What You Have Heard Is True

: (Penguin Press, 2019) is a beautifully-written, tension-filled story by the poet and activist Carolyn Forch. She traveled throughout El Salvador between January 1979 and March 1980, during the harrowing, endless rounds of protest and murder that led to that nation’s shockingly cruel civil war. Her memoir is about death by indiscretion, by trusting the wrong person, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She writes about what she saw, questioned, heard, and experienced, including several narrow escapes of her own from American-trained death squads. Her last meeting in the country was with Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated less than a week after he insisted that she return to the U.S. – for her own safety, yes, but also so that she could tell the American people about El Salvador.

In the 1980s, she was unable to convince Americans to oppose U.S. support for the Salvadoran government’s brutal war on its own people, during which several hundred thousand Salvadorans were tortured and died. Perhaps this story now will convince Americans to insist that we do not intervene in Venezuela.

Forch recounts a heartbreaking story of torture and mass murder by the Salvadoran government as it attempted to throttle any challenge to its power. The U.S., ever-mindful of its jealously guarded Monroe Doctrine, and fearful of Russian and Cuban influence in Latin America, provided training, weapons, and diplomatic cover to the Salvadoran government. The U.S. was mostly silent about the Salvadoran army’s brutality, even when American nuns and priests were assassinated.

Forch traveled with, and at the request of, a Salvadoran named Leonel Gmez Vides, a man with a complex understanding of the people and power structure in El Salvador. It’s unclear why Vides selected Forch (she was an acquaintance of one of his relatives) because, until she met him, she was not an activist or even particularly aware of the suffering of the people of El Salvador. Perhaps he thought a poet was the best person to describe the plight of his country; perhaps he was directed to her by an old mystic peasant who lived in Guatemala.

Although his sympathies lay with the , the peasant farmers who experienced unimaginable suffering before, during, and after the civil war, Vides knew and worked with people on all sides. “I have no doctrinal allegiances,” he proclaims. “What I have been doing is something like three-dimensional chess.” He worked with the army, the peasants, guerrilla commanders, the church, and the Americans. First he tried to prevent the war; once it erupted, he worked tirelessly to end it.

His efforts eventually bore fruit, but not until many years of death, torture, and economic destruction elapsed. Vides himself was the target of assassination squads at least eight times (during the last attempt on his life, he hid in a large garbage pile for hours to escape the army). He was finally forced to flee to the U.S., where he was granted political asylum. Surprising his friends, he survived the death squads and the war, dying peacefully in a hospital bed years after the conflict ended.

The U.S. loudly proclaims that it’s playing a high-stakes game for freedom, democracy, and benign influence in the world; it downplays its lust for power and its support of multinational corporations. In practice, the government blunders from disaster to disaster in cultures and power structures it does not understand, so that corporations make a little money and leave. Vietnam (which has a small part in Forch’s story), Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. – the names vary, but the story remains the same – are also tragic examples of U.S. greed and hubris. Forch’s El Salvador is described with the words of a poet who is staring into the face of a dead teenager whose eyes were gouged out by a death squad.

Reading this important, beautifully-written book, I felt that I was encountering, shortly after its publication, a great classic of U.S. literature, the kind of book that belongs in the Library of America and college courses far into the future. It is also a book of stunning relevance to this moment in U.S. history, taking us to an earlier time in the history of El Salvador, crucial for assessing the appalling atmosphere of anti-immigration, anti-asylum radicalism in which we live now. It is also a story of an exemplary life, a young poet awakening to the urgency of political realities, eventually forming her commitment to “poetry of witness,” using her craft to bear witness to injustice and horror. The narrative technique of the book is rigorous and effective: in detailed descriptions of her gradual initiation into realities of Salvadoran life in the late 1970s, Forche confines her account to what she understood and did not understand, moment by moment, immersing readers in her own experience of partial knowledge. The language is as finely tuned as the best poetry. This book affected me very deeply, changed me; it is one of the best books I have read.

This is a critical book in a time when we are called to answer for who we are and what our responsibility is to and toward one another. What impels us to act? What holds us back? What, as Adrienne Rich asked, behooves us? More than memoir, Forch has given us a manual for Seamus Heaneys injunctive to walk on air, against your better judgement.

I took Carolyn Forch’s memoir on a trip earlier this month and read it cover to cover over a six hour flight. Whether one is a veteran of Central America’s dirty wars of the 1980s, or just someone who loves a compelling story and sincere, wonderful prose, this is a book that you will want to read, earmark, and re-read time and again.

Carolyn Forche spent several months in El Salvador in 1979-80 where she witnessed the outbreak of the depraved and gruesome death squad terror that caused the deaths of thousands of mostly poor and unarmed civilians, a campaign of repression launched by the Salvadorean military, an institution dominated by the opulent landed oligarchy allied with multinational agribusiness interests that oppressed and exploited the destitute Salvadorean peasantry going back centuries, with training, support and ideological cover being provided by the U.S. government and the CIA.

A ten year civil war ensued that took the lives of over 100,000 people. A truth and reconciliation commission in the 1990s determined that one of the worst perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity was the barbaric, U.S. trained “counter insurgency” Atlacatl Battalion that committed numerous massacres of unarmed peoples including women and children, the former being subjected to mass rapes before being mutilated and killed. This is a legacy that we as Americans need to repudiate and ensure is never repeated by ourselves or enabled by us to be perpetrated by any ally or client state.

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