Ruins and Martyrs

The Ruins at San Andres

On Thursday morning, I decided to make a small trip outside of the San Salvador area to one of the five Mayan ruin excavation sites in the country, the ruins at San Andres. Amado gave me directions that I didn’t really understand, but I figured I would just play one of my favorite games down here: keep asking until I’m finally on a bus somewhere. After being sent down a few blocks from one park, stopping in to get a few pieces of fluffily dense Salvadoran sweet bread, and being told by a smiling elderly Salvadoran man (the old men here have always seemed so happy to help me) to go two more blocks north.

I found myself on a random corner where a woman well made-up and dressed in a beige lady-suit was standing and I assumed I was at the right place. Knowing what happens when you assume, I asked her anyway. She confirmed and we started chatting. Her name was Andrea. A couple Santa Ana-bound buses – the line we both needed to take – came, but they were not the comfortable, direct buses she was waiting for. When she learned that I was going to the park alone she became worried, which in turn made me worry. She warned me that sometimes gang members go there and harass people, or worse. I acted self-assured on the outside – maybe for her but probably more for me – and said that I’d be okay and that I don’t mind traveling alone. The “especial” came but it would not stop where I wanted to go, so we parted ways there. She seemed very middle to middle-upper class and I convinced myself that she was disconnected from her country by her status. Whether it was true or not, it worked enough for me to get on a bus alone.

I hopped on the next 201 bus that came by and, though I couldn’t explain exactly how, the second-class buses here felt so much more comfortable and spacious than their Guatemalan cousins. I got dropped off on the side of the highway where the park entrance was and followed the driveway to the parking lot. There was an armed guard there and suddenly I felt better. When Julie was with me in Guatemala, she told me that guns always made her feel uncomfortable. At first, they seemed weird to me. But now when I see a guy outside of

a McDonald’s casually slinging a shotgun over his arm, I feel better. The digital camera in my pocket wouldn’t be worth the potential slugshot in the stomach to anyone.

At the ticket booth, I tried paying my $3 foreigner fee, but the guy couldn’t break a ten. I promised to pay on the way out, which I would do. The park grounds were nice with sprinklers sprinkling in every direction you looked. In the museum, there were photos of the excavation site, artifacts that were found, and some scale models of the site. Nothing was explained too well, but the scale models looked cool if not modest. Not quite Tikal, but it would do. Or so I thought.

I walked through the gates to the archaeological site and wandered past the cacao plants dangling their football-sized fruits under the shade of canopying trees. In front of me, there was a sign that read “Gran Plaza,” but all I could see beyond the arrow was a big grass mound with a fence around it. I walked up the open grassy path leading around to the back of it and there it was, as anticlimactic as ever. The large temple stood, at the most, 20 ft tall and remained largely unexcavated with only the crumbling stone steps at its base protruding from the grassy hill. The center of the plaza was a flat grass field and the surrounding mounds hid the remaining structures. In the distance, beyond the barbed wire fence, there was a larger mound with cows grazing on it. That was the larger temple I had seen in the scale designs, but that the park didn’t actually own it. Around the grand plaza, a couple of couples laid in each other’s arms giving each other some besitos.

I hung around for a little bit, spotting some interesting looking birds that I can’t name and watchin

g lizards scurry across my path. I guess I could’ve laid in the lawn and made out with myself, but I thought it better just to head out. After walking by the sprinklers and restraining myself from jumping through one, I crossed the highway and flagged down a van back toward Amado’s place.

Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Martyrs of El Salvador

In a war that had too many bad guys on both sides, Archbishop Oscar Romero stood as a figure of righteousness and hope for El Salvador’s most vulnerable and impoverished citizens. Critical of and outspoken against the government and its military, Romero did not make many friends with the earthly higher ups. On March 24, 1980, he was slain by military forces while saying mass in the chapel of San Salvador Divine Providence Cancer Hospital. His death served as the straw that broke the camel’s back and later that yea

r the civil war would be in full swing.

After getting off the van from the ruins, I decided to put off heading back to Amado’s and took a trip into town to see the free exhibit at the Centro Monseñor Romero on the UCA campus grounds. Dropped off on the highway heading into the center of the capital, I had only my microscopic map in Lonely Planet to go by. I asked an elderly woman on the corner selling candy and bags of chips where to go and, coincidentally, two Salvadorans right behind me were heading there as well. There was Geraldo, a 30 year old medical student, and his cousin Daniela visiting from Sweden. Daniela, like over 300,000 other Salvadorans, fled the cou

ntry in the 80s to seek refuge on foreign soil.

Geraldo was giving his cousin a tour of virtually everything we passed, from buildings to cars to fast food chains. The university had beautiful gardens filled with students chowing down and chatting it up and the buildings had all been redone and modernized in recent years. The exhibit in the Centro Monseñor Romero was built on the site where six Jesuit priests, their maid and her daughter, were slaughtered by the national army in 1989. In the sterile white and air-conditioned room there were glass cases housing bullet torn Bibles and blood-stained clothes that were all found in the living quarters. There were also a few cases devoted to Romero, although his clothes and articles donned on his last day are now displayed in the hospital chapel where he was shot. There was a poster of him with a quote that read, “Que mi sangre sea semilla de libertad y la señal de que la esperanza será pronto una realidad.” That my blood is a seed of freedom and a signal that hope will soon be a reality.

In another room, the walls were plastered with photos and pictures – including, quite randomly but touchingly, a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. with his I have a dream speech typed up – as well as some photo albums of the site when the bodies were discovered. One had pictures of the bodies, uncovered and as they were found. I had never seen anything so gory. It was almost like it couldn’t be real. A few of the priests heads were not heads anymore; they were just crushed melons with their fruit spilling out onto the floor. The maid and her daughter lay on top of one another, their lifeless limbs entangled as if they both tried to save each other’s life in vain. I could picture it all happening in my head. The soldiers came in. There was no slow motion. No dramatic music. Just the impersonal blasts of the rifles and their bullets mangling the faces of their recipients in real-time, their bodies seizuring until the force of gunfire could no longer keep them afoot. And what was it all for? In the chapel next door, the back walls were adorned with violent illustrations of bound, bullet-ridden bodies. The violence seemed inescapable and irremovable from the collective

Salvadoran memory.

I parted ways with Daniela and Geraldo, sensing that they were tiring of my company. I spent a lot of time thinking about what Romero and these other martyrs meant to the Salvadorans. The day before I visited the tomb under the cathedral of Oscar Romero, and there was a prayer vigil. Flowers and lit candles adorned the tomb as the chanted prayers tried to reach his buried ears. Elsewhere, I’ve seen statues and murals of the fallen archbishop. I even saw his picture on the back of one man’s polo shirt. I do not know exactly what he means to El Salvador, and I’m sure that it’s something different to each person. But I get the sense that the people are still invoking his name to water the seeds of his spilled blood and to realize his promise of hope.