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“Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests. The Red scare of 1919-20 have served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the sell and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years. The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan's domestic economic program. The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“i remember el salvador, /n it’s horse shit, like i tell you.
i stopped chasing the messiahs /n madonnas - wised up,
set myself straight.
i’ve laid em /n balled em in every half-way house south of biloxi,
every 10 cent bed west of tulsa, fucked /n slobbered myself stupid on swingsets, greyhounds
/n gas station floors the world over.
i’ve split em in half
from head to ass
in elevator shafts, plus-size fitting rooms,
in the lobbies of sheraton inns
/n kfc parking lots - fucked em everywhere
every way that i could.
someone else can fuck em now.
i’m done w/ el salvador.
i know her militias
her perfume, munitions,
her missing hubcaps /n posters of paris.
i know her goyas, her barricades,
her paintboxes
/n bookshelves
of baudelaire,
her banners, her bullshit /n paris can keep her.”
― Brandon Thomas DiSabatino, 6 weeks of white castle /n rust

“Even innocent people find themselves in trouble, Adolfina is innocent. We're all innocent. The only ones at fault for the bad things that are happening are the authorities. They with their way of being. Their behavior. Yes, the only ones who go to jail or end up wounded or dead along the roads are the poor. And that's because the authorities have a predilection--they know who to hassle. They exist to boss the poor around. To order the poor about, to beat up on the poor and to carry them off as if they were animals. Someday the good life they're living will end. Always doing it to the people, always. They've never suffered the slightest hurt. That's where they get their pride from. Once they're in uniform they think they're kings of the world, and they themselves say they're disposed to anything”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“...it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“I have been in many awful places, but have never seen such fear as in the eyes of those who are trying to survive in Haiti's indescribable slums during the Clinton backed terror, or such misery as among poor peasants in southern Colombia, driven from their devastated lands by US chemical warfare -fumigation- and much more like it around the world. Even after violence achieves its goals and it's relaxed, it leaves a residual culture of terror as the surviving Salvadorean Jesuits observed. Yet somehow, communities endure and survive.”
― Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

“...moral commitments and emotional engagement were principal reasons for insurgent collective action by campesinos in the Salvadoran civil war.

"Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in Rural El Salvador”
― Elisabeth J. Wood

“Nación en que abundan los hijos de alcohólicos, ésta condenada a vivir en el desconcierto, en la vacilación, en la festinación y en la inconstancia.”
― Alberto Masferrer, El Dinero Maldito

“Life gets harder and harder. They say we have a lot of people in this country. And the most abundant are the poor. Hordes of poor people everywhere. But what can we do? What are we guilty of? That is why there's so much hunger in the villages and everywhere. Well I don't think life should be that way. "What's important is to be aware that one is poor," Chepe tells me repeatedly. "And what good is that?" I ask him. And he replies that only that way will we become strong enough to claim, to demand that which we have a right to. Everything else is a farce. What we must always insist on is the rights of the poor.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“The road to Hell is paved with evildoers, they'd tell us. And the evildoers were those who had bad thoughts. We always wanted to be good. We believed that to be good was to bow one's head, not to protest, not to demand anything, not to get angry. No one had clarified these things for us. On the contrary, we were always being offered a celestial paradise. The reward for being good. To respect one's neighbor was really to respect the landowner. And to respect the landowner was to conform to his whimsey. If there were no beans to eat after working on the plantation, it was because the landowner couldn't manage, the landowner was suffering losses. If there were no hammocks to sleep in, it was because the harvest had not left the landowner enough time to provide them. And there we were without food, waiting for the afternoon or the evening to go home to eat, a whole day without eating; or we'd go to sleep under the pepetos trees in the coffee fields.
We used to confuse goodness with resignation.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“Guadalupe Fuentes:
--They're not paid to kill honest people, to shoot for no good reasons.
Rubenia Fuentes:
--Ah, my little girl, then why do you think they give them those big guns that look like tree branches and are larger than they themselves? To shoot, baby, to shoot. Because if they don't, that gives rise to talk that the authorities are useless, are nothing more than decoration.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“The guardsmen dragged him to the Detour; the mules they had ridden were there. The corpse was buried near here or the buzzards ate it. The authorities were laughing as they left.
One could see the laughter in their eyes, the only place where they are allowed to laugh.
Because the authorities cannot laugh. It is prohibited; at least they never laugh with their mouths. They're made to denounce, interrogate and capture. Laughing is a weakness. They themselves say, 'Laughter abounds among fools.' An official must not show any weakness before a civilian, otherwise he'll thereby lose precisely his authority. The authorities are short on words; they don't want to lose their strength by speaking to civilians. They act. That's the only way they can defend property, which is sacred. That's why many of them are paid by landowners. How big a bonus they get depends on how well they behave.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“We have to be well fed, the gringo tells us, so we can defend the country. In exchange for these pleasures, we cannot let these people down. One must be ready to defend the country against its enemies even at the expense of our own brothers. And, though it's unnecessary to say so, even at the expense of our mother. This might seem like an exaggeration, but the Western world is in danger and we know that the worst danger to the Western world is what they call 'the people.' The trainer shouts, 'Who is our worst enemy?' And we shout, 'The people!' And so on and so on, 'Who is the worst enemy of democracy?' And we all respond, 'The people!' Louder, he says. And we shout with all our might, 'The people, the people, the people." I'm telling you this in the strictest confidence, of course. They call us the Special Forces.”
― Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life

“The men in Washington seem unable to accept that there are more poor people than rich peoplele in the world. They do not recognize that poor people, in the late twentieth century, cannot endure poverty and disease and ignorance forever. When minimal social justice is long denied, the poor will rebel. If rebellion can be crushed - as is perhaps possible in a very small country like El Salvador - it will rise again later. Nicaragua can be bombed flat, and then what? A success story like Vietnam? [1986].”
― Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War

“I knew that if I didn’t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself. I could never say to myself: If only I’d had the chance. This was, I knew, my chance.”
― Carolyne Forché

“Forgetting begets forgetting begets ongoing mass murder.”
― Roberto Lovato, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas

“If you want to see changes in our world, become an agent of change by taking the first step.”
― Federico Navarrete