Vides, who kept firearms in his car or on his person, moved Forché to “safer” locales at night - sometimes for longer periods - as he interpreted the crosscurrents of intelligence from his network of sources. Forché’s status as an American citizen and poet provided a plausible rationale for her presence in El Salvador during daylight hours. Hers was a contingent existence, one of constant surveillance by the authorities. Previously they were obligated only to “keep order,” repressing imminent “Communist” threats to the status quo of a highly stratified society with the world’s highest homicide rate.įorché’s Spanish was poor when she made the first of seven extended stays to El Salvador, but it improved rapidly as “the work” of ongoing resistance was revealed. This was an unsettling precondition for El Salvador’s military, which had controlled the country since 1932.
president in 1976 and he made human rights a predicate for foreign aid. Vides became her Virgil as she descended into a place of awesome beauty and abject poverty, teetering on the edge of civil war.
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