Tagged: el salvador
40: Our Own Backyard
This is a long one:
“A small nation of little inherent strategic or economic importance, El Salvador seldom attracted much attention in Washington. Bilateral relations were ordinarily governed by regional policies the United States fashioned in response to exigencies elsewhere. The result was not always wholly sensible. When counterinsurgency was thought to be the antidote to Cuban-style revolution in the 1960’s, the United States lavished military assistance on Latin America. El Salvador received some $4 million of this aid between 1961 and 1970, even though it had no revolutionaries to speak of at the time. Naturally, the military government perceived the flow of arms as an endorsement.
Military assistance to El Salvador was interrupted when the Congress introduced human rights concerns into the allocation of foreign aid. In early 1977, El Salvador joined Guatemala, Brazil, and Argentina in rejecting further militaryassistance rather than submit to an evaluation of their human rights records. Previously authorized aid continued to flow, but now authorizations were made until 1979. Economic aid was by half, from approximately $20 million to $10 million annually.”
William M. Leogrande. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977 – 1992.
I’ve taken up an interest in the mid-20th Century political history of El Salvador. This isn’t just some weird academic “Gee, I wonder what obscure point in history I can make myself the leading expert in.” My mom is from El Salvador and the family moved here because of the political turmoil of the ‘6os. I’m happy that events happened as they did, since I wouldn’t be here otherwise, although…
If the U.S. had minded its own business in 1960, most of the shit that happened in El Salvador since then probably wouldn’t have happened, out of fears of Big Red Cuba led it to intervene in a democratic movement of the people out of fear of the spread of Communism and the whole country was unstable ever since.
That is my two cents and I stick by it.
This particular book didn’t have much of what I was looking for. Except for the above mention, there was nothing related to the government of the ’50s leading up the 1960 Junta. THAT is the focus of information I’m looking for. So…
If you have any information, or can lead me to any information, directly related to the regime of José María Lemus and the Military Coup that followed, let me know.
30 Days of Movies: Day 19 – Movie That Made Me Cry the Hardest
Since I’ve never used a Rockwell scale on my tears, I actually have no idea as to their relative hardness from one movie to the next. Maybe I should start capturing this hard data using charts and graphs.
Or.
Maybe I could just guestimate that some movies makes me more sad than other movies based on the way they touch personal experience? Sure. Let’s do that:
Everything is Illuminated (2005)
What personal experiences could a movie about a neurotic Jewish writer from America wandering the former Soviet Union with an interpreter who doesn’t really speak English and his blind driver of a grandfather grant some dude in Minnesota? It isn’t “Jonfen”‘s search for the lost town where his own grandfather fled from the Nazis and it’s final beautiful resolution. It’s instead in the pairing of the grandson and grandfather that I am caused “distress” (as Eugene Hutz’s character would say). My own grandfather and I weren’t just separated by a generation but by language and culture. He was a Colonel in the Army of El Salvador before becoming a Mover for Bekins in Los Angeles. I was a mix Latino/Anglo who was cuddled in the arms of American pop culture. When I was almost 18, my grandfather made a trip to El Salvador to see his mother before she passed away. I didn’t go. A trip to Central America, in a country that I didn’t speak the language without all the “benefits” of civilization? I was a selfish, stupid kid.
There is a moment in Everything is Illuminated when the grandson looks at his grandfather and sees a whole new person. He doesn’t even recognize this old man as the very same old man who smacked him up the head for hitting the dog, Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. It was close to my grandfather’s death, almost ten years ago, that brought that same sense of “who is this person I’ve known all my life?” It was a slow burn, the dawning realization that I owed everything that I had become to him, by virtue of the fact that he instilled values of strength, love of family, and (ultimately) a faith in what is right into his children.
This movie is a meditation on love, on family, and on the way that “the past casts a glow of understanding onto the present” ( ¹ ). I understand my family, and myself, much more when looking on the life of my grandfather.
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
No major heartbreaking story here. I went through a pretty bad “breakup” in 2006. I got drunk and depressed. I watched this movie in the interim of our first goodbye and our last reunion.Two years later, I bought this in a used DVD bin for $5 after she moved out for the last time. It’s still sealed.
We Slept in Rented Rooms 