 I'm going to start as some people will keep coming in, but my name is George Perkovich. I'm a vice president for studies here at Carnegie Endowment. And I work, and have worked for four decades on nuclear weapons mainly, and also strategic technologies. So I need to tell you the backstory of why we're hosting this discussion today with Caroline Fourchet. When I was in college in the late 70s and the very beginning of the 1980s, I read a lot of poetry. I had no interest in international affairs. I read a lot of poetry, and in 1981, I was browsing the bookstore in Santa Cruz, and I was looking through the poetry shelves, and this book was kind of staring out from the shelf. And so I looked at it, and I picked it up, and I started reading it with The Country Between Us by Caroline Fourchet. And I really admired the strength of the writing, and I mean that, like, almost literally, it's very kind of thin, strong writing, very direct, which I quite like, and so I bought it, and I've probably moved 25 times since then, and it always kind of moved along and was on my bookshelf. So then this spring, I was reading the New York Times Sunday book review, and I looked, and there's a book by Caroline Fourchet. So I read the review, and it was a quite glowing, deservedly glowing review. So the next day I went down to Kramer Books, and I bought the book, and I started reading it, and pretty soon I'm saying to my wife, you gotta read this. And then I keep saying, you gotta read this, and I think it was probably becoming a little irritating, but I finished it, and Wes and Sarah started reading it, and I looked at her on the couch and book, and she's not noticing whatever else is going around in the house, and so I go, okay, that's work, and she really liked it. She did, she finished it, she loved it. So then I saw my colleague, Jared Blank, who's back here, who works here at Carnegie, has done a lot of work in Afghanistan. We got to shoot in the breeze one day, and I said, there's a book that I think you might like, you should really read this book, so fine. You never know what people are gonna do, you know what they're gonna do, if they're gonna read it or not. Couple weeks later, he comes walking in my office, and he goes, that was one of the 10 greatest books I've ever read. And so we just started going, yeah, wasn't it great in talking about our favorite parts in Iran? So at that point, I felt like the least we could do was reach out and invite you to come here and give a presentation, not only about the book, but obviously because the context that we're living in, especially a couple months ago with the immigration crisis, which hasn't gone away, and the bringing up of US policy in Central America, it has a resonance that I thought would also kind of benefit us to think about it. So that's my long introduction of Caroline Fourchet. Let me also introduce you to Karen Young. Many of you know Karen, or certainly know of her work. She's the associate editor of The Washington Post. Boats of Prize has covered just about every major story. And in the 1970s, the late 1970s, which is the time period of Caroline's book, Karen was in El Salvador too. She was a bureau chief for The Washington Post, kind of a young, the old days we say kind of war correspondent, but in any case, working in hot spots. And she intersects the story in a couple of places as well. So I thought, as I've seen about doing this event, who better to lead the discussion than Karen Young? So that's the back story. I'm gonna get out of here, I'm gonna go sit over there. You all enjoy, and thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, George. I'm so happy to be here, mostly for strictly selfish reasons to see Caroline again, although we just realized we lived like three miles apart. And I don't think we've seen each other for 30 years. For 30 years. And to see Harry, her husband, who was also part of this whole story in lots of ways. So this has all brought us together. As you know, if you know about Caroline, she uses the term poetry of witness, and it applies to conflicts all over the world. And I'll ask her to define that term for you in a little bit. But I think what it means is that often, art writ large is the most effective way of using words and vision to preserve human memory. The people who perpetuate tragedies such as happened, and to some degree still happening in El Salvador, are well aware of the power of poetry and arts and creativity to shape a narrative. I remember when I first went to Argentina, which is where I first went as a correspondent for the Post in the mid 1970s. Just after a coup had brought the military to power there. One of the first things that the junta did was to shut down all artistic expression and free thought. All music was banned except for tangos and traditional music. Modern art was taken out of the museums, books were burned, universities closed, their arts departments and sociology departments. They even banned group therapy for people who had mental health issues. The idea was that any intimation that something in the society was making people crazy just was unacceptable to them. I think for those of us who deal in what we like to think of as the facts of the situation, who recount events abroad and try to provide some context, have a role to play. And by the time the little country of El Salvador sort of reappeared in the world's consciousness around 1977, there was a lot of background to explain as well as what was going on there then. El Salvador was then and is now a country of superlatives. The littlest country in Latin America, the most heavily populated, by some counts the poorest. It also had what the Salvadoran military and the upper economic classes there like to call the Latin America's first Bolshevik revolution. This was a peasant uprising in the 1930s that was brutally shut down and led directly to more than four decades of military rule without a break. And the constant fear of those who were in charge that the subversive forces, whoever they defined them in any particular week, were plotting against them and had to be brought under control. So by the time our story starts in 1977, 78, very little had changed there. A few dozen families owned about 95% of the land and the wealth. The vast majority of people had no services at all and lived hand to mouth either on small tracts of land they didn't own on other people's very large tracts of land that they worked on or in very poor quarters in urban areas. But there were some glimmerings that things were changing. The Catholic Church, which had long been a defender of the oligarchy and the military, all of a sudden began to see its mission as the defense of the poor and the need to reorganize Salvadoran society and the economy. Organizers had risen up to tell peasants that they had a right to their own land and that there was power in numbers and if they would organize that they would have the opportunity. Not surprisingly, the oligarchy and the military were scared and they very quickly defined it as a replay of what had happened in the 1930s, which I think at the beginning at least it wasn't at all, although later some communist movements from elsewhere and homegrown, like in many other places, saw a situation that was ripe to take advantage of. When the killing started, it wasn't communists or politicians or guerrillas or the ideologues of the left who were the victims, it was the peasants and the priests. There were some people in El Salvador who were appalled by this and also figured where it was likely to head and sought witnesses to tell their story to the world and to issue a warning that if things didn't change there very quickly, they were going to go in a direction that nobody wanted. Some of those witnesses were people like me and other journalists who spent a lot of time there, but I think ultimately the ones who were most effective were those like Carolyn and really Carolyn alone in El Salvador who were thrust into that country with no preconceptions, really no politics, just her eyes and her ears and a creative capacity to see and to hear and to explain in a way that ultimately turned out to be much more valuable. So I want to start by just asking you Carolyn to explain where were you in your life when, and how did you end up in El Salvador? I had published one book of poems at the age of 25 with Yale University Press and on that strength of that, I began a university teaching and I was at San Diego State teaching freshman composition and being a young poet who really, I was idealistic, I wanted to do something in the world and I was thrilled to be teaching in the university but I was a little bit directionless. I really didn't know where my life was headed quite and I made a friend there who told me her mother was a poet and eventually I read her mother's poetry and my friend and I decided to try to translate it because it had never been translated into English although it had been published extensively in the Spanish speaking world and had been translated into French and German and other languages. And so Maya and I decided to translate the work of Clarival Alegria who was born in El Salvador and grew up in Nicaragua and was living at that time in exile in Spain and I had difficulty with the translations because Clarival was writing about things that she had witnessed as a child and that had to do with the aftermath of the first Bolshevik uprising and there were horrific images in her poems and I didn't understand whether they were literal or figurative, I had no context to translate, no historical context, no knowledge of Central America. I had actually imagined that a very thick Spanish English dictionary was going to do it for me in terms of translation. So I said, Maya, I can't translate your mother. I don't know what she's writing about. I don't understand her poems and Maya said, come with me. I'm going to Spain this summer. Come and stay with us and we'll translate it with her and she'll tell you all the stories and explain the poems and I said, I can't do that because my family had come from Eastern Europe and no one went to Europe where I grew up. No one was going back there ever. So I said, I can't go to Europe. And she said, why not? And I said, because, I had all these visions. She said, look, you're going to stay with us. It's fine if you have a ticket, just come. You'll be safe, you'll be in our house and we'll do the work and so eventually I went. Spent the summer and most of the house guests were writers from all over Latin America. They were people who had gone into exile from the Pinochet regime in Chile from Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay. They had fled the dirty wars. And they were writers that you might know, Mario Benedetti, Agasarovastos, Gabriel Marquez, Julio Cortaza, all of these people were her friends. And I listened to the conversations on her terrace every afternoon and they were always about politics and about the situations in their respective countries. And I was glued to these conversations and horrified because my country kept coming up in some of these as, you know, the supporter of some of these regimes. And I, so I became depressed and I finished the translations and I wanted to do something and I didn't know what. I went back to my teaching job. And I was home alone one day and grading papers and writing letters for Amnesty International. I was working for this urgent action network. Some of you might remember where we would suddenly deluge some horrific dictator's office with letters of appeal on behalf of an incarcerated person. And I heard a vehicle in the driveway. I wasn't expecting anyone. And I looked out and it was a vehicle with El Salvador license plates. It was covered with dust. It was at Hiachi. I'd never seen a Hiachi before. And I wasn't expecting anyone. And a man got out with a bag over his arm and two little girls jumped out. So I relaxed because I thought, well, no, it'll be all right. There's two little girls with this. And he came to the door and rang the doorbell. And I almost didn't answer it. I almost thought, no, just they'll go away. They're at the wrong house. So they'll go away. I was a little afraid of El Salvador license plates because of all the stories I'd heard that summer. And finally, my curiosity got me and I opened the door and he said, you're Carolyn Forchet. And I am Leonel Gomez-Vives. And these are my daughters. And I have to talk to you. So I made him identify Clarivelle in a photograph because Leonel Gomez-Vives was her cousin. And they had talked about him that summer in Spain. And every time they talked about him, they would say things like, well, he's a champion motorcycle racer. He's a champion marksman. And he has trophies for these things. And he gave some land away to the Campesinos. So he's sort of like a Robin Hood. And he might be with the gorillas no one knows, but a lot of people think he works for the CIA. So I thought, OK. He was mysterious. And every time I asked about him, everyone would be quiet because they didn't want me to know too much about him. But Maya had sent him my first book of poems and a letter. And he shows up on my doorstep. And he came into my house. And after properly identifying Clarivelle by your picture and spent three days with his daughters in my house, he covered my kitchen table with white paper and put lots of objects on the table and pens. And he had his pouch of tobacco and his pipe. And he talked and talked and talked. And he gave me the history of Central America. He began with the conquistadores. And by the time he was finished three days later, he was drawing US gunship helicopters crossing the mountains that he had drawn on his map. And he had drilled me on how the military was put together and how the government changed hands every four years and how the economy was structured and what this was all about. And then he said, in three to five years, we're going to have a horrific war. And the policy of the United States is going to be decisive in that war. And I said, yes. I had no idea why he was telling me any of this. And he said, I need you to come to El Salvador now. I need a poet. OK, no American would ever say that. So I said, I need a poet. I said, why? And he said, I need you to come and learn everything you can about the country so that when the war happens, you can come back to the United States and explain the conditions and the reasons to the Americans. And I said, well, I think you need a journalist. And he said, no, I need someone who's going to write the language of the heart and who doesn't have the constraints that journalists have. I need a poet. And I said, well, poets can't talk to people in the United States because people in the United States don't talk to poets. They don't think about poets. And he said, really? Because we take our poets very seriously, as Karen was pointing out. And he said, you'll just have to change that. So I thought, OK, no. And he said, no, listen, it's really important. I'm going to let you work with my friends. I have friends who's a doctor, one a social worker. Go around the country with them. I will take you to all the sectors of the society. I have friends in the military. I have friends who are among the wealthy coffee growers. I have friends among the campesinos. I'll show you everything. And then you'll understand. And then when the war happens, you'll be in this position. He said, I could turn you into an expert. And that's something Americans can never get enough of, experts. So I thought, I've never been an expert in anything. I had five majors as an undergraduate. I barely focused on any major in college. So I tried to dissuade him. And he wasn't to be dissuaded. He said, I need a poet. Just come. We'll see what happens. He said, there's no obligations. Later, he did have one obligation. So he went away, and no one thought I should do it. But I didn't have anything that was holding me. I had a Guggenheim grant I had just been given. And I wanted to perfect my Spanish. And I wanted to translate more. And I wanted to see the world. And I didn't really believe that anyone could predict that a war was coming. And I also assured him that the United States would not be involved at all, because we just got out of Vietnam. And we wouldn't do this again, because it had been horrific Vietnam. And we were done with that. He said, oh, you're done with that. And I said, yes, I believe so. So he left. And finally, I decided I had to go. And I flew into Ilopango, you remember? It's really kind of a dark, small. It was a scary airport for someone who'd only been in Paris and Spain. And it was January 4, 1978. And he took me to all. He had arranged a dinner that I would go to. But he wasn't at the airport. I was alone. It was dark. I didn't know anyone. And he sent a Peace Corps volunteer to pick me up. He came through the parking lot. And he said, are you Carolyn Ford? I said, yes. He said, I'm John Taylor Peace Corps. I'm here to take you to Lyonel. So he had arranged a dinner at Benihana of Tokyo, San Salvador. I didn't understand this. But he was trying to get me in the mood for understanding that Vietnam was not over. So he thought of Benihana. He was like that. So what he wanted to do was to educate me. And how he wanted to do that was by giving me experiences. So he would never answer questions. And he would never tell me what to think. He wouldn't even tell me what I had just seen. And sometimes I didn't know what I had just seen. He cultivated an air of mystery with everyone because he believed that that protected him. If the military thought he worked for the CIA, that was good because they wouldn't do anything to him. And various people thought he was various things. And he would actually encourage this kind of, as you know. How was it when you met him? I was in, I was doing an interview with a man who later became one of the Junta's ambassadors here. But he was the owner of the biggest car dealership in San Salvador. And I was interviewing him just as a kind of oligarch guy, rich guy. And I was, I hadn't, it was one of the first times I ever went to El Salvador. And I was sitting there and we were talking. And all of a sudden the door of this guy's office burst open, no knocking, no nothing. And this guy comes in. And Lonell, you have to understand, he was big for Salvadorans. Salvadorans tend to be small. Lonell was a big guy in girth and height. And he was dressed in kind of, you know, like chinos, but dirty and wrinkled. And a kind of check shirt that you'd like buy in Walmart that was all wrinkled up. And his hair was all messed up. And he had this huge mustache and had glasses. And he came in and he started yelling at this guy. And he was a very proper sort of rich guy. And I was introduced. And he said, great, great, you haven't been here very long. OK, great, we'll talk. And the next time, and then he said, he had some business to conduct with this guy. And I thought, well, this is, you know, put him in my category of oligarch guys. And the next time I saw him, he came, I don't know how he knew, he came to where I was staying and said, come on, we're going somewhere. And then took me out to some village somewhere to sort of show me the other side of El Salvador. But he was like that all the time. He knew everybody. He knew everybody at the US Embassy. He knew everybody in the government, everybody in the military, all the rich people, every village. But you never could quite figure out where he was coming from. And as a journalist, it was very difficult to sort of take what he said. I mean, I never quoted him or anything. He just took me places like he did with you. Or when he got very involved in the land reform, I mean, he talked a lot about that. So what did you, I like your description of the airport. It's funny, I actually was in El Salvador for the first time in many, many years. A few weeks ago, I went with Secretary Pompeo. That was kind of a weird trip. But the airport now, obviously they have a new airport, and it's completely different. And the road from the airport into San Salvador is like you think you were in San Diego. I mean, it was a very brief trip. We went directly to whatever the president was. Everything was clean. Everything was beautiful. Flowers were blooming. It was all really green. And it was like, I said, this can't be. I mean, I was there for maybe six hours. But it was like a completely different place. So what did you, so you drive in and then he starts taking you where? I mean, what did he want you to see? Well, events, even in the few months, he visited me in November of 77. I went there in January of 78. And even in that period, things had sped up in a way that he wasn't anticipating. And that had to do with operations of the death squads. And so paramilitary groups were active in the city and also active in the Compo and the countryside. And they were getting more active all the time. Some of them were military people. And some of them were civilians. And some of them were supported by the wealthy families. And some of them were mysteriously supported. But they were brutally killing people and mutilating some of these bodies. And then they would toss these bodies on the street or in the body dumps. So that was it starting to really intensify when I got there. And he was more nervous than he had been when he visited me in California. So the first place he took me, he said, look, I have had to speed things up. I wasn't going to start this way, but we don't have much time. And he talked about a North American, a black man from Philadelphia, who had been murdered, he, Leonel said, at the hands of the Salvadoran military government. And he was trying to work on the case and get to the bottom of it and find out who was responsible and hopefully find the body of this man who was named Ronald Richardson. And Leonel was obsessed with this case at the time, really obsessed. That's all he wanted to talk about was this man. And as it turned out, it was because he was trying to persuade the Salvadoran military that this American citizen was important and that the US government cared about what happened to their citizens. He was trying to establish that as a fact. And it was, for various reasons, we don't have time to go into, not quite a fact. So the US was actually not actively pursuing this case. So he brought me, without my knowing where I was going, into a residence that belonged to General Medrano. And the first man I met was General Medrano. And he was the ex, I mean, he was in charge of the Ancel Sa, the counterintelligence. He was a huge figure in the Salvadoran military, but he was retired. And he was known to be a hefe. He was known to be a bit of a butcher. He was not considered a nice guy. And I'm sitting in his parlor talking to him. And I'm trying to, Leonel and he are having one of those heated discussions that Leonel would have with military people sometimes. And I was trying to follow it, but I was quiet. And I was looking at them and watching it like you would watch a play, or a tennis match. I'd watch Leonel talk, and then I'd watch him talk. And finally Leonel said, well, Carolyn has a question for you. And I thought, what question? She would like to know. May I, Carolyn? Yes, I said, she would like to know about the status of the investigation of the murder of Ronald Richardson. And he leaned forward, and he was very dark in his tone. And he said, I am no longer in charge of these matters. And he looked at his wife, watching. He said, it's nice to meet you. I have nothing to say about it, the sort of idea. And that was it. We got back in the vehicle. And Leonel said, you are perfect. It was perfect. And I said, what happened? And he said, you listened. You were very quiet. You were somewhat mysterious. You were a North American. And out of the blue, you asked about a case that no one's interested in, and they're trying to cover up. And you want to know about it. And you listened to his reply, and you walked out. He's got in his mind now that at least one American is here in the country looking into this matter. So this was the kind of thing he would do. And sometimes everyone who knew him, and President Congressman Jim McGovern spent a lot of time with Leonel too. And we've joked a lot about the fact that we always was asking him, what was it that we just said or did, or what was it because he would put us in situations that were partly theater, I think, and partly designed to have some particular effect. Well, I think sometimes, too, you could think that you were being used. I mean, you were being used. I confronted him. In this book, I write about confronting him about that. And I don't even know for what, I would say. And so he had, I wrote the book in such a way that the reader could go through this process with me. I write it so that the reader never knows more than I know at the time. Because I wrote it for young people, young Salvadorans who are here and want to know about their country, and their parents won't talk to them, and other young people who just want to know what happens to a 27-year-old that changes the course of her life. And so I reveal Leonel little by little. But I do confront him. I ask him point blank at one time whether he was actually worked for the CIA or not. And we, it was a very interesting relationship. There was a great rapport. He was funny. I hope the humor is there. I went through a lot with him. And I broke free of him a couple of times. It was always a bad idea. But I tried to provide the education he gave to me. And one time when I confronted him and said, you used me. And I don't even know for what. He said, look, I did not use you. I gave you a rare opportunity. You just experienced something very few people get to experience. And you can learn from it. So let's not, you know, we're not talking about using you. So that was how that was. Yeah. So when you first go out into the countryside into some of these villages and stuff, I mean, here you are a relatively sheltered person. And to see how people live there, what were your first impressions of that? Well, I have to say that since I'd only stopped over in France briefly on my way to Spain and had never been anywhere except Canada, I had not seen that level of rural poverty before. And I had not seen that massive poverty before on the scale. In other words, that when 80% of the country is living in dire poverty, I had no experience with that. It was shocking. And Lena would leave me in villages for different periods of time so that I could have a sense of life there. And these were villages without electricity or running water and without much food. They sold anything except beans and tortillas. And it was really a severe destitution. And then he would take me to elegant houses of the coffee growers and fountains and gardens and houses and it was beautiful. And then the next day, we'd be back in this poor village. And then the next day, we'd be in a colonel's office and then back to a fancy house and then back to a poor village. And it was every day all day long. And I realized there was a certain kind of method to it where he was trying to get me to feel in my gut the disparities and the structure of the society. And occasionally, he would give me some statistics about measles, about malnutrition, about life expectancy. But mostly, he just showed me. Did you feel, especially on this first visit in the beginning of it, did you feel like you had an understanding of El Salvador? I mean, what was going on there? What the various forces that play were? Were you anywhere close to drawing any conclusions as to what all this information? No, not in the big, it took time. And it took friendships with other people whom I write about in the book, people who were working with the Church Human Rights Office and people who were unbeknownst to me collaborating with one of the guerrilla factions and people who were trying to provide medical care to the poor with no resources. And I think that slowly I came to understand that indeed war was coming and that it was because all peaceful measures of reform in the country had been, were being exhausted. All strikes and protests were attacked violently or fired upon and there was no recourse, that people were being pushed economically, socially and in every other way to such a degree that it was inevitable that they would have to save themselves in some way. So it wasn't the matter of, as it was in Nicaragua of overthrowing a dictator like Samosa, who had dominated Nicaragua, that family had dominated Nicaragua for decades. This was a systemic institutional military government that for various reasons feared, I think it was the echo of 1932, the uprising of 32, they feared any change at all. So Leonel had a small coffee farm, just to give you an example, he provided mattresses and quarters for the workers on his coffee farm. Mattresses were terrible, it created great problems for him because the rest of the growers were furious that he had bought mattresses because he was upsetting what was supposed to happen and they might get ideas, they might want more, you can't give mattresses, by that you give mattresses, pretty soon you're gonna be giving everything. This was the kind of thinking. And when I was at dinner with the rich people, the oligarchs, the way they talked about the poor was shocking to me, that they were little more than animals, they were just there to work, that was it. And surely I had no other ideas than that. And they were very frightened of communists. They didn't really know much about who the communists were so anyone who worked for the poor became a communist. A communist is someone who works with the poor. A communist is someone who supports the poor in some way or provides some service or speaks on their behalf. Therefore, Monsignor Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador was a communist because every Sunday he spoke on behalf of the poor and he challenged the government to cease the repression. So he was a communist. They used to call him, his middle name was Arnulfo and they used to call him Oscar, Marx, Nulfo Romero. So it was, Lionel knew Monsignor and I got to know Monsignor through Lionel because they had been friends. He was very close friends with the Sisters of Divine Providence who where Monsignor lived, they had a hospital for, a small hospital for terminally ill patients. And I didn't know that Lionel was close to them but eventually I realized that it was fairly close and the last time I saw Monsignor Romero was the week before he died. We had supper in the common kitchen and Monsignor and Lionel decided that I had to leave the country the next day and I didn't want to. I wanted to stay just two or three more weeks. I just had a little bit more to do and they said no. So I spent my last moments with Monsignor Romero trying to persuade him to let me stay and also unfortunately I tried to persuade him to leave El Salvador because he was the most, the most wanted man. He was the one the death squads wanted to kill the most we thought and he said no, I'm a shepherd. My place is with my people. I'm going to stay here no matter what and now your place is with your people. And I never thought of myself as even having a people we don't think in those terms. And I, so when I could have been talking about just about anything else I was trying to persuade a saint to give up his mission and it was really a ridiculous thing to do but a week later I got a call from San Salvador that he had been murdered and so that I was back in the United States. The next day they approved the first 5.5 million in military aid, military aid had been suspended and they approved the first 12 trainers they called them to be sent to El Salvador. They didn't want to call them advisors because you know Vietnam that might hint that Vietnam so they changed it to trainers. And of course in Vietnam they called them advisors because they didn't want to call them combat troops. So there's always a change of name but that so then I had written these poems about El Salvador my experiences there, seven poems published a new book. See I told Monsignor when I left that I didn't think I could speak to Americans. And you know I was a poet and he said no you will do it you just have to get ready. You must just pray and get ready. And I thought well Leonel and Monsignor have very funny ideas about poetry in America but the book was published at about the time when El Salvador was once again welcome in American newspapers, right? I mean it was you remember that period? It was 1989, 81, 82. So I got invitations to give poetry readings and that gave me an opportunity to talk about El Salvador and I went to 49 states. And there was a real effort. I was so inspired by the American people at that time because they were building the sanctuary movement and the witness for peace movement and CISPAS. There was all kinds of activity dedicated to trying to keep us militarily out of Central America to keep us from invading, to keep us from thinking that was a good idea. And so wherever I went I met them and that movement materialized overnight. And yes, the war ensued and for a decade there was war and every year military aid was exponentially increased but the people in El Salvador that when I went to the signing of the peace, the people in El Salvador said you know, we don't know what would have happened if the American people hadn't organized in this way. Maybe we would have had to have American troops on the ground fighting, you know. So they said don't feel bad that you didn't stop the war, you know, so. I think I just want to, you mentioned the poems and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the process of writing. One of the things I like so much about those poems is that they combine observation of total normalcy in people's lives while they're doing the most horrendous things and you see that when you're there for a long time, you know, life goes on for most people. And I wanted to ask you to read that poem, The Colonel, which is where the incident is recounted in the book and it also is that brings the title of the book. I didn't republish the poem but I refer to the evening and what, you know. So I'll read the poem and then I'll tell you what the aftermath of this poem was. 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. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cup show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine. A gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. 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. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around, he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He left 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. May, 1978. So the friend, I never revealed this until after he died, but the friend who says don't say anything in the poem was Leonel Gomez. He had taken me to quite a few Colonel's houses and this is what happened at one of them. And the people he wanted me to tell to go fuck themselves, heep, right? Okay, I'm sorry. Was President Carter and the US government for establishing a human rights policy in the State Department that required certification for respecting human rights in order to have aid released? The certification was a formality and a process but it gave ammunition to people who were working in human rights and who were documenting human rights abuses to try to delay or even deny certification. And they were, the reason he was upset was that this was never asked of them before. They were asked only to maintain order and stability, not anything else, by whatever means. Just do it, just we don't want any trouble. And we certainly don't want another Cuba in the Western Hemisphere. So he thought, well, they're tying our hands. What is this game they're playing? What do the Americans want? And that was the time, when I was there that was what the military was thinking. They felt betrayed by the US and puzzled and angry. And meanwhile, the country was blowing up. There's a, it seemed to me the book changes fairly abruptly at one point. The whole first part in your first trip there is almost a sort of word picture of things without imposing any particular, the words are more gauzy, I don't know, I mean. Kind of a narrative. Yeah, but then it switches to almost kind of an urgency. The sentences become more clipped, it becomes more, you know, and this and this and this. Was that a conscious thing or am I misreading it somehow? No, I was narrating it along, recreating my former self, trying not to falsify her, making her as sort of naive as she was. And then I, but after a while in the time of reliving it, and you have to relive something like this in order to write it, I got to the places where it was pretty violent and terrifying. And I found an old notebook of mine that I had actually written in at the time. And the passage was very written very differently. It had no punctuation, it was really fast and it was all run together. And I decided to put that passage in the book. And then I found more of them. And I realized that another kind of language had to, I had to use another kind of language to get the feeling of what that was like at the time. So it goes back into that narrative again, but the narrative is a little more knowledge. The narrator is more knowledgeable. I don't know, would you read one of those? There's several, they just toward the end, which are just from your notebook. Well, this is a small one. They're all called written in pencil because they were written in pencil in my notebook. And so we had gone out to the compo after the army had done an operation. And this had to have been in like February of 80 or something. On both sides of the road, there was smoke. It was blue and still rising when we passed, although the fields were already black from being burned. Everything was burned. They shot the cattle, yes, even them and the pigs also, they shot. So they were lying there already bloated. And there was a smell of meat as well as death and a howling that couldn't actually have been heard, but it was there. The waddle in the houses was burned and the corn in the cribs, we didn't stop. We slowed down. The turkey vultures were above us. Many also already on the ground. They don't sing. They hiss. Some things we saw through the field glasses, some with naked eyes. We couldn't tell how many people. We didn't know how long it had been. That's all I told them. Lionel had driven as slowly as he could through the smoke. Look, Papu. Look at this. Remember this. Try to see. He called me Papu. We all had Soudalimos, you know, other names. We didn't use our real names and so that was mine. And there's something germane to our time now that he said that I would like to share with this paragraph. He said, this is toward the end of our time, when he actually was talking to me finally, you know. Yeah. It isn't the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up. Lionel once said, it is numbness, acquiescence and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible. He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government is corruption. That and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption, trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye. So corruption is something we have, I think, to pay attention to also us. Yeah. And lots of different kinds of corruption, yeah. Lots of different kinds, right. So you have this lengthy period. You write the book of poems, which is published in 81. 81, yeah. Finally it came out with HarperCollins in early 82, yeah. There was a fine edition in December of 81. And then you kind of go on the road. Yeah. Relentlessly. As an advocate for El Salvador, but then that expands into other places too. I mean, it expands the concept of the poetry of witness. So that kind of explains. The book was attacked because it was called political poetry. I had written about El Salvador, so I had become a political poet. I didn't intend to become a political poet. It's just that if you write about Italy, you're not a political poet. Well, maybe now. But if you write about El Salvador, you are. So I didn't think that that was true. I associated political poetry with sort of propagandistic tracks of things that were more message driven. I'm not condemning it. It's not in a pejorative way, but that's not what I had done. So I began to think about, well, what had other poets done in the 20th century who had passed through extremity? Wars, military occupation, house arrest, banning order, severe forms of exile, or censorship? And it turns out that most of the poets of the 20th century had endured those things. And in the aftermath had written sometimes about those things, sometimes not. But I began to realize that their language had also passed through it. And that when you read the poems of poets who were interred in the Holocaust, when you read the poems of poets who suffered under brutal military dictatorships, when you read the poems of poets who were in the Gulag, you can tell in their language that this happened to them. I got fascinated with that trace in the language. So I compiled this anthology against forgetting 145 poets writing from 30 languages translated into English beginning with the Armenian genocide and ending with Tiananmen Square because that was the last event before I published the book. And because the Soviet Union had collapsed, I had in my imagination, which will tell you that I never really lost my idealistic mind, I thought, well, now we're fine because now we're going to have peace the rest of the century and we'll turn of the century and we'll have peace. So not included in the anthology is Bosnia, Herzegovina, Rwanda, et cetera, et cetera, all the other wars that then eventually became Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and so on. So they're not included. So the idea of witness, of writing out of one's mind in the aftermath, because we don't really live after events, they're never over. We're in the terrain of the aftermath and that is where we, where our language arises. And so if you know what happened in a place, I mean, you can read the terrain and sometimes you can feel it even if you don't know what happened. I was in a Sculpey of Macedonia and I could feel something strange about this middle of the city where I was. And we were walking and it was unusually silent and it was a place where almost nobody talked the way they don't talk when they're walking around the cenotaph at Hiroshima. So I asked my Macedonian friend, what is this place? This is strange and she said, yes, it's strange. It's where the earthquake destroyed the city in 1963 and hundreds of school children were killed in that railroad station over there and we've never moved the hands on the clock from the moment it happened and nothing has been built here. So that's why people don't speak there and I began to see that as a kind of metaphor for aftermath of all wars and all, because human suffering never really leaves us. It becomes part of the world that we inhabit and live in. As you know, you don't get over things. You just learn to live beyond them. You learn to take them with you and nevertheless continue. I'm gonna open up to questions in just a second but I wanted to sort of spool this up to now. I remember writing about El Salvador in the early 80s and about immigration and Washington has always been a place where there are lots of Salvadorans and most of them from a certain part of the country in the eastern part of the country and going and talking to guys who were working in kitchens or on lawns here and then going and finding their families there. But they were small in numbers and incredibly enough, the district didn't have a law against hiring a legal alien at the time so there was no real sort of danger to it. Obviously things are much different now, both in the sense of this flood of people who started coming here, not only with the Trump administration, I mean long before that, but also in the way that the administration has reacted to it. But what I'm interested in is what drives people from El Salvador, you have an elected government of a sort, I mean they have a very personable new president. If you went there today, I don't know when the last time you were there. 2009. But today to see the kind of violence there which is so different in many ways but still affects the same people. Yes. Who were supposed to be free from all of that. I mean, is it worth going there now? And I would think it's much scarier. It's much scarier now. In fact, we both, Harry Madison who was there and we met there in the Monsignor Omedo's refugee camp and then we met again three years later and we didn't realize that we had, we didn't remember each other and then we put that together. But well, the aftermath of the war, there was a peace agreement. There were promises on all sides including from the US about how things were going to go and how the society was going to be reintegrated, reconciliation, truth commission. We were gonna go forward into a peaceful time. That did not happen for economic and social reasons. There was never any political will I don't think to make massive structural changes. And that included in redistribution of land and so on and so eventually, well, as you know, narco trafficking took hold in the isthmus of the Americas and El Salvador became a warehousing place for narco traffickers, shipment warehousing. But on the ground, you had the gangs developed and they were born in American prisons, as you know. They were, when they were redeported, they established the gangs in El Salvador and because there were no jobs and there was no, because of economic situation, the poverty, extortion and narco trafficking and all manner of organized crime became the law of the land and the judiciary was not functioning and there was corruption at all levels and the police were involved, the judges were involved and they were even extorting from people who were living in the US and working, you know. If someone found out that one of your family members was cleaning houses in the US, the house cleaner would then be demanded to pay $5,000 or will kill your husband or your father or whatever. These kinds of things were happening and so it became a disorganized violence, a non-political disorganized criminal violence that had political causes and people became terrified. My theory about the families that replaced the adult males who used to come for work, the families that fled to our border, people don't pick up their children and run through a desert with nothing unless they're more terrified of what's behind them than what's in front of them. So even without a concept of what would happen when they reached our border and even after months of horror stories about what actually happened when they reached our border, they were running away. People who run away are refugees, they're not migrants and because the United States so materially supported the war that created the continuing disintegration of the society, I believe we have a responsibility, a great responsibility to those refugees, to welcome them, to offer hospitality, to process them legally and allow freedom of movement and work while claims are being established and fairly heard and so on. It used to be that way. When Lionel came to the US, he asked for asylum in an airport, he got it, he was able to work and live and have an apartment while his asylum claim was being considered. That was a three-year process and then eventually he was given asylum. He didn't have to go into a detention center while he waited. Instead he went to Capitol Hill and began to work to end the war. So what we've done here is aberrational and I believe we're in non-compliance with international protocols and the law. I'm not an attorney so I can't be specific with you about that but I believe we're in violation of multilateral agreements. I think it's also interesting and depressing that we didn't talk much about the far left in El Salvador and about the guerrillas and stuff because they're kind of immaterial, I think, to that story but they certainly were, at least for the Reagan administration, were the reason for deep US involvement in El Salvador and yet with the peace and them kind of entering into the political process such as it was there, they kind of became part of the same problem as corrupt politically and economically as everybody else and the people who not only presented themselves as the saviors of the people of El Salvador but also were the reason for the United States to become involved, just kind of what happened? They held it into what the problem was and kind of left the vast majority of Salvadorans right where they started. Well, I think they had one thing, on both sides of the conflict, they had military training. What they did not have after the war was health care and jobs and a way to go forward with their lives and I personally witnessed several guerrillas talking to army soldiers and comparing notes about what they did not have and how they felt betrayed by the peace agreement and by the government in the aftermath of the peace agreement and the combatants had more in common with each other than they had in common with anyone else and so they became one disillusioned group and some left the FMLN and the FMLN became a legitimate political party and was in power and had the presidency for a while and also legislature. So it's much more complicated than people imagine but if you don't take care of a transition and follow it through, Truth Commission Report is going to make that society okay. It requires a lot of long-term in-depth work and investment and that did not happen. We have about 30 minutes for questions. Yes, sir? Thank you, Ethelbert. Thank you for coming. Okay, I love the writing of your memoir but it is a memoir and when I was reading it, I made a note of something that you just say briefly in passing. It's not about El Salvador but it's about Detroit when you're growing up and it's about your mother and you mentioned about your mother suffering from depression. Yes. And I wonder how that might have affected you in terms of leaving Detroit, teaching and then also being in El Salvador because this is a memoir. Were you affected by the bodies a certain way the poverty coming out of the working class back? Yes, because when I was 17 years old, 10 years before Lionel rang my doorbell, there was an uprising in Detroit. That's what we call it. And it was an uprising against the violence that was inflicted upon the working community of Detroit, the racism. Detroit was an apartheid city and all the violence associated with that and I was working in an emergency room as a 17 year old as an aide. I was way too young to be doing that and it was, you know, but I got to see the results of that uprising in that emergency room and it was, it made a great impression on me and the other impression was the civil rights movement because I discovered that the white people I was surrounded by didn't like Martin Luther King and I didn't, I mean my earliest formation was that complete not understanding the white people. I didn't, I didn't, I followed the civil rights movement and I also, of course, as you know from my book, had some experiences because of Vietnam but I wouldn't say that despite these things, despite growing up in apartheid Detroit and let's say one of the most, I would say Detroit had suffered poverty and injustice long before anyone, you know, thought about this in a way and Detroit was abandoned for 50 years after that uprising and allowed to become a kind of empty zone. There's a land mass within Detroit that is not contiguous but it's the size of San Francisco and it's all abandoned buildings and fields and okay, I don't wanna make this all about Detroit but you know, I never became, I wasn't yet politically conscious because until I went to El Salvador I didn't have the tools, I couldn't analyze what I was seeing, I could only feel but I didn't understand how it was put together. You know, so and that was true of my relationship to the war in Vietnam too, I had feelings, I didn't have an analysis, I wasn't sophisticated. I hope that I created the person who wasn't sophisticated in this book, yeah. Okay, yes, well one always has to have optimism because we're responsible for creating hope so upon which we can base our optimism but the disaster for El Salvador is that within the next 20 or 30 years it will run out of potable water, fresh water throughout the whole country. 80% of surface water in El Salvador is contaminated today. The poor are suffering terribly because of environmental degradation. I think that environmental damage that's ongoing now and is going to increase is the most challenging thing that we can think about globally but also with El Salvador. The water is being destroyed systematically. You know, gold mining is, arsenic is used in gold mining and you know, arsenic poisons, water tables and so on. So the water's been poisoned and industry has been allowed to do that in various ways. So you can't have 10 million people with no water and partly that the droughts of the caused by environmental damage are also contributing to the flight of people who can no longer farm or are losing their farms and they're desperate and they're coming north and that's not going to stop. Well, I mean, I think that on the 20th we saw a great surge of effort and our children are the ones who are leading the way here. So we know what we're up against. We know how daunting this is going to be and how there's no guarantee of success. We aren't guaranteed to be able to survive in our biosphere. So we have to do everything we can and I don't have any answers. I'm not a scientist. Heather, Heather, Heather was in El Salvador. Yeah. Do I have a comment and a question? The comment is, it seems to me that the effort towards the peace settlement, which was one of the few negotiated through the United Nations, deserves a little more credit in my looking at it. After all, there were decades of non-political participation and the struggle moved through the peace accords from a military struggle to a political struggle largely. And we have here Mark Schneider with us. I remember very clearly when he was at the American Health Organization and through the vaccination campaign helped to get the guerrillas and the government to start sniffing at each other the preliminary steps towards talking. The question is around where it takes you to have an artistic writer's prism as opposed to a journalist's prism in looking at a situation. And I can remember the co-reporters from the Washington Post circling around Washington talking to everybody before they went down on their first trip to El Salvador. You've, I very much look forward to reading the book. You've angled this very much through Leonel Gomez, one person, and so I'm just interested in the question of the prism and how that takes you embrace reality or realities. Well, as I wrote in my acknowledgements I'm not a historian and I'm not a journalist so this is a book written from memory and it's a personal story. And so I have my cast of characters but they were real human beings and I try to write them as fully as possible with all their flaws and fears and triumphs and everything else and it's written I suppose in the form of almost like as a novel would be written the difference being that everything in here happened. And so I can't answer the question about the artist's prism because that is why Leonel wanted me to come because I was not a journalist. And he talked to journalists all the time. He had very good relations with journalists except that almost everyone was baffled by him and didn't know what to think but including you Mark, right? I mean, did you ever get clear about that? So I think that he wanted, I think he wanted poetry. I think he wanted the poetry to be to touch people's hearts about this war. He didn't really want the war to start and once it did, he wanted to help in any way to bring it to negotiated ending and that's what he dedicated himself to. But this is a mosaic piece. This is one little tile in a picture that has to be created by a lot of people and I'm happy to say that I'm in touch with Salvadoran writers who are in this country now brought here as babies and as younger people including Javier Zamora who crossed that desert when he was 11 years old and he's in the process of writing his story now of being in the war and fleeing through the desert. So I have a lot of hope in that generation and so they'll add another tile. You see, I mean, each poet from Salvador, I really want the poets, the young people from El Salvador to be telling this story too. What it was like to grow up in the aftermath. And I agree that that was a very, that was an incredible effort to bring that peace agreement about. I wish that more had been done once it was put in place. You know, once the war was over. I was there when the guerrillas were breaking up the weapons and we had a lot of elation and hope that we were going to build a new society and I wish it had not turned into what they call a failed state, you know and maybe it will emerge from that. Yes, Mark. I met you when you were really a kid. I had hair. I know, thank you very much. I look forward to reading the book. Just, no one ever really knew Leonel in terms of what exactly where he came from but everybody trusted him and his information was always pretty good. And so during the period of the, you know as you all know, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador and involved in El Salvador from the beginning. I think that one of the things, I do have some hope. I've been in El Salvador a lot during this last decade. A lot of the civil society groups and people really do care about trying to build a different country. The fact is that corruption remains a major problem but they've had glimmerings of hope. I mean, they've got three presidents who have been brought to the judiciary, a couple convicted, one died while he was on trial and there are things that are positive. Hopefully the new president will in fact move in the direction of our hopes as opposed to our fears. It's an open question and there's no question that we failed in the aftermath of the Peace Accord in helping El Salvador deal with the structural causes of the violence and of the war. That's where we failed. And I think that in all the countries the key was we failed in recognizing that we didn't have an independent judiciary and an independent legal system that the whole process was not going to succeed. And I think still think that's the key question. And we have to think about that for ourselves and protect our judiciary. I'm curious though, you talk about the whole period. For me, Napoleon Duarte was the tragic figure of El Salvador. He was the mayor when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. He was the leader of the effort to get a democracy and then he accepted mistakenly, I think, to accept the presidency in the second junta. I'm curious as to how you see during the period of the war the forces that ultimately did bring about movement towards the peace process and an agreement to have basically the war come to an end. Well, during the war, toward the end of the war, the Soviet Union began to collapse. That was one factor. But there was also, it became clear to people that there wasn't going to be a military victory on either side and that it was not in anyone's interest to continue the fighting. And once people were convinced of that, a lot of people worked quietly, I know some of the names, people who worked kind of secretly and quietly in this city and in San Salvador to bring about the first talks, the very first talks of getting the first guerrilla commander at the table with the first military officer. And those were early. One of them took place under a tree in La Mora. Yeah, were you there? I was one of the first times that the guerrillas came together with the government and with Duarte directly. Yes. And the church was crucial in making that happen. The church was a partner too, yes. So, I mean, this is all very too complicated for this kind of forum, but there's a lot to be studied about what happened. Thank you for talking your words in your book. What is the role of the poet today? Today? Yo soy guatemalteco, no soy. Oh. El Salvador Eño Pero, de Corazón Sota. And in the front page of the Washington Post today, there's an article about a little town in Minnesota that has a very large number of Guatemalan immigrants. They're not Salvadoran, but they're very similar. And it talks about the divide between the community. You talk about corruption, well, corruption is right here, right now. So, I would like to say we need more poets now, but how can a poet be heard in the middle of the Twitter era? This is a very exciting time for poets in this country and poets from communities that have not been visible and had not had an opportunity are now emerging. Poets of color, Latino poets, black poets, Asian poets. The real energy among the young is there in those communities and it's quite an exciting time. I know it hasn't entirely broken through the larger culture, but it's starting to happen. And they're there and they're committed. The poets against the war with thousands of poets joined forces to oppose the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. So you had, I think the poet's energy is there. You have to understand that very few poets support the present regime here. And so there, if you wanna know where the poets are weighing in, they're weighing in for social justice and peace and environmental protection. And they're among us. You can have faith in that. But you know, that story, I don't know if you all read it. It was about this small community in Minnesota, I guess, where people had gravitated to work on the pork processing business, which is where a lot of Central Americans had gone. And to me, it reminded me of earlier immigrations. You could have seen the same thing in the late 1800s and the turn of the century, certainly with the Irish in New York and where people tended to gravitate to one place and one business, because that's where the jobs were. And that's where their compadres were. And so one could hope that the same thing will happen that people, the next generation or whatever, will disperse and people will move into different jobs in different industries. But to me, the sort of fear now is that the pressure on people is so great. And where you have a political system or at least an administration now that is promoting those kinds of divisions rather than trying to ameliorate them or something, that's scary, I think. Yes, sir. So mainly, I'd just like to thank you for this astounding book. I mean, it's a wild story. It's full of profound insights on a whole variety of issues. And it's written in a way that makes me want to stop writing because it's just so good. I'd like to ask you and maybe Karen also to speculate on one question which is, was Lionel right about Richardson? If Washington had been delivering this message, was the leadership prepared to hear it? Would it have mattered? You mean if, well, his theory was that if you're going to say that human rights matters, it has to matter in actual terms with actual cases and the signal that was being sent by ignoring that case in the beginning allowed the military to imagine that this was not serious. And so we have no way of knowing what would have happened had it the case been taken seriously. It was taken seriously initially by the American Embassy and then the political officer and the ambassador were pulled early in the Carter administration. And I think under the influence of cold warriors in the early in the Carter administration, I won't name names, but they really wanted to, let's make a new relationship with the Salvadoran military government and let's not worry too much about this. I don't know, but what would have happened had they been able to send that message, we can't go back in time and find out. But I think he was right that it was important and he was right that it sent the signal that the United States didn't care. I think he's right about that. I think that's true, but I also think that, you know, we always make the mistake here of thinking that whatever, in particular in Latin America, whatever the United States does or says or thinks is to be all and end all of what's gonna happen in Latin America. And I think that there was the dynamic there had very little to do with the United States. And so I know as a journalist and dealing with those kinds of cases, you always tried to get the name out, force the government in power to acknowledge what happened and, you know, you could put pressure on by bringing it up in your own country and saying, you know, well, what about this? Why isn't anybody doing anything about this? And so that's useful to do. But I also think in El Salvador that the forces that were at play there were going in a direction that they were going in. And I don't think that, you know, the Carter administration was, you know, this better than I do, Mark, was sort of up and down and up and down and up and down about human rights and military aid and any kind of aid. And then toward the end, they sort of lost it all together and then Reagan came in and they were looking for a Cold War battle. And they, you know, I mean, it's hard to believe that El Salvador really was the Iran of its day. I mean, it was, of course, Iran was going on at the same time. But I mean, it was the central fight of the Cold War at that time. And they clouched it in those terms. And so then, you know, the United States fairly forcefully intervened in there. But I think, you know, the between the military and the oligarchs and the church and the campesinos and the guerrillas, they all had their own agendas. And maybe some small part of them was gonna be influenced by what the Americans said or did. And certainly sending troops and sending money always influences a situation like that. But I think too that it had its own momentum. I agree with this and that time. What was happening in El Salvador was happening internally. And there was another aspect to that case of Ronald Richardson, which is that he was quite interested actually in the man who ordered the killing and his position in the military. Lionel was interested in manipulating the military a bit as I write about, you know, seeing how vulnerable the military was to breaking apart. And also, what would the military do about this one officer who was actually creating his own private army in Central America? And of course, things in that direction went that far worse. Right. So that's what that was, yeah. There was a massacre in the countryside. And the church, when I was at the human rights bureau, and the church sent us information that it was the military, the military said that the guerrillas had done this. And so Sally Shelton and I, Sally was at the Western Hemisphere. We were directed by Warren Christopher to go and make an investigation. And we did, and we had the full panoply of Salvadoran military, the ambassador, et cetera. And we went out there. And the people in the community were just clear that the military had killed everybody. And when we went back, we asked the hefe de la Stada Mayor, do you believe them now? And he said, yeah, I believe them now. Well, that resulted in our being able to keep the suspension of military aid here. I think the big problem was, as you said, that everything was else was going on. Iran, the Afghanistan, the Soviets. And so when the first junta, which was a moderate liberal junta came to power, there was no willingness here to take the risk to support that. And instead, they let the process go forward. Gonna, we've got like two or three more minutes. We've got one question there. Two questions there. Why don't you both ask the questions and then we'll, and then Carolyn can address them. I just wanted to say, somebody, I was very close to Leonel in the time of this. So your portrait of him is just spot on and really rang true to anybody who knew him and his style and enjoyed him. I'm wondering though, at the end of all of that, did he reflect on had he succeeded with you, had he succeeded in the Salvadoran context? How did he look on his own project as the war wound down and was he satisfied with what he had done or how did he think, how did he look back on it? He was very philosophical in his later years and he kept working. He had projects. He kept investigating deaths and killings and extrajudicial killings. And he also got involved in the mining operations and Canadian mining operations in Gavanias. And he kept pushing and pushing and pushing. But he always just did what he could in the moment. And I don't think he, you know, when I would say, well, did you feel that we failed? He'd say, well, we did what we could, you know, we did what we could. And I felt that I wish he'd lived for me to write this because the one thing that I had promised I would do both to Monsignor and to Leonel was write it. Someday I will write it. Well, I'm 53 years old and I start writing it. Leonel was able to read half of it. So he approved, he was happy. But he died before I could finish it. And, you know, it was a very strange thing because I was there for the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the deaths of the Jesuits in 2009. And I was over at Leonel's house talking and in walks, unexpectedly for both of us, John Taylor, the Peace Corps volunteer who first picked me up at the airport and said, what are you doing here? We also, what are any of us doing here? So we had a wonderful visit. And a week later he died of several heart attacks in an ER in San Salvador. And, but I do think that toward the end he intended to just keep going and he intended to keep fighting injustice and he called himself an investigator at that point. He was a human rights investigator. And case after case and in typical fashion he would always get obsessed with the case he was working on in the moment and he'd talk your ear off about it and enlist everyone he could in somehow being part of this, right, investigation. So he was still doing that when he died. I think we're really out of time. Do you, you okay? Well. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you, Carolyn. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you Carolyn. And there are books back there. Oh, I didn't know that. And, and if you have time. Books? Sure. I didn't know they were going to be here. I didn't know they were going to be here, but we, thank you. First, do you have a pen here? Oh, thank you. That was great. Thank you. I thought I was funny to you. It's like old home week here. Harry was here, other was here, Mark was here. And now we're gonna open Zamora. What is in the middle of the night that I would see?