[In the following review, Videz finds Salvador a less than illuminating study of conditions in El Salvador.]

In the aftermath of President Reagan's recent address to the Joint Session of Congress and in light of ongoing congressional deliberations, the American people need to understand El Salvador. Joan Didion's book ＼Salvador］ should have helped. It does not.

Last June Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, traveled to El Salvador for two weeks, and spoke with various local and American officials. After this “fortnight of living dangerously” （The Washington Post）, she spent four months working on a book praised on its jacket as “an incredible portrait of the true meaning of terror, fear and political repression.” The copywriter's claim is echoed several times by Didion herself, who believes that in those two weeks she came “to understand the exact mechanism of terror.” （She comes to this epiphany during a nonevent: she is setting on a restaurant porch, watching a gunman standing near a gas pump as a car goes by.）

Reviewers have suggested that Didion's subject is terror itself, her own, and conceivably the terror that any American would feel during a two-week vacation in hell. Didion brings to Salvador her gift for precise observation, and the book deserves praise for its haunting evocation of mood. To achieve this mood, however, she mystifies her subject, believing that her failure to understand means that El Salvador cannot be understood.

“. … The visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.” She finds “no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.” When she learns that a local commandante thought some foreign missionaries were French, rather than Irish, because they were called “Franciscan,” she decides that “This was one of those occasional windows that open onto the heart of El Salvador and then close, a glimpse of the impenetrable interior.” This echoes the work's opening epigraph from Conrad. But these periodic pronouncements upon El Salvador's unyielding mystery betray her subject.

“Actual information was hard to come by in El Salvador,” she claims, “perhaps because this is not a culture in which a high value is placed on the definite.” On another occasion she suggests that “In the absence of information （and the presence, often, of disinformation） even the most apparently straightforward event takes on, in El Salvador, elusive shadows, like a fragment of retrieved legend.” Amnesiac fugue? Legend? This might provide Americans with a poetic reading of our circumstances, but it is an approach that neither we Salvadorans nor Americans can afford.

Ms. Didion's terminal vagueness omits any reference to the system of corruption endemic to the military government—an essential fact of politics in El Salvador of which Americans should be more aware. One example of this corruption, close to home, was the 1976 arrest of the Salvadoran chief of the armed forces in Mt. Kisco, New York, as he attempted to sell ten thousand machine guns to men he assumed were members of organized crime, but were in fact Mt. Kisco's local police. Didion alludes several times to the January 1981 murder of two American labor advisers, Mark Pearlman and Michael Hammer, and that of Salvador's Agrarian Reform Agency President, José Rodolfo Viera, but fails to mention that Viera had been on a death list for months, a result of his televised attempt to expose the theft of $40 million by the previous （military） administrators of that agency. “Terror is the given of the place,” says Didion. It has no cause.

Nor, in her reading, do numbers—whether of dollars or of lives—have meaning.

All numbers in El Salvador tended to materialize and vanish and rematerialize in a different form, as if numbers denoted only the use of numbers, an intention, a wish, a recognition that someone, somewhere, for whatever reason, needed to hear the ineffable expressed as a number. At any given time in El Salvador, a great deal of what goes on is considered ineffable, and the use of numbers in this context tends to frustrate people who try to understand them literally. …

She makes this point in connection with voter estimates in the March 1982 elections, and the difficulty of determining the extent of capital flight over the past ten years. The discrepancy between estimates leads Didion to her helpless conclusion—in effect it is a surrender to the convenient smokescreen masking the reality, which is that the nearly one billion dollars in U.S. aid sent to Salvador since 1980 has, as one American Senator put it, “disappeared down the rat-hole.” Did the $40 million that Viera found missing simply evaporate? Such questions are never asked. Nor does Didion ever pause in her litany of deaths to consider the causes of any of the murders.

What she provides is a horrific description of atrocity: “The dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie,” and

In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue; for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with a land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question.

What point is Didion making? Such lurid details make for compelling prose, but in the absence of any analysis of why such murders occur, they seem at best to bolster her thesis of mindless terror and at worst to suggest a penchant for gratuitous special effects.

Any understanding of why the Salvadoran government might be opposed must be preceded by an understanding of its nature. Didion quotes Thomas O. Enders, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs: “Perhaps the most striking measure of progress ＼in El Salvador］ is the transformation of the military from an institution dedicated to the status quo to one that spearheads land reform and supports constitutional democracy.” She then undercuts him by claiming that former Minister of Defense García “understood the importance to Americans of symbolic action: letting the Americans have their land reform program,” which she later refers to as “less a ‘reform’ than an exercise in public relations,” and promoting the illusion that the new civilian president Alvaro Magaña “was in fact commander-in-chief of the armed forces.” Thus she narrowly misses an opportunity to scrutinize those armed forces, and perhaps ask the obvious （and still unasked） question: why are those armed forces fighting? What is in it for them?

Young men enter the Salvadoran officer corps to acquire the power and money that military service provides, through its systemic opportunities for corruption. Seven hundred officers in the military lead the Salvadoran army, national guard, national police, and treasury police; most of them attended the El Salvador Military School. Each officer belongs to a tanda （graduating class） and each tanda has a president. During their thirty-year careers, the officers seek contacts and form alliances with other tandas, as they prepare for political power. In past elections in El Salvador, no matter which party had the most votes, the army candidate won. The outgoing president would choose his successor, and together they would assemble a coalition of officers from one major tanda and several allied tandas to enjoy the spoils of their five-term. The tanda system remains in power today.

Didion reveals her ignorance of this structure when she calls former Defense Minister García “a survivor” for lasting in office since 1979. García was never a survivor. That is, it was not through his own powers that he enjoyed his tenure （now over） with the military; it was at the pleasure of the military itself.

As for the civilian president's influence with that institution, Didion tellingly recounts a conversation with Alvaro Magaña. Magaña describes for her his conversations with Roberto D'Abuisson, a figure whom some have accused, although there has been no trial, of being involved in the death in March 1980 of Monsignor Oscar Romero （Didion makes no mention of this）: “When we're alone now I try to talk to him. I do talk to him, he's coming for lunch today. He never calls me Alvaro, it's always usted, Señor, Doctor. I call him Roberto. I say, Roberto, Don't do this, Don't do that, you know.” In light of American failures to get that government to prosecute those responsible for American deaths, one wonders about the extent of American influence as well. Didion, however, does not seem to wonder.

Progress toward these prosecutions was a congressional condition of U.S. military aid in 1982. Despite three reports that certified progress, the trials of the murderers of the nuns and the labor advisers remain in limbo. By now, one would think that Congress would be asking why. But Congress is not asking why or attempting to understand the logic of the Salvadoran military, which requires that it protect its own.

Just seven weeks ago, it seemed that Congress was ready to require as a condition for military aid that the government enter into unconditional negotiations with the Salvadoran opposition, i.e. the guerrillas. Congress seemed to have finally grasped that a solution to the Salvadoran problem required that the opposition be recognized as legal and legitimate and must, in a transition period leading to elections, share power with the military.

Negotiations leading to power sharing is a strategy not without risk. But the risks are hard to define. One can look at the history of coalition governments and view guerrilla participation as a trojan horse leading to guerrilla control. And there is an understandable fear that, once in power, the guerrillas could turn out to be as brutal as the army. Risky though it is, the participation of the left is necessary to create a force strong enough within the Salvadoran government to purge the corrupt and murderous elements within the officer corps. Two administrations have failed to be that force for human rights. But at this writing, after the President's speech, Congress seems confused, perceiving nothing “so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.”

The debate over military aid in the House in April was characterized above all by vacillation. In the end, the House Foreign Affairs Committee fashioned a compromise, making “effective control” of the military and the termination of murder and torture an objective of U.S. policy, rather than a condition of military aid as Congressman Stephen Solarz had proposed in his amendment, passed by the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee on April 12. Negotiations, which Solarz also drafted into his amendment, were retained as the one legally binding condition. Not one member of the committee, however, was willing to declare “power-sharing” as the proper and necessary outcome of a negotiation. And finally the committee increased military aid by $38.6 million, thus undercutting a clear signal to the Salvadoran Army that it was serious.

One can reasonably expect that as the foreign aid bill makes its way through the legislative process, the fear of taking responsibility will increase and, in the end, Congress will strike the negotiations clause drafted by Solarz. Unconditional negotiations will become an objective. The law will give Congress a chance every six months to block the next installment by concurrent resolution. But as the foreign policy leadership of the Congress well knows, Congress has not once voted to stop aid by that procedure. So every six months, the situation will mirror Didion's portrayal of it: fluid, mysterious, impenetrable. A Heart of Darkness.

The Congress, for its part, relies on the information provided by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which last September released its report, U.S. Intelligence Performance in Central America: Achievements and Selected Instances of Concern. Didion also has mined this report noting that she was “struck … by the suggestion in the report … that the intelligence was itself a dreamwork, tending to support policy, the report read, ‘rather than inform it,’ providing ‘reinforcement more than illumination,’ ‘ammunition’ rather than analysis.” Unfortunately, that characterization also fits Didion's Salvador.