36 pages • 1 hour read
The Massacre at El Mozote
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Radio Venceremos
Radio Venceremos, the guerrilla radio broadcast, is a symbol of resistance to the Salvadoran government. Radio Venceremos becomes a sympathetic symbol as the narrative continues: “its every broadcast reminded the world of the Army’s impotence in much of Morazán” (22). As such, it also functions as a symbol of perseverance, occasionally even imparting a bit of levity to otherwise heavy subject matter; for instance, Monterrosa is quoted as saying that as long as Radio Venceremos is around, “we’ll always have a scorpion up our ass” (22). As the narrative moves away from discussions of the guerrillas’ day-to-day operations, Venceremos also takes a back seat, but it comes charging back at the conclusion of the book, in which Danner leaves us in the Radio Venceremos museum, where Monterrosa’s wrecked helicopter is kept.
Mountains
The mountains in this narrative at first seem to symbolize safety. At the end of Chapter 2, two residents outside of the town of El Mozote, Sebastiano and Alba, decide not to join their neighbors in going to the town for refuge before Operation Rescue commences. Rather, they “hid in the mountains above their house” from which they watched “thick columns of smoke rising from El Mozote” (20). For them, and for other villagers at various points in the war, the mountains were a safe haven; Sebastiano and Alma lived through El Mozote, when so many others did not.
However, as the narrative continues, we see this dynamic upended. In the heart of Chapter 5, the men are shuttled to the hills surrounding the town in order to be executed; later, young women and girls are taken to the hills to be raped and murdered. The fact that these terrible things happened on elevated ground outside of the town feels symbolic of disrupting and undercutting the sense of refuge that the mountains formerly represented. As such, the mountains then also become symbolic of the country as a whole: what once was a home has become a horror through the ongoing civil war.
Río Torola
From the very first sentence of the book, the river that forms the border within Morazán between the more stable southern region and the more dangerous and violent northern region takes on important significance in the narrative: “[...] you cross the Torola River [...] and enter what was the fiercest of El Salvador’s zonas rojas—or ‘red zones,’ as the military officers knew them during a decade of civil war” (3). This natural barrier also could be seen as an impediment to escape, as the narrative shifts in the following chapters to military actions and reprisals. Moreover, rivers in general often signify movement, recalling the number of people who fled north, into refugee camps in Honduras.
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