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

by Carolyn Forché

“Revolutions do not go according to plan,” he went on. “There must be thinkers among the commanders who understand the tactics of the battlefield, who can think strategically, and whose plans can be executed successfully so that they may command loyalty and respect. There must develop a strong bond among the fighters so that they will risk their lives for one another, not once but every day. And these fighters, who will nevertheless be hungry and thirsty, wounded and in pain, must respect the lives of the people, must not steal from them or harm them. And when the enemy is captured, he must also be respected and not harmed. Those captured must be housed and fed and clothed and treated for their wounds. None of this is easy,” he said. “Armed uprising is one way to attempt to lessen repression and begin building a just society, Papu, but it is not the only way, and it is, without question, the most difficult, and when it is over, and let’s say you have triumphed, you must guard with great vigilance against becoming an oppressor yourself. This is the greatest danger. If you are defeated,” he went on, “that’s another story. Waging a guerrilla war takes something more than waving red flags with hammers and sickles at the bull.”

“Don’t get caught up in the rhetoric. If the Salvadoran campesinos fight, and I think they will, they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another two hundred years. But to win, they must defeat the Salvadoran military, and if, in this engagement, they are perceived as so-called Communists, the Salvadoran military will have the backing of the largest military force in the world. So. If you are going to wave a red flag around, you had better know where is the bull.”

The Mayans don’t distinguish between past, present, and future, he’d said. They have one word to describe all instances of time, meaning something like “It comes to pass.” If you know the past, you know the cyclic forces that created the present, and by knowing the cyclic influences exerting themselves on the present, you can foresee the future, and this, he said, is why the present interests him so much. If you can learn to read the present, without preconceptions, you will better know which of all possible futures will come to pass. There is nothing magical about this. It is a skill that can be acquired by anyone with the inclination and discipline.

This Greg, he thinks he’s Che Guevara. But he won’t draw plans for a simple bridge. This is something you should learn, Papu. Lesson number four: If someone promises to do great things, ask them first for something small, like a bridge or a cow.”

“I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that I’m not being fair. It’s something you Americans say when you are told the truth.”

On three occasions things would go wrong, but, as he would remind me years later, all three times I hadn’t followed the rules.

“I’m learning to imagine being a North American,” he said. “In order to think in a certain way one must learn how to enter the mind of another, as a guest to be sure, but to feel another’s reality from within. I’m not studying you,” he said, “I’m learning you, and you could use your time here to learn what it is to be Salvadoran, to become that young woman over there who bore her first child at thirteen and who spends all of her days sorting tobacco leaves according to their size. Now that would be an education.”

“I can’t give it to them,” he said again, flatly. “They have to take it from me.”

“Papu, listen to me. You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see. And get angry.”

We sped. The other car sped too. This was going to be it, I thought, now when it wasn’t expected, after a day of talking about philosophy and God and the practice of liberation. I wanted to be brave. I did not feel brave. I had no weapon; it would not have helped. There was no last chance to do anything over again. Are you afraid, Margarita? Jess. They were still behind us when we reached a heavier-trafficked road, behind us when we got to the roundabout, and that was where the honking began, other cars whose drivers saw what was happening, other cars pulling into the roundabout, slowing down, blocking the way of those who followed us, and all the while horns honking and even some cars stopping and people getting out of the cars and then there was an opening and we took it. All the way to the house of the friends of Margarita we didn’t breathe and then the door was opening, and we ran through it from the front of the house to the garden in the back where the journalists were standing around in the dark.

a skirmish they said the guerrillas are training now in the mountains using sticks for rifles they have had enough do you know why it has come to this do you understand how innately cautious these people are what would get them to fight am I afraid yes will I continue yes will I die it is likely so tell me what better gift to give than one’s life?

Why there is a jaguar on my woven bag, why he had given me a small weaving of a jaguar on a torn piece of cloth. He sometimes also called them wildcats. “You are a wildcat, Papu,” he said, “you just don’t know it yet. That is why I gave you these things. The wildcat can camouflage itself. It can hide anywhere. It doesn’t roar like the other great cats. It is solitary and nocturnal and can adapt to many environments. The Mayans call it b’alam. Certain humans have jaguar characteristics. They help with communication between the living and the dead. They are said to be extinct in El Salvador but they are not. Someday you will understand why I’m telling you this.”

promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”

He also kept this from Bertolt Brecht, folded into his wallet, and later, he passed this slip of paper to me: Sink down in the slime, embrace the butcher,/If you could change this world, what would you not be willing to do?

“People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them. They think that what happens in one place doesn’t matter anyplace else.” This reminded me of something I had read years earlier—a single sentence from The Captive Mind by the poet Czesław Miłosz, written when he was also young: If a thing exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.

I’ve been making these declarations in the offices on Capitol Hill, and I have realized something. The Americans already know what’s going on, and have known for a long time. What’s going on is fine with the Americans, so what am I doing here?

Alex was staying in Los Angeles, had apprehended him, and summarily deported him to the custody of the Salvadoran government, whereupon he was immediately imprisoned.

It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel 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. “This is the stage of denunciation,” he said, “which precedes the revolutionary moment.” He did not believe in war as a solution. There is no instance, he said, of a country’s having benefited from long warfare. But if the armed struggle begins, it must not fail or the poor will suffer for another two hundred years.

I once asked him what it would take to make the United States a good country. Well for one thing, you could green the hemisphere, he said. You have the resources and the capacity. You won’t do this, unfortunately, but you could. You believe yourselves to be apart from others and therefore have little awareness of your interdependencies and the needs of the whole.