EL SALVADOR

EL SALVADOR
Photojournalists in a Cauldron of Violence
“THIS IS HISTORY. THIS IS MY VOCATION.” BY BILL GENTILE
HIS VOICE CRACKED AND HE FIDGETED AS HE
recounted the incident. He had raced out
of his newspaper office to make photographs
of yet another cadaver in the street.
That’s part of his job—to photograph victims
of his country’s slow-motion suicide.
He cut through heavy traffic on his
motorcycle to beat colleagues from competing
newspapers to the scene. But a
pack of young men stopped him along the
way. They were armed. They surrounded
him. Asked if he was a cop. Demanded
to know what was his business in their
‘hood. One of them reached for his motorcycle,
killed the engine and pulled out the
key. That’s when Juan (not his real name)
feared that his colleagues soon might be
making pictures of him lying lifeless in
the street.
The young men, all gang members,
questioned and searched him. They
didn’t believe he was a photojournalist.
One of them called somebody on a cell
phone. The gang member handed Juan
the phone so that he might explain himself
to “El Jefe.”
The “boss” told Juan not to “talk shit”
about his neighborhood or about his
“homies,” and assured him there would
be consequences if Juan did. The gang
members now knew where Juan lived,
they threatened.
Juan recounted this incident during
my visit to El Salvador in December 2014.
It had been a long time since my last trip
to El Salvador in the early 1990s. Back
then I was Newsweek magazine’s contract
photographer for Latin America and the
Caribbean. Although my area extended
from the Rio Grande along Mexico’s
northern border all the way down to the
tip of South America and then east to
include Cuba and Haiti, I spent most my
time covering the contra war in Nicaragua
(where I lived for seven years) and the
civil war in El Salvador. At the time, Central
America was the eye of the storm. The
last battleground of the Cold War.
I never liked working in El Salvador.
The country had too often extracted too
much blood from too many of my friends
and colleagues. John Hoagland, my predecessor
at Newsweek, was killed in a
firefight there in 1984, one year before I
signed my first contract with the magazine.
In the late ‘80s I helped carry to
hospital two other colleagues shot only
yards from me in separate incidents while
covering the conflict. They both died of
their wounds. Every time I flew into the
country my gut would tighten, and it
would stay that way until I was beyond
Salvadoran air space on a flight out—to
any place other than El Salvador.
After I listened to Juan recount his
run-in with the gang members and conducted
phone interviews with some of
his photojournalism contemporaries to
report this story, I understood that the
violence in El Salvador is so much more
A boy carries arms during the civil war in 1989.
insidious now than it was when I covered
the region. And I’ve come to respect and
to admire even more the men and women
who practice our craft under conditions
unfathomable to the population at large.
Violence in Latin America during the
late 1970s and 1980s was largely characterized
by left-wing insurgencies fighting
to overthrow right-wing governments
supported by U.S.-backed militaries. But
violence in the region now is about multinational
drug cartels in collusion with
urban gangs. Much of the killing is gangagainst-gang;
“homies-against-homies,”
if you will. But non-combatant civilians
often are killed for resisting gang extortion
or for simply showing up in the
wrong barrio at the wrong time.
A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAR
In a follow-up telephone interview
from my home in Washington, D.C., I listened
to Juan describing today’s conflict.
“This is a totally different war,” he said.
66 ReVista SPRING 2016 ABOVE: PHOTO BY BILL GENTILE WWW.BILLGENTILE.COM; OTHER PHOTOS IN THIS ARTICLE BY ANONYMOUS SALVADORAN PHOTOGRAPHERS