-piece sectional, throwing leftover campaign literature all over the living room.
This call was an insensitive, even selfish, mistake on my part and we wrapped it up very quickly. My call had been something akin to insulting the dead.
My grandfather died here in San Francisco where he resided at the end of his life. By then, the entire family had emigrated. One day, he put me down for a nap in my crib, settled in for his own nap in the same room and passed in his sleep. The Salvadoran government flew him back “home” to a state funeral. He is buried in the Municipal Cemetery in San Salvador, where Marti and his two student followers were executed.
I went there in 1968 with my grandmother to see about repairing his sepulcher. The tomb was large and ornate but in shambles. We stayed two months and I came home with a Spanish accent, having seen my first volcano, my many cousins and my first encampment of earthquake survivors. It was a good thing we went when we did, because the next biggest carnage since the Matanza of 1932 was well on its way to erupting.
The coming civil war would rive the country and would rive our family here, too. Our Sunday dinners became unbearable – with half of us backing the rebels and half of us backing the government and their US government supporters. “Come to San Salvador to visit,” my Uncle Carlos said. He was here on a visit and received daily calls from the capital with political updates from his conservative contacts there.
“I’d like to, Uncle Carlos, but not in an American uniform“, one of my cousins replied. At the time, the question of a U.S. invasion was still very much open. I had nine male relatives of draft age, including my only brother.
Maybe this happened in all of our families during the war, whether we were still “at home” or whether we were in our new, North American home. El Salvador is a small country and every family seems to be a microcosm of the place. We are a stew, a casamiento of rich and poor relatives, light and dark skinned, leftist and conservative, professionals and laborers, indios and laudinos – although before La Matanza, the indigenous community was much more autonomous and visible. I hear, this is changing now. The indigenous community is reportedly having a renaissance. Peace.
In the years after my grandfather’s death and before I was old enough to go to school, my grandmother took care of me while my mother and her siblings tried to find their footing in San Francisco. I remember only three things of his in the house. There was a smiling headshot of him, in his general’s uniform, on my grandmother’s dresser. There was a hatbox in her closet that held his immaculate dove gray fedora with its black band. If I was good, she let me take it out of the box and look at it.
There were also the stories that belonged to him and to his life in El Salvador. They seemed like fairytales to me, or at least, indistinguishable from tall tale. Stories of the General’s hapless generosity -- like the time he swore off his tailor, and then was found in his briefs at his desk by his daughters. The tailor had come and managed to talk the pants literally off of him for an alteration. More fantastic stories, like the time he broke with “that evil murderer Martinez” and wound up being arrested and imprisoned, then fleeing the country – but vindicated in the end with a happy return to El Salvador and to government. My grandmother had her own stories, too, about how she survived in exile by going on radio quiz shows and by using her education to win grocery money for the family. I’ve seen a picture of my mother during those years. She and one of my aunts sit in what appears to be a park, maybe six and seven years old. They are very, very thin and their eyes are shadowed.
In all these years, there were no stories about La Matanza. And certainly none about Agustin Farabundo Marti. I have to wonder, what would my grandfather have thought about my translations for Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, tapes she brought out of Nicaragua to present to Congress during Contragate, supporting the Sandinista’s case that they were in fact negotiating with the Contras? Tapes made in secret places in the jungle – you could hear the jungle in the long pauses of those conversations. Or, what would he have thought of me helping to raise money for the FMLN, even in the small way I did, buying concert tickets for the whole family during an FMLN fundraiser? (It was my birthday and some of my relatives came to celebrate with me. My godmother looked around and whispered to my mother, “Rosita, these people are all Communists.” My mother shrugged. “What can they do -- they’re listening to music.” And she went back to reading her menu.)
Not that politically active daughters and granddaughters would have surprised him. His own wife was a closet socialist and wrote editorials under a pen name. The General couldn’t have stopped her. But, more than ever, I don’t understand their negotiated peace except in the sense that El Salvador seems to require elaborately negotiated truces. From all of us. And so begins my own negotiation, with what erupted in Izalco, 1932, with my grandfather’s hat, with Farabundo Marti and Gen. Castañeda, whose shades might stroll together in the cemetery, for all I know.
There is a storekeeper out here on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. He is from San Salvador. He studied philosophy at the Catholic University there and he also was held captive for a year during the last civil war although he was not a combatant. There was torture involved. He tells me, Marti was no angel. He tells me, it was too bad your grandfather left for those years, because the military establishment that replaced him was a band of crooks. But, my friend is from El Salvador where a convoluted courtesy sometimes trumps fact. I wonder what else he knows. And wonder, what he isn’t telling me -- yet. And so, the negotiation begins.
Elizabeth Ferrari
November 2005
San Francisco
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