I
first went to El Salvador in 1985 to attend a wedding. I quickly became fascinated
with the country and its people, many of whom have become good friends. I kept
going back to photograph and to try to understand what was happening there.
El Salvador suffered through a civil war from the late 1970s until a peace
accord was implemented early in 1992. Five guerrilla factions, united as the
FMLN, received arms from Cuba and Nicaragua as well as money and a few recruits
from solidarity organizations in Mexico, South America, Europe, and the United
States. The Salvadoran government forces, frequently working closely with right-wing
death squads, were extensively trained, financed, and equipped by the United
States, at one point receiving an average of a million dollars a day. A peace
commission report held the government forces responsible for the vast majority
of the 70,000 deaths in the war, although the guerrillas also committed atrocities,
if on a smaller scale. The war and political killings are over, but poverty
and crime are rampant.
Last year I accepted an invitation from the Diocese of Apartadó, Colombia,
to visit the department of Chocó, a remote jungle region along the Rio
Atrato, near the border with Panama. The people in this region, many of them
Afro-Colombians, have been caught between the FARC and ELN guerrillas and the
Colombian military and their allies, right-wing paramilitaries. In a bold and
creative experiment, seventy small settlements have declared themselves to
be “Peace Communities,” announcing that they will not cooperate
with any of the armed actors.
These Peace Communities have survived precariously for almost six years, thanks
to the support of the Catholic Church, the United Nations, International Red
Cross, and various countries of the European Union. There are still occasional
attacks, harassment, and even murders of community members by the different
forces, especially the paramilitaries, but the residents courageously try to
hold on to their little houses and cultivate their plots of jungle land.
Sadly, both Salvadorans and Colombians have been slandered by racist accusations
that they were, or are, addicted to violence, that it’s built into the
culture or “in their blood.” My experience is that the vast majority
in both countries are kind, generous, hospitable folk who want nothing to do
with the men (or women or children) with guns. The real problems in Colombia,
as in El Salvador, are the high levels of poverty and unemployment and the
failure of governments to guarantee the basic rights of all their citizens.
Whenever someone would ask me why I wanted to photograph in their community,
I answered that if they gave me permission, I would take my pictures back and
use them to tell their stories to my community. No one ever said “no.” In
a meeting in the peace community of Costa de Oro in February, a young man stood
up and said, “Photograph everything. We want the whole world to know
what’s happening here.”
