A Review of Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981-1984

During most of the 1980s I lived in Managua, Nicaragua, as a photojournalist for Newsweek magazine. I had covered the 1979 Sandinista Revolution that sent shockwaves through Washington because Nicaragua “lost” a staunch ally against Communism. Central America had become the final battleground of the Cold War, and Washington was not about to lose another Vietnam. In 1981, the Reagan Administration rushed to prevent defeat in nearby El Salvador. So, although Newsweek assigned me to cover all of Latin America and the Caribbean, I spent most of my time documenting the Contra War in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador – the eyes of the storm.

“I never liked El Salvador,” is how I began Chapter 10 of my own memoir. “It had extracted too much blood from too many people and too many of its victims were my friends and colleagues.”

Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981-1984 by Robert Nickelsberg (Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2024, 192 pages)

Robert (Bob) Nickelsberg’s book, Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981- 1984, reinforces my assessment of El Salvador and the events that tore it apart. Bob and I met at some point during those years he was based in El Salvador as a photojournalist for Time magazine, while he created the images that eventually would find their way into the pages of this book.

He was drawn to Central America by curiosity and concern. In an essay at the end of the book, he writes that he “was familiar with the checkered history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and other elements that underpinned the civil wars” that he would cover there. He moved to El Salvador in 1981, and like so many of us who worked in the region, he wondered if his work would make a difference.

“A single photo would be inconsequential,” he writes in that essay. “My effectiveness would lie in following the arc of a news story, with its central elements and characters. But the challenge remained: Would my images be as striking as the events themselves? Could a photographer or writer change the conditions we found or merely expose them?”

Nickelsberg’s altruism clashed with what he called, “the horror unleashed by the Salvadoran security forces” and “the stream of lies coming from San Salvador and Washington,” the latter of which supported the Salvadoran military with equipment and training. He felt, “exhausted and ineffective.” In this book, he displays many of the images he created while covering the violence that challenged assurances from U.S. State Department officials that things were getting better in El Salvador—where right-wing death squads murdered nearly 40,000 people between 1979 and 1985. Those death squads were made up mostly of off-duty soldiers and police.

The dissonance between the official versions of the violence as opposed to the reality on the ground forced him to pull away from the country every three months or so, mostly to Miami, “to remove the sour taste, the anxiety, menace, and fear.” By the end of 1984, “the daily toll of outrage and grief became unbearable,” and he relocated to Time magazine’s bureau in Rio de Janeiro.

There is a fundamental difference between the work of print journalists “covering” war, and visual journalists (photojournalists, television camera operators, documentary filmmakers) reporting on the same conflict. Print journalists can do their work on-site, over the phone or on a computer. They can arrive days or weeks after an event to “cover” it by speaking with witnesses or authorities. And I have tremendous respect and admiration for many print journalists who make complex issues understandable to readers.

Visual journalists, however, must be on time, in place and up close to any event that might yield stunning, historic imagery. So journalists like Bob and I typically run toward trouble — as opposed to away from it. And the psychological trauma can be profound.

When Bob relocated to Rio de Janeiro, he also relocated the thousands of black and white negatives and contact sheets, prints and magazine clips he generated in El Salvador to a box where they remained untouched and unseen until 2019. Then, and perhaps as many photojournalists do (I am one of them), he dug into his archive to find some answers.

“What emerged was a narrative far more compelling than I expected,” Nickelsberg writes. And it was there, perhaps, that he sought to answer his own question: “Could a photographer or writer change the conditions we found or merely expose them?”

Nickelsberg’s book more resembles the work of an anthropologist than the work of a photojournalist. Each picture is a document. One step of a visual journey into darkness. An indictment. In the 104 images that appear in Legacy of Lies, I count only a handful of smiles on the faces of hundreds, if not thousands, of subjects. Nickelsberg has built a case against the lies and the liars of his time in that place. Each image is testimony. Their cumulative effect is numbing.

Included in the book are brief essays written by renowned journalists who covered El Salvador during those dark days. Those essays complement the pictures and their captions by providing more context. The journalists are Jon Lee Anderson, Carlos Dada, Alma Guillermoprieto and Scott Wallace.

This is not a book for the light-hearted. It is a relentless visual assault of image after image in what Anderson describes in his essay titled, Memories of a Promise Unkept, as “a palpable sense of its enduring tragedy.”

In her essay titled, Lies and Delusion, former Washington Post correspondent Guillermoprieto writes, “It’s all here. Not just the corpses and the violence, but the desperately insular, unequal society that produced them: the graduation parties; the brutalized, wiry campesinos, hungry for food but also for some small amount of justice; the demented press conferences where the brutality was lied about; the corporals and complacent generals; the majorettes; the guerrillas. It’s a portrait of a time.”

At that time, Central America was considered by many, including myself, as our generation’s Vietnam, complete with the official deceptions and brutality of the ill-conceived policy.

In his essay titled, Let Them See Your Eyes, award-winning writer and television producer Wallace writes, “Few officials in Washington or at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador could bring themselves to admit that the guerrillas might be, at least in part, a home-grown movement that arose in reaction to decades of corruption, abuse, and gross inequality under a murderous military and a rapacious oligarchy.”

Carlos Dada, the Salvadoran exiled founder and editor of El Faro, an online newsmagazine focused on his homeland, entitles his essay, Whose War Was This?

“Robert Nickelsberg’s images, like those of many of his colleagues, challenged the official story,” Dada writes in the book’s opening essay. “This book is proof. Each frame standing on its own is an extraordinary piece of photography and a document, but assembled as they are here, they establish a narrative still unwelcome in the seats of power in the United States and El Salvador.”

Indeed. The double-truck image of Salvadoran soldiers crossing a river in waist-high water reminds me of images of Vietnam in Life magazine delivered each week to my home in southwestern Pennsylvania. A picture of Colonel John D. Waghelstein, commander of the U.S. Military Group in El Salvador, smoking a cigar and wearing full hubris during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. Even a woman pictured on a sandy Pacific Coast beach seems to be alone, exhausted and splayed out on the sand. As if she were dead.

The book leaves the viewer more than exhausted. It leaves one with a need to pull away from it. To put the memories behind. To cleanse oneself of its darkness – like Nickelsberg felt when he lived in El Salvador. Like I felt when I traveled there to cover the war.

Nickelsberg’s essay titled, Staring in The Face, discusses his relationship with John Hoagland, a photographer for Newsweek magazine. Because Nickelsberg worked for Time magazine, the two were competitors. But they worked together because they trusted each other and because working alone was too dangerous.

“What we captured graphically contradicted what the Reagan Administration claimed was occurring in El Salvador,” Bob writes. But “Working in tandem did not save Hoagland…In March 1984, we were caught in a firefight between the Salvadoran Army and leftist forces near Suchitoto, then a no-man’s land less than an hour from the capital. Crouched inches from me, Hoagland was machine-gunned down by Salvadoran soldiers firing from across the street. He died within seconds.”

John Hoagland and I had covered the 1979 Final Offensive by members of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of the Somoza family. Hoagland and I worked together for some of the same reasons that he and Bob worked together in El Salvador. For our own safety. We trusted each other. Hoagland was a stringer for the Associated Press (AP). I was a stringer for United Press International (UPI). We were competitors.

John and I were hungrier than mad dogs and performed some rather foolishly dangerous stunts to make pictures that might get published in the big magazines. We earned the dubious distinction of being called, “The Suicide Stringers.”

Despite having known Nickelsberg since the 1980s, Bob and I have never discussed Hoagland’s death. Nor have we discussed the deaths of Dutch cameraman Cornel Lagrouw and British correspondent David Blundy—both killed during, or in the aftermath, of firefights in El Salvador and both in which I helped move the two colleagues from the battlefield in vain attempts to save their lives.

I don’t know if Bob has answered his questions on whether journalists can change the conditions they find, or merely expose them. Certainly, I know this book exposes the lies, the savagery, the desperation, of his time in El Salvador. What I also know is that the search to answer his question about the impact of our work is what drives many journalists to risk it all.

I never liked El Salvador. I still don’t.

Bill Gentile is an independent, national Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. His memoir, Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, is a firsthand, frontline account of the human cost of war. He is a pioneer of “backpack video journalism” and director, executive producer and host of the documentary, FREELANCERS with Bill Gentile, distributed by the Walt Disney Company’s affiliate, National Geographic Television, across Latin America and the Caribbean. He is a Hurst Senior Professorial Lecturer and Journalist in Residence at American University in Washington, DC.

NOTE: This brief video shows the incident in which John Hoagland was killed in El Salvador. Bob Nickelsberg is seen at Time Code 7:24, helping carry Hoagland’s body from the battlefield. Nickelsberg is wearing a blue shirt. The film is titled, Kill the Messenger.