Chapter 129: Covering Democracy’s Downfall
For Salvadorian journalist Carlos Dada, democracy in his homeland has been a brief parenthesis between two exiles. Having first left El Salvador during its civil war (1979-1992), he returned twenty-five years ago to found El Faro (The Lighthouse), the first digital newspaper in Central America, now among the most respected media on the continent. As the Democratic regression felt the world over takes hold of his country, Dada is again in exile, forced by the authoritarian regime of Nayib Bukele. A collection of his articles –many available in English– is out in Spain under the title Los pliegues de la cintura (The Folds of the Waist).
Throughout these stories, he seeks to unearth the reasons that have led the region to the brink of a political precipice.
DC- You say the stories you published between 2010-2021 belong to the time of disenchantment, the period where hope ended in the face of the dilution of the democratic project in Central America and its "Replacement by dictatorships and authoritarian populist projects." Where are you calling on us to see?
CD- Central America –and a large part of the world– is experiencing a democratic crisis. Democracy is no longer functional for a lot of people, among other things because they don't believe that it has significantly improved their lives. They are giving way to populism, to anyone who offers them a solution –which is not a solution, as we know– that sells very well in moments of desperation; to anyone who offers them an immediate solution to their big problems. We have yet to reach the peak of populism’s rise. We are only halfway there and the effects are already disastrous. There is still a long way to go. Yet, like everything in history, this too will end. This too shall pass when people realize that these were not solutions, that they were lies coated with candy to continue concentrating power and wealth, to continue denying us our rights as citizens. By the time this is over, the worst thing that could happen to us is to go back to where we were. I am not so ambitious as to think my work can change anything, but if any idea should be sown, it is “This is the way we were before. This is what gave rise to what we are living now. When this is over, we can't go back to that.” That is the underlying intention of this writing.
DC- In the book’s introduction, you quote Swedish writer Stig Dagerman: “Suffering that is deserved is just as hard as suffering that is undeserved, it feels the same in the stomach, in the chest and the feet.” This underlines an ethical facet of your work: each character is a person; a unique story shaped by circumstances and should be portrayed as such. How do you apply this creed to victims and victimizers, corrupt elites, and the forgotten to whom you give voice?
CD- One of the first things I learned when I started going out on the streets, is that being a victim is not a human condition, as we usually see it. We tend to identify someone by saying: this person is a victim. No, that person is not a victim. That person is a victim of something. And that person can be at the same time the victimizer of somebody else. I often meet them: people who have these two facets, that of the victim and that of the victimizer. I think it is a moral obligation to first of all see people simply as people, because otherwise, it will be very difficult for you to relate to them. I say it more as an aspiration than as an achievement. I too get carried away by prejudice and by impressions, by shadows more than by lights. But the intention is there.
I’ll share an anecdote, which has to do with Captain Rafael Saravia (a participant in the assassination of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Óscar Romero, and a fugitive for decades until Carlos Dada obtained a confession). This is probably the story that I have had the hardest time writing. There came a time when I felt I could not take it anymore and I said so to a professor of mine at Stanford, Terry Karl, who introduced me to this subject. And she asked me, “Why?” I said, “Look, Terry, Captain Saravia embodies everything that I abhor in life, and yet I empathize with him. And this has me very conflicted with myself. How can I feel empathy for a person who has killed so many people, who has been so cruel? And my inner conflict is such that I can't deal with this anymore.” And Terry told me a wise phrase: “Far from being conflicted, you should be proud of yourself because that's exactly what differentiates you from him. If he had been able to recognize humanity in his victims, he wouldn't have been able to kill them. You should be proud of what you are feeling, of being able to empathize with and be affected by a person's suffering, even if that person is Captain Rafael Saravia.”
CD- Let's discuss the story you’ve just referred to, How We Killed Archbishop Romero, which took nearly five years from when you began writing in 2005. How does one live for so long with a story that is both a professional obsession and a national symbol?
CD-It cost me a lot. I felt as if I was writing in stone. And journalists do not write in stone, but on paper. It weighed on me; I thought the story was too big for me. There were many meetings with Saravia, and during the first three or four, he did not let me record him. What kept me going was all the work behind my interviews with Saravia, which allowed me to structure the piece. When I knew that I would not speak to him again, I interviewed about 60 people, one after another.
Of course, when I had obtained all that material, this very feeling of writing in stone overwhelmed me. My colleague Carlos Martinez, with whom I discussed each of my visits to Saravia, roundly criticized the first draft. When he saw it, he told me: “This looks like a police report, where is everything you have told me? Where is that man you saw as so fragile and starving? Where is all that you thought of when you saw him? It's nowhere. You've made a police report. This is useless. Get into the text. Be our eyes, our guide.” And that's what led to the story it became.
DC- Regarding the difference between writing a complex narrative, compared to a police report, you often turn to complex structures, alternating settings, historical times, and perspectives. Why is it worth going beyond the news into narrative nonfiction?
Because I think it allows for a lot of things. First, it allows us to give complex issues, and painful situations, a more human face. For instance, it's not just about there being drug dealers somewhere, it's about people who live there, who are supposed to have the same rights but don't. You can only convey this through longer formats where you can look beyond the facts of mere news. Using literary tools allows you to play with the text in other ways.
For example, In Honduras, the Law of the Jungle Abides is a very metaphorical story. There is a moment in which I describe that in the narco’s private zoo there is a small lake, full of alligators, and in that lake, there is a small island populated by monkeys. These are monkeys that live in constant fear, all day long, because their killers surround them. It's a metaphor for how many people live in that country. “Whoever gets off the island is getting eaten.” This is not allowed in a “cold” news story.
DC- You write: “We come out of a period without having resolved the wounds of the previous one. As if we were two atrocities late while a new one is in gestation.” How do you deal with the end of a story when it is entwined with the one to come?
There was an American philosopher named Richard Rorty, who said that history does not happen in chapters. We divide it into chapters because we need to isolate parts to tell it, otherwise, it would be endless. But history is a continuous narrative. Of course, more horrors will come. I keep revisiting previous horrors because we still don't quite understand them. It's a very personal quest to try to comprehend how we got to a country where an army company killed a thousand people (during the 1981 El Mozote massacre). How did we get there? We never figured it out, and we think life goes on as normal. All those horrors return because we never drew the lessons from what happened to us. We'd rather close that wound as if it could be closed by decree. We closed it and kept walking. And that’s not how things work.
Monument to the victims of El Mozote, in El Salvador (Ernesto Zalaya, Wikimedia Commons)
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Our newest story The Unlikely Posthumous Life of a Prodigy’s Typewriter, follows the story Stig Dagerman, a literary phenomenon that took his own life when he was 31. Now, a hundred years after his birth, a writer goes in search of his typewriter to make sense of his enduring legacy.