Still in the midst of the pandemic, El Salvador has spent the last few weeks grappling with an onslaught of nerve-wracking controversies. The Trump administration may soon be ending the Temporary Protective Status program that has, for decades, given protection from deportation to nearly 200,000 Salvadorans. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been accused of forcibly performing hysterectomies on women as the agency continues deporting Salvadorans to a country whose government is using the pandemic for personal enrichment and whose president is exhibiting increasingly authoritarian tendencies. And just last week, the Bukele administration blocked an investigator’s attempts to secure documents of the 1981 El Mozote Massacre, one of the deadliest and most notorious mass murders in the hemisphere in the past half-century.
While wading through news of the multiple crises, I picked up a new book by Salvadoran-American author and journalist Roberto Lovato. While Lovato couldn’t have possibly foreseen all these developments — the stories have broken just in the last couple of weeks — he definitely foreshadows this destabilization and amnesia of a nation’s history in his book Unforgetting, which was published by Harper-Collins last month.
With Unforgetting Lovato, the California-born son of two Salvadoran immigrants, enters the sphere of immigration literature dominated by books written by those who have neither participated nor been affected by what many Americans consider the “crime” of moving across borders. Highly-anticipated book among circles of those who know better, Unforgetting is being placed in bookshop stands next to other 2020 border hits like NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s non-fiction book Separated and the highly-criticized (and best-selling) fictional American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, a woman known for claiming not to be Latina until it was time to sell books about the American dream.
Lovato doesn't shy away from laying out his own politics, and putting himself on the line for them. So-called objectivity, in an author, can be a narrative deadweight. Lovato has worn many hats in his search for answers when it comes to El Salvador’s violent history — as a researcher, journalist, guerrillero, and witness — and to him that means he can’t morally and realistically remain objective. In this story, for Lovato, objectivity is too passive and a fool’s errand.
“I’ve never been one to simply stay on the sidelines of the challenges and issues of my time,” Lovato told me recently. “I call myself a journalist with a voice because I used to see the ambassadors of objective journalism... I believe in the idea, but I don’t actually believe [objectivity is] a possibility.”
In his prologue, Lovato points out that “all the stories in all the main media outlets of the United States have erased Central American experts from the refugee crisis story. All of them. There were no U.S.-born or -based Central American lawyers, no Central American scholars, no Central American NGO leaders, no Central American journalists in any coverage on any channel.” With Unforgetting, he hopes to make a dent in the narrative, in the way El Salvador’s story is told in the United States.
Unforgetting — a memoir, first and foremost — is the carefully pieced retelling of a first-generation American child’s memories, a Salvadoran father’s trauma, a guerrilla fighter for the FMLN’s experiences clashing with an entire nation’s willingness to forget. Lovato told me how the lack of exposure to Latinx voices and, in this specific case, Salvadoran writers and reporters, combined with the media’s erasure of topics that are of interest to Salvadoran (and Latinx) audiences, adds to the “continuation of a pattern of amnesia and forgetting that dates back probably to the foundation of the country in 1821.” That forgetting—whether deliberate or blind—in large part, informs Unforgetting.
Lovato tells the story of two countries from a perspective he owns: as a Salvadoran-American, he grew up understanding gang culture in California and he spent his childhood holidays exploring his roots while visiting family in El Salvador. As an adult, Lovato joined the non-profit sector to serve the Salvadoran diaspora in the U.S. before going back to El Salvador, where he was an urban commando in the FMLN. Years after that, we encounter Lovato as a journalist reporting on the Salvadoran history most of the world is familiar with nowadays — the history dotted by gang murders and tales of mass immigration.
Lovato takes us in a multi-generational, inter-societal investigation of his own origins across his roots in El Salvador and the United States. He introduces us to his family — a doting mother, a difficult and secretive but hardworking father, a crop of rebellious cousins, a loving grandmother gifted with a strong will and stamina. Closely intertwined with this family’s tale is a nation’s history of marginalization, political strife, death and war. With the machete playing a central role, Lovato tells us of two Salvadoran uprisings — the first, La Matanza, occurred in 1932, the second, El Mozote, in 1980 — and how they were both defined by mass killings that, despite having momentous consequences, have been poorly recorded in the nation’s collective conscience.
Taking Up Arms
Lovato played an active role as a revolutionary in the second uprising. In Unforgetting, he walks us through the motions of how he became a member of the FMLN guerrillas, an “estadounidense” (American) who returned to his parents’ home country to resume a fight he became familiar with as a child. Lovato was first introduced to the Frente’s teachings through pamphlets handed to him in secrecy as a boy by his older Salvadoran cousins during holiday visits. As an adult, his non-profit work led him to the mysterious G, a woman who inspired him to fly down to El Salvador and fight a military government infamously boosted by the United States government.
As a younger Salvadoran, with a Millennial’s understanding of Salvadoran history, and more familiar with the FMLN's contemporary stance, which, as Lovato writes, has abandoned the core principles that allured him to it in the 80s, I hesitated when I came across Lovato's relationship with the party. But while at first the reader gets a sense of what seems to be an idolization for what began as a ragtag coalition of revolutionary groups, we quickly learn that he has no love for today’s party. Lovato told me that the FMLN no longer resembles what it was during the war, no longer upholds the values espoused by those he fought next to. In other words, the hunted have become the hunters — police and military under Presidents Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren became sick with power. Lovato doesn’t have many compliments for ARENA either, and largely blames the party and its leaders for the societal collapse that followed the Peace Accords.
But, in many ways, Lovato’s memoir is a critique of a different country altogether: the United States and its unforgiving stranglehold over El Salvador. He denounces the abuses the U.S. government has historically carried out in Central America by placing a particular emphasis in the U.S. government’s training of police and military forces. “Salvadoran violence is, in no small part, an expression of forgotten American violence,” he writes.
It is impossible to read the denunciations in Lovato’s book without linking the current Black Lives Matter movement and over-militarization of police in the United States to the ways in which the American government has armed and trained forces in El Salvador and beyond. Lovato has studied the effects of policing and militarism on different populations, including the massacre carried out by the Salvadoran army in El Mozote and the shootings carried out by Los Angeles police officers, and he says there’s not a fine thread connecting the two but rather a direct bloodline. “When we look at the LAPD,” Lovato says, “We're looking at a police force that isn't just trained over there in Elysian park, where they used to have their training center...here's a far more complicated story that's been forgotten.”
Lovato says he can remember Pentagon trainers being brought to El Salvador to train death squads “and other murderous battalions of war and counterinsurgency.” At the end of El Salvador’s war, he says, these officers were hailed as heroes for, joining “the fight against political communism.” Those are the same folks, Lovato says, who came back to the U.S. to train the LAPD, the San Francisco police, and other police departments in counter-insurgency policing. “Police officers were talking about being trained by these really cool trainers who were in the jungles of Central America and South America,” Lovato says.
Cycles of Violence
Lovato’s book is a reflection on silence and memory, both personal and collective. With Unforgetting, Lovato wants to revive the record, reawaken bits and pieces of his and the nation’s consciousness. In a particularly striking scene, Lovato, this time serving the role of a Boston Globe reporter writing about El Salvador’s gangs, visits San Salvador’s Instituto de Medicina Legal — the nation’s largest morgue — to better understand the violent murders that have now plagued the country for decades. There, he finds fragmented bodies left behind not only by gang violence but by the 1981 El Mozote massacre.
It is at the IML where Lovato encounters one of El Salvador’s contemporary controversial figures — director Fortín Magaña. Lovato questions Magaña about the remains of victims of crimes long forgotten by the national conscience. “El Salvador is an amnesiac country, historically speaking,” Magaña tells Lovato. “Neither ARENA nor the FMLN wants to really look at what happened in 1932. The political will is not there, and until there is, we will continue like zombies without any history to guide us.” Lovato then hits us with a staggering number: a 2007 poll from from newspaper La Prensa Grafica found that 75% of Salvadorans have no knowledge of La Matanza -- the 1932 government and military suppression of a peasant uprising in western El Salvador during which an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 Salvadorans lost their lives, many of them of Pipil (Indigenous) decent. “1932 is totally related with what’s happening today,” Fortín adds. “Pretending to explain what’s happening with violence in El Salvador and the migrant children today is an enormous obstacle.”
When I finished the book, I asked Lovato a question that has been plaguing me for years: Does he think we’ll ever see the end of this cycle of violent death in El Salvador?
“I was there during the war and I saw young men I knew make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of social justice and revolution,” Lovato says, “So I have to believe even now that there is a possibility that [those] who sacrificed everything did so for a better future for others. I have to believe that. I'd go crazy, if not.”
“That's what the book is about,” he continues. “It's an epic story of violence and overcoming of the Salvadoran people in El Salvador and the United States. The story of our people, I think it's astonishing. That's why I wanted to tell it. I was like, ‘Whoa… How the hell did my father manage to smile and joke? How do I manage to smile and joke? How do I manage to love?”
Unforgetting, by Roberto Lovato, Harper-Collins, $21.59
