Carolyn Forché

Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

What You Have Heard Is True

Andrew John Kinney

6 stars.

Monsignor Oscar Romero, who was beatified as a Saint last year by Pope Francis, was told by friends who loved him that his sermons were angering the El Salvadoran military, and that he was taking too many chances. He replied:

“One does not need to be fearful. We hear from Jesus Christ that one should not tempt God, but my pastoral duty obliges me to go out and be with the people; I would not be a good pastor if I was hiding myself and giving testimonies of fear. I believe that if death encounters us in the path of our duty, that then is the moment in which we die in the way that God wills.”

He was assassinated in 1980 while he was celebrating mass one week after he spoke these words. Carolyn Forche’, a poet, and a well and truly lapsed Catholic, was present at the interview and recorded it. Romero and his followers were a force for peace, and he was the best advocate the people of El Salvador had. As Carolyn said:

“I found myself surrounded by these wonderful souls who had all accepted the preferential option for the poor, which is of course the understanding that if you are going to put yourself at the service of the poor, you must also accept their fate. You have to be fully with them, including in their manner of death.”

The sad and shameful truth is that the scum who killed Oscar Romero were funded, directly or indirectly, by the United States government. Carolyn Forche’s book is a powerful, vivid testament to, and indictment of the brutalization and oppression of the Salvadoran people by their government. It is honest and graphic in the extreme. I recommended this book to a friend who worked for the Peace Corps in Honduras near the El Salvadoran border, and she said she couldn’t get very far into it before she had to set it aside – it was too raw for her. She said she would read it in bits.

I served in Honduras with the U.S. Army in 1984. I went to Honduras as a member of a Ranger Battalion when Reagan’s Central American interventionist policy was at its height. We went there with live ammunition, and were told to be ready for attacks by FMLN guerrillas; in fact (as the CIA knew perfectly well at the time), the FMLN was only in El Salvador, was weakly armed, and it never operated in Honduras. It quickly became clear to me that the only armed people we needed to be careful of were the “patrones” who owned the immense ranches near our base. The day we arrived in Honduras (secretly, or so the theory went), over 100 Hondurans were waiting for us at our camp. They were sick, or had children who were sick, and they knew that U.S. Army had medicine. One man had carried his son on his back for two days to obtain treatment for him. Our Battalion Physician’s Assistant surveyed the crowd (actually a very orderly line of people), set up a camp chair, and started treating patients at about 8:30 in the morning. When I arrived back in base camp from field exercises just before dark, Doc Donovan was still sitting on his camp stool, treating patients, but he had run out of many medicines, so he called back to the US asking for a complete re-supply of meds on the next plane. Doc and I briefly made eye contact, and he smiled. He had treated nearly 100 men, women, and children that day, and he looked dog tired. I was never more proud of the U.S. Army than at that moment. And yet, despite the good intentions of men like Doc, we were on the wrong side of history. 

The part of Honduras where we operated was, if anything, poorer than the Salvadoran regions described by Carolyn Forche’. All dwellings were literally mud huts that had thatched roofs of palm frond, no doors, no windows, and dirt floors. The chickens and pigs ran in and out with the children. It was the poorest, most third-world place I have laid eyes on in my life, and I’ve traveled a bit. And for the United States, it was a complete waste of time, money, and resources to deploy US forces under the guise of “fighting communist insurgents”. Most of the inhabitants were close to starving; indeed I saw many Honduran children with reddish hair and pot bellies, the visible markers of the severely malnourished. They needed better nutrition and healthcare, land on which to farm, and education, not protection from non-existent insurgents. Though they also needed protection from the patrones.

The title of the book comes from the line of a poem Ms. Forche' wrote soon after leaving El Salvador:

"The Colonel"

"WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went 
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. 
………………………
There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. 
 ……………………….
I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground."

As the subtitle says, this is a tale of witness, witness to one of the worst wars in the Americas. About 100,000 people died in El Salvador during the civil war there, out of a population of about 5 million. To put that in perspective, proportionally that would be the equivalent of 6 million Americans dying in a war. The brutal, vicious military government of El Salvador was by far the greatest purveyor of terror in the country, and they were supported from start to finish by the U.S. government. Aside from the immorality of this, it was just stupid, because the “insurgency” only existed as a reaction to the bestiality of the Salvadoran Army. And the consequence of pumping weapons and military training into these small countries has been the creation of the most violent societies in the Americas – El Salvador and Honduras. This has in turn fueled the flow of immigrants to the U.S. from these countries, people fleeing the conditions the U.S. helped create. On top of everything else, much of the weaponry provided by the U.S. to Central American dictatorships ended up in the hands of the drug cartels, sold to them by Colonels eager to become rich through re-direction of US aid. Think what might have been accomplished if US aid had been in the form of medical supplies or farm implements instead of weapons. As Leonel Gomez, Forche’s mentor, said while touring a Salvadoran hospital and noting some shiny new Swedish medical instruments, “The Swedes always provide great medical equipment!” My thought was, why wasn’t that American equipment? Reading this book made me angrier and angrier, because I went to Honduras as an American soldier in good faith, believing what I had been told about communist insurgencies in Central America. And it was all bullshit, and my government knew it while it was feeding it to us.

I found the book riveting reading. Forche’ sticks to her personal experiences as much as possible, so we don’t hear about the geo-political context, except as explained by Leonel Gomez to Carolyn. As Forche’ sees more and more in El Salvador, and worse and worse, culminating in a horrific visit to a prison, she becomes a member of the resistance, though in a peripheral way. The “movement” mainly wanted her to be a voice for the Salvadoran people in the US, but she also participated in other activities for the resistance that put her at risk. Forche’ knew Archbishop Oscar Romero and UCA President Ignacio Ellacuria, both of whom were assassinated by the military. Her personal situation, vis a vis the military, ultimately became so dangerous that Oscar Romero told her she had to leave the country, if not to save her life, then at least to tell the story of what was happening there to the American government and people. But in the early 1980's, America was not ready to listen. 

This is a moving, powerful book, not for the faint of heart, but important. Ms. Forche’ has followed the path of her duty in writing this account. It should be required reading for American politicians who dream about influencing governments in faraway countries.

What You Have Heard Is True A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

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