A Review of Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq

Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq by Scott Wallace (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024)

These two parts are juxtaposed with a third, the remarkable photo essay that runs the length of the book, in always fascinating, illuminating, at times devastating, relation to the prose.  So many of these photos are movingly intimate, showing the very people and settings Wallace is writing about, often on the facing page.  We feel as if we are seeing them as Wallace saw them, and as he remembers them.  These faces, in a sense, constitute the beating heart of Wallace’s book.  Soldiers, guerrillas, widows and mothers, rural peasants, faces in the urban crowd, young people—a few still innocent and hopeful looking, others marked by the bitter and terrifying experiences they’ve been forced to bear—old people with gnarled limbs and expressive eyes; the unbearable aloof arrogance of officialdom, whether Central American politicians or American diplomats; the hard and even cruel expressions of the military officers, especially Salvadoran, and of U.S.-backed Contra insurgents of Nicaragua.  There is something else altogether, frankly, in the faces of the young people in the Salvadoran guerrilla forces—in their “ragtag assortment of jeans, fatigue shirts and ball caps”—and of Sandinista battalions, youths crowded into the backs of troop transport trucks headed toward combat, grinning with an adolescent excitement that is heartbreaking when you think about where they’re headed, these guerrillas and soldiers of the young revolutionary Nicaraguan government, comprising, Wallace writes, “the very people the U.S. was paying to exterminate.”

Wallace’s reader can’t help but contrast these faces with comparatively vacant, or simply worried expressions of Salvadoran and Guatemalan drafted soldiers, the almost goofily clueless faces of peasants press-ganged into Army-allied civil patrols, one of those militia men holding a grenade and looking at the camera with a “What might I do with this?’ grin.   The photographs of mostly young journalists, Wallace and his colleagues, their scruffy young visages looking out from the page as if to remind us of who “we” were back then, reporting on and experiencing all this that was going to be, for better or worse, so formative, that was even going to haunt us, maybe for the rest of our lives.  Perhaps, for a reader of any age encountering the U.S.-manufactured wars of Central America of the 1980s for the first time in Wallace’s book, those young journalists’ faces are like small embedded portals, or even mirrors, through which reader observes and learns some of what of those journalists did, but from an inevitably self-reflexive contemporary standpoint and context, in which however sad and shocking, it might also seem appallingly familiar: that the United States never changes in these respects is one lesson this book unforgettably illustrates and reinforces, that the way it regards and treats poor, marginal non-white countries never changes, and neither does its mostly blithely oblivious citizens.

Wallace’s photographs make us look at those who bore the suffering, the crushing of so many lives and worthy hopes, and all that death at the hands of a U.S. foreign policy that couldn’t have been more indifferent to their fates,  employing its multifarious powers of propaganda to hide the reality from gullible citizenry. All this any contemporary reader might find nauseatingly familiar.  Also caught in those “crosshairs” are the journalists, so many of them—but not all of them—dedicated to, indeed, risking their lives, to get the truth out. When you work for establishment media, as Wallace himself often did, that seems more committed to tacitly supporting U.S. policies than in putting the truth before their viewers or readers, it seems an almost impossible task.

I am about Scott Wallace’s age, and years when I was working as a freelance journalist in Central America overlap exactly with those that Wallace spent there, starting his journalism career.  My family, on my mother’s side, is Guatemalan, a mestizo, Catholic, generally politically conservative, middle-class merchant family, and with whom I have always been close, despite our political differences, divisions common enough inside many Central American families of that time, and up to our own. I spent much of my childhood in Guatemala and have spent much time there subsequently, including at least half of the 1980s.  Wallace arrived in El Salvador in 1983, the same year I had my first on the ground assignment, from Esquire, to go to Nicaragua to write an article about one of the Sandinista volunteer battalions (known as the BONS), made up of young people from Managua neighborhoods and that after some weeks of training, in this case at the Santa Clara base, would be sent into combat against U.S.-created-and-backed Contra forces, then in the still early stages of their insurgency against the leftist Sandinista government.  In 1979, the Sandinista Revolution had toppled the decades-long, grotesquely repressive and corrupt, U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.

That year I, recently out of college, was living in Guatemala, in my uncle’s house in Guatemala City.  Working in New York City restaurants hadn’t produced enough money to pay rent and be able to write the three short-stories I needed to apply to MFA programs in the United States. I’d come to Guatemala and ended up staying for more than a year; at that point, writing journalism of any kind wasn’t in my plans. I got into those MFA programs, the storied Iowa program even offered me a full scholarship.

However, when Esquire accepted one of those short stories for publication, and soon after asked if I wanted to try my hand at non-fiction, I was faced with the most fateful decision of my life.  I forsook the well-funded, surely creatively and academically rich security of Iowa for the extremely tenuous, economically impoverished existence of a freelance journalist in Central America, writing a piece on my time in Guatemala first, followed by that Nicaragua piece. But I knew, given my own heritage and ambitions and influences as an aspiring novelist, that I had to go there.

As Wallace writes, when President Ronald Reagan took office in the United States in 1981, he announced his determination to “draw the line against communist aggression in El Salvador” and prevent a repeat of the Sandinista Revolution. Back in Brooklyn for a while, later that same year or perhaps in the next, 1982, I remember watching in astonishment as Reagan, on television, stood before a map that showed how a red tide of Communism would rise, enveloping all of the Isthmus, and Mexico, before finally submerging Texas, unless the United States did not put a stop to it.  Extraordinarily, those countries, El Salvador, Nicaragua, mostly, but Honduras and Guatemala too (and later, Panamá) would become more than a decade-long focus of U.S. foreign policy, a front line in what some would term “the end game of the Cold War.” But, of course, the United States had been involved in Central America, part of its Western Hemisphere “backyard,” with various episodes and levels of intensity, rapaciousness, diplomatic initiative, and so on, for at least a century.

I was born in 1954, the year of the infamous CIA-manufactured coup that ended Guatemala’s sole decade of democracy, which ushered in decades of military dictatorship and right-wing oligarchic rule, unrelentingly murderous state repression, and an internal war that was finally ended by a peace treaty in 1996. Lately, I’ve often found myself reflecting­—prompted by the unignorable awareness that Guatemala is not essentially unique in this respect—that from the time I was born until I was 42, there was not a day when the United States was not paying for or otherwise supporting, justifying, covering-up, the Guatemalan state’s murder of civilians, and also death-squad abductions of civilians, their subsequent torture, rapes, exterminations.

These policies included the overt, if always underreported, interventions of the 1960s and 70s, when modest but lethal detachments of U.S. Green Berets pursued, even deploying napalm, a then-fledgling guerrilla army, a campaign that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, and, in the 1980s, when the overt and clandestine support for a Guatemalan military that, faced with what Guatemalan military and political leaders now claimed was a growing Marxist guerrilla insurgency with substantial civilian support, especially in the Western Highlands of the rural Indigenous Maya, launched the most lethal counterinsurgency campaign ever seen in Latin America.   According to a U.N.-backed Truth Commission, which charged the Guatemalan military with having committed genocide, some 200,000 civilians were killed, half in the decade of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan fought to restore overt military aid that had been cut off in 1977 under the Carter Administration.  (By various means, U.S. military aid continued, and alternative ways were found for arming their client-allies.)

When Wallace went to Guatemala in 1983, he saw troops armed with “folding-stock Galil” rifles. “The rifles were a common sight in Guatemala, where Israel had stepped in to assist the military when U.S. support was suspended,” he writes. The U.N. Commission concluded that of the war’s civilian casualties,  “eighty-three percent of the victims were Indigenous Maya and seventeen percent were Ladino” (non-Indigenous) and that the Guatemalan military was responsible for ninety-three percent of those deaths; more than 600 massacres had occurred, and some “420 villages had been razed.” As Wallace notes, and as I remember all too well, a Guatemalan military dictatorship that was being denounced for its war crimes all over the world was enthusiastically defended by President Reagan, who said it was getting “a bum rap”; as a matter of policy, members of his administration and U.S. diplomats denied what was occurring. In the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City, a spokesperson tells Wallace, after his return from a reporting trip in the Western Highlands, that “most accounts of massacres are either not true or exaggerated.” What constitutes an exaggerated account of a massacre?

“I gained a sense of when it was relatively safe to venture up one road, when an ambush might lay in wait down another,” writes Wallace. “I developed an ear for when someone was telling the truth and when someone was telling me what he or she thought I wanted to hear…

“I studied the way Bob [the great photojournalist Bob Nickelsberg] and other more experienced journalists handled themselves, and I did as they said: at checkpoints, when drawing near combatants of one side or the other, or when guessing the right time to leave before things went sideways…a sense of how to act, what to ask.”

Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the habit of art” was more a way of being than a discipline, as “a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.” A young journalist, especially the type of narrative journalist Scott Wallace would become, a writer of long-form pieces and of books, needs to develop the same habits. Though in war zones, such habits not only help to produce good work but also possibly keep you alive.

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring.  There is nothing that does not require his attention,” O’Connor also wrote, excellent advice too.  I’ll always be grateful for what journalism taught me, as a young writer and freelance journalist starting out in Central America, about how to observe and engage with the world, and with humans who might initially seem so unlike myself, or, in some cases, so intimidating or frightening.  For me, the exigencies of the work, of having to report and write a piece, helped me overcome what had been an often-insurmountable shyness.  It opened the world to me, by which I mean, it taught me to engage, directly and indirectly, with all manner of human beings.

In Wallace’s book, we follow a young journalist undergoing that education. His book brings back so much, and feels personally meaningful when I read about Wallace perceiving some of the same things I did, or relying on, repeating or questioning some of the same assumptions, for example, the repeated self-assurances that being a gringo or even a journalist provides a certain safety…except not always; that’s a truth Wallace learns all too personally in one of the book’s most devasting episodes. In 1989, in a Salvadoran village in guerrilla territory that comes under fire from Salvadoran troops, his colleague and friend, the Dutch reporter Cornel Lagrouw, is shot to death while standing just feet from Wallace, who had just happened to step out of the way seconds before.  Hours later, the jeep Wallace and accompanying reporters come under direct lethal fire from a military helicopter gunship, and are fortunate to survive.  I was mostly based out of Guatemala City in those years, working on my first novel, but I spent long stretches in Nicaragua, and, at different times, was on assignment in El Salvador, Honduras and Panamá too.  Wallace worked as a reporter, fixer and sort of field producer. He wrote for television, radio and newspapers. and was truly a working journalist in a way that I never was. Jon Lee Anderson, who Scott writes about in his final Iraq chapter, I met in El Salvador (as Scott did too) became my close friend, as did other journalists, foreign and Central American, not mentioned here.  The camaraderie of those years has been a lasting gift.

Central America in those years, in part because established, veteran journalists often didn’t want to go there—so underdeveloped and poor, so violent—provided opportunities to young aspiring and novice journalists, whether as stringers, freelancers or on staff of a media outlet.

“We enjoyed access to the competing sides in a way that few other frontline reporters ever did or have since,” writes Wallace, contrasting that with how unlikely it would have been for a reporter like him in Vietnam to have had access to the Viet Cong. In El Salvador, the FMLN guerrillas defended “liberated zones” that journalists could—  not without risk, of course— drive to from the capital city of San Salvador on the same day, albeit on muddy roads.  If you couldn’t find Contra forces inside Nicaragua— which Wallace and his colleagues could—their camps along the border in Honduras were hardly unreachable, even if you always seemed to find yourself driving on roads “churned to a muddy soup by exhaust belching military trucks,” and where the possibility of driving over a landmine or, especially as twilight fell, into an ambush was never far from your thoughts. Many young reporters who wanted to be in Central America had learned Spanish or accelerated their efforts once there; they could get to know the war’s seemingly most invisible or marginal people, if they wanted to. Guatemala was different: the guerrillas held no liberated zones, and while much of the immiserated rural population, those that were not refugees in one form or another, survived, isolated by terror and mistrust of outsiders, in their villages and hamlets, most of that population speaking Maya languages, not Spanish.

El Salvador is where Wallace has his most consequential and direct experiences of war.  The tiny country, the size of Massachusetts, was a prime focus of U.S. policies throughout the 1980s, and the United States lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the Salvadoran military in a futile effort to defeat the FMLN guerrilla forces, resilient, resourceful and effective fighters with substantial popular support, though they did prevent them from gaining power.  In El Salvador, as in Guatemala,  massacring civilians seemed to be a fundamental military strategy.  “Elite counterinsurgency battalions trained by U.S. Green Berets racked up several massacres in hamlets suspected of harboring sympathy for the FMLN rebels,” writes Wallace.  “U.S. officials had been complicit in their cover up.”  The elite Atlacatl Battalion was responsible for more than one massacre, including the most studied and notorious slaughtering of 1,000 civilians, including hundreds of women and children, at El Mozote.

In 1984, Wallace, on another reporting trip, comes across the site of another Atlacatl massacre of civilians by the Gualsinga River, where some 50 civilians died, some while trying to flee across the river.  He describes how “the nauseating sickly smell of death filled the car.”  Wallace finds human, skeletal remains, and holds in his hand “a tiny cranium size of an infant, a bullet hole clearly drilled through the back.”     He interviews survivors and reconstructs what happened, describing their terrifying escapes from the soldiers.   “It was clear the testimonies were spontaneous and unrehearsed,” writes Wallace, a declaration that at first irked me, as I recalled how widespread and almost kneejerk such declarations among journalists became at the time, as if we needed always to assure each other that we weren’t the dupes of leftist propagandists.  Why, I wondered, did Wallace feel the need to write such a reassurance for a contemporary reader?

Elsewhere in the book, he writes of another encounter we have no reason to doubt, “I could detect no trace of anything rehearsed, staged or disingenuous.”  A few pagers later, in the case of his reporting on the Gualsinga River massacre we  realize that Wallace actually seems to be reliving the strained assurances he needed to give, in this case, to “CBS News executives in New York [who] decided that our videos of the skeletal remains, the piles of discarded clothing, and the on camera interviews were inconclusive.”  CBS kills the story. (Though the Atlanta Constitution Journal publishes it on its front page.) I could share with you probably a dozen stories about journalist friends of mine in those years who had stories that reflected poorly on the U.S.’s Central American allies, similarly censored, or “killed,” in those years.

Journalists understood and believed what they saw and heard with their own senses.  When Wallace describes being struck by the “wild unruliness and exuberance of Managua, especially its youth, and contrasts it with San Salvador’s “oppressive, morgue-like atmosphere,” he is noting what was obvious to so many of us.  I remember my close friend and Time photography stringer Jean-Marie Simon noticing how in Guatemala City, its center suffocatingly dense with bus diesel-smog and fear, pedestrians always walked slowly, so as not to attract attention by seeming to be in a hurry to get away from anything or anybody and kept their eyes straight ahead or lowered. In Nicaragua, Wallace found that he was “witnessing something extraordinary— an infectious, irrepressible, spontaneous outburst of optimism and national pride.  This tiny country was standing up to the Yankee Colossus.  The joie de vivre itself seemed like a collective act of defiance.  Even the unruly vegetation seemed to wave a banner of insurrection.”

This does not mean that Wallace in this book is always sympathetic to or reluctant to criticize the Sandinistas’ revolutionary government, which often governed ineptly, catastrophically, as time and the Contra war dragged on, repressively.  He does not dispute that there were Contra fighters as committed to their cause as so many young Sandinistas— or young Salvadoran guerrillas, for that matter— were.  I don’t recall hearing of anyone encountering the same idealistic hopes and “exuberance” in the Contra camps as journalists found among Sandinistas and Salvadoran and even, if more rarely, Guatemalan guerrillas, however.

Of course, not all U.S. journalists saw it that way.  Some were through their own convictions and characters sympathetic, even loyal, to their government’s aims, and where their government saw enemies and allies of what they declared to be U.S. national interests, those journalists saw the same or disciplined themselves to report as if they did. That was even truer of establishment new editors and producers.  Their mission was very different from that of so many young freelancers.

What was it all for?  What did the U.S. get for its millions and millions of dollars, what did the countries of Central America gain, what did so much slaughter, suffering, destruction and death achieve? Certainly not free and functioning democratic institutions.  El Salvador and Nicaragua are dictatorships, in Guatemala, an alliance of criminal and kleptocratic oligarchic-narco-military powers and its coopted institutions hold its unlikely democratically elected and decent president virtually powerless and captive.  Guatemala, the region’s most powerful economy, has one of the world’s highest rates of infant and childhood malnutrition.  Wallace writes that the U.S. effort was aimed, in El Salvador and Guatemala, of maintaining the status quo of grotesquely unequal societies in which meaningful peaceful reform was impossible.

“What might have happened if we had embraced the desires of Central Americans to build just, democratic and equitable societies?” asks Wallace, rephrasing that question more than once in his book.   Of course, it’s impossible to know. But in Nicaragua, it seems logical to assume that without the U.S.-Contra war, the more idealistic and pragmatic Sandinista leaders wouldn’t have been marginalized and driven from power— and eventually into exile— by its more hardline military elements, resulting finally in the decadent and depraved, ideologically incoherent Ortega dictatorship.

Part of a feasible answer is provided by a Guatemalan military officer Wallace interviews in the book, who speaks with racist contempt toward the Indigenous Maya who constitute perhaps a majority of the country’s population.  “We think they have small brains, a limited ability to think,” Lieutenant Recinos says of the Indigenous people, and he continues in this manner, ascribing Guatemala’s subversion to them and, in a comparison the officers seems to think will ingratiate him with the gringo journalist, says, “It’s the same as with your negros in the United States.” I know that voice too well. I’ve been hearing opinions of that sort all my life, the intractable voice of Guatemala’s profoundly reactionary and racist, defiantly ignorant ruling classes, and of so many of their supporters and dependents.  So that it’s hard not to conclude that if the United States had stood back and embraced the desires of most of the population for true democracy, rather than, as Wallace puts it, “propping up criminal oligarchies and militaries that sought to stifle change no matter what,” there would have been an extremely violent backlash from those latter powers, and then what?

Wallace, in more than one instance, describes and analyses the throughlines from Vietnam, through the wars of Central America and of Iraq and Afghanistan up to our own times, and the persistence of cynical and inhuman political mendacity in justifying U.S. overseas endeavors to its usually complacent citizenry.

Wallace perceptively writes: “In the U.S., some campaign rhetoric has reached such levels of vitriol that it calls to mind the discourse mouthed by Central American extremists to incite the terror that ravaged their countries forty to fifty years ago.”  When he was writing this book, it was campaign rhetoric; now it’s the rhetoric of government.  Is it possible that instead of changing Central America for the better, in the end our many years of efforts, of foreign policies underlain by so many lies, so much opacity, so much denial and ignorance of human realities on the ground, so much violence, only ended up making us more like them, those corrupt and murderous anti-democratic, extremist, profoundly unjust and reactionary governments of Central America?

At the end of the book, an Iraqi woman tells Wallace, “The thing I want now more than anything else is that, one day, you people in the United States will be made to suffer like we have suffered here.”

Wallace’s magnificent Central America in the Crosshairs of War offers an indispensable account of what brought us to this moment, when such an outcome could even seem a possibility.  Except now it would be our own government, corrupted institutions, and their most extremist supporters imposing that suffering on the rest of us.

Except we now have a U.S. government and supporters that would inflict that suffering on its own people.

Francisco Goldman is the author of five novels, most recently the Pulitzer finalist, Monkey Boy, and of two works of non-fiction, including the award-winning The Art of Political Murder. He was a 2018-19 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, lives in Mexico City and teaches one semester a year at Trinity College, in Hartford, Ct.

A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

En los 80s