Andrés McKinley - For the Love of the Struggle

Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857

By the time I finally got around to finishing this book, a project I have been working on for almost 20 years, I had lived most of my life in Central America, that small explosive chain of poverty-ridden nations connecting continents, separating oceans and blending the very best with the very worst humanity has to offer.

When I arrived in this region in 1977, the isthmus was on fire as poor and traditionally marginalized sectors of society struggled against five decades of military dictatorship and centuries of poverty and injustice, and I was quickly engulfed by the flames of political violence. I had been exposed to poverty during four years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching school in impoverished communities of northern Liberia. I knew little of social struggle, however, and even less about revolution. I was quick to perceive, nevertheless, the historical importance of the moment, marking the pinnacle of a prolonged era of liberation struggles of poor people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. I was also forced to recognize that the United States government my government was on the wrong side of these struggles, allied with murderers and thugs in a desperate effort to defend over a century of hegemony in its own back yard.

El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America with an area of slightly more than eight thousand square miles and a population of six million people, quickly became the site of Americas most prolonged and expensive military endeavor since Vietnam. To win the continuing support of the American people during 12 years of bloody war by proxy, successive U.S. regimes promoted a devious distortion of Central American reality, characterizing a legitimate struggle by the regions poor as communist subversion and arguing that military intervention was necessary to halt Soviet expansion in the western hemisphere. Farmers impoverished by generations of landlessness, overexploited factory workers battling for a minimum wage and the social activists who supported them were described as terrorists and delinquents.

Between 1981 and 1992, billions of dollars of U.S. military aid were spent in the systematic slaughter of over 250,000 innocent Central Americans. As a U.S. citizen who witnessed the horror of these policies on the ground, I became overwhelmed with anguish at the levels of human suffering that my own government was willing to inflict on innocent human beings in the name of national security, and with the ignorance and complacency of the American people in the face of such blatant disregard for human life. My allegiances became firmly realigned in favor of the victims of U.S. aggression. My heart became hardened in self defense against the insanity of everyday life, and my country of origin, along with friends and immediate family, were often the target of my growing rage.

It was many years after the war in El Salvador had ended that I was finally able to reconcile my anger with the nation of my birth. Politics in Central America evolved into something less urgent and less dramatic than the life and death struggle it had once been, and U.S. intervention became more subliminal and benign. I am still moved to anger by Americas continued commitment to the use of political intrigue, economic pressure and military force to shape the world in accordance with its own interests, and I have been appalled in recent years by the U.S.s continued propensity to intervene in harmful ways in the internal affairs of the nations in the region, shoring up anti-democratic and often corrupt regimes and pushing for neoliberal economic policies that prioritize the interests of local elites over poor majorities. At the same time, however, I am constantly reminded by Central Americans themselves that the U.S. role in this region and in other parts of the world cannot be explained by the hearts and minds of the American people.

In the spring of 2002, ten years after the signing of Peace Accords in El Salvador, I came across a series of letters that my now-deceased mother had written in March 1986 emphasizing the goodness in the human heart and demanding tolerance from a son she was finding increasingly difficult to reach at the time. I was deeply moved by the levels of pain and frustration I had failed to see and I was forced to recognize my own inability to help the people that I most loved understand my anger towards the country of my birth. I had not shared adequately the human experience of a war that had bled my adopted country white and changed me forever. I had been unable to bring to life the personal histories of its heroes and martyrs and I had been unable to record more faithfully the hopes and aspirations that had pulled me into their struggle.