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San Salvador, El Salvador (Cold Case) Jul 25, 2009

“‘We are journalists, we are journalists’, they shouted, holding up their cameras and equipment as they ran for their lives. They had just met up with four FMLN guerrillas and were walking up a dirt path to a spot to interview them when they were shot at“, Harm tells us, but the shooting went on and all four of the IKON team were killed, my brother Jan included. Only one guerrilla escaped”. We’re sitting at the conference table in my corner office on the second floor of the NS HGB II (Headquarter Building 2). The corporate planning meeting is over and Harm Kuiper is relating the story of the murder of his brother and three other IKON journalists in El Salvador a few years earlier on March 17th 1982, an event that shocked the Netherlands and led to serious diplomatic tensions between the Dutch and the Americans.

It is late afternoon and the light coming through the two corner windows is beginning to fade as Harm, a serious kind of guy with an early shock of grey hair, tells the six or seven of us at the table about what he and his family were told happened that day and the days immediately after and we all speculate about what might have been behind it all, given at that time the civil war in El Salvador was still ongoing and the case was unsolved. That scene of us talking, Harm on my left against the wall with the niche where I kept a few books and reports, the fading light falling on the small group gathered around the conference table, it’s all frozen in my mind’s eye. When I arrive at my hotel in San Salvador, I look up where exactly it was in El Salvador that it happened.

Other left wing guerrilla movements were spurred on by the success of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, and at the behest of Fidel Castro several Salvadoran movements gathered in Havana and joined to form the ‘Frente Farabundi Marti de la Liberacion Nacional’ (FMLN) by October 1980. Archbishop Oscar Romero had been murdered by a right-wing death squad while celebrating mass in San Salvador in March 1980 (Roberto d‘Aubuisson, leader of the death squad and founder of the ARENA party, was never arrested and tried before he himself died of cancer in 1992). That, and the struggle of the poor and dispossessed garnered a lot of sympathy in Europe, while the Americans, fearing (further) communist incursions in Central America, supported the (corrupt) government.

Koos Koster (journalist), Jan Kuiper (producer), Hans ter Laag (soundman) and Joop Willemsen (cameraman) were sent by IKON (a church-based TV network that under the peculiar Dutch system has a few hours of air time every week) to report on the upcoming elections. IKON journalist Koos Koster, a minister’s son himself, had visited El Salvador already often, befriended Oscar Romero and covered the FMLN and very much identified with their cause, as did IKON, to the point that he was even thought to have personally channelled funds to support their struggle.

Continuing on from the Paseo Escalon, where I am staying, the Alameda F. D. Roosevelt leads straight on to San Salvador’s ‘centro historico’. On my way there I stop at the slightly past-its-prime hotel Alameda, on the corner of Av 43 Norte, where the four journalists stayed before they headed out on March 17th 1982.

San Salvador city centre is almost choked with ‘commerciantes informales’, the new mayor who has promised to unclog the streets has his work cut out for him, and it is slow going before I finally get to the Plaza Barrios with the Cathedral and the Palacio Nacional. Pictures of San Salvador‘s past in the Palacio confirm that, like most Latin American countries, El Salvador was much better off in the 30s and 40s than today. Since 1575 the city has been destroyed by earthquakes fourteen times, the last one in 1986. The places of interest date from the 19th century or even more recently, such as the Church of El Rosario that my guide book calls ‘San Salvador’s best kept secret’, helped no doubt by it’s rather ugly exterior, but where the light effects inside are indeed spectacular.

It is AD 640 as the Laguna Caldera volcano, 32 kilometres west of San Salvador, erupts, covering the nearby small Mayan village of Joya de Cerén in 14 layers of volcanic ash, several metres high. This ‘Mayan Pompeï’ preserves the only known remains of ordinary Mayan houses. Household objects, the construction methods of the collapsed mud walls, the layout of the huts and the plots they grew food on, it is all still there. No dishes with food on the table or bodies caught in their daily routine as in Pompeï itself (one wouldn’t wish such a fate on anybody, but if it had happened it would give even more of an idea of how the Late Classical period Maya lived). Because the eruptions lasted more than a week, some walls had collapsed under a metre of ash, and the inhabitants had time to save themselves. The huts seem rather small, consistent probably with an estimated average height of 140 to 160 cms, their descendants are still rather short, and the way they planted their food, the guide tells us, is still how it is done by indigenous people today.

Joya de Cerén (only a small part of which has been uncovered due to lack of funds) depended on the San Andres ceremonial site further along the Rio Sucio (also only partly excavated). The grey sections of uncovered pyramids set in the lush green grass and forest landscape work very well, in a way belying the danger, as the indigo works on the site demonstrate, excavated from under the ashes of a 1680 eruption that engulfed a Spanish hacienda.

Distances are short: El Salvador is indeed small compared to the other Central American countries (locally only 5 countries are considered ‘real’ Central American: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica; not Panama which was Columbian when this region gained independence from Spain; not Belize, which was British (Honduras) at the time; and not Mexico considered North American), and after visiting the archaeological sites I easily cover the Cerro Verde with beautiful views over Lago Coatepeque, and the Balsam Coast (origin of the Balsam trees, tapped for pain-relieving balsam), which is still largely undeveloped, and La Libertad (the beaches near Libertad are more developed, but the advice to foreigners is not to go there, not even in groups), before I get into the late Sunday afternoon traffic trying to find my way back to the Paseo Escalon.

Santa Rita in Chalatenango where the four IKON journalists went to meet their FMLN contacts in 1982 is only about 65 kilometres north of San Salvador and in looking up the location, I come across a 2007 symposium to commemorate the event and a visit to where it happened with ‘Marcos‘, the only survivor:

‘…Near Santa Rita we turn off on a small asphalted road that 25 years ago still was a dirt path. We stop a few hundred metres beyond: ”This was the place where the Dutchmen where to meet with their contacts in the resistance”, Marcos says. He walks to a tree and shakes his head: “A memorial plaque used to hang on this tree. It has been destroyed because this is a place that the Salvadoran authorities do not like to be reminded of“. He covers his face with a handkerchief because it is still not safe to be recognized…He points to hills on the left side of the road: ”That is where the Salvadoran army was waiting”. We climb over a fence and walk down a sloping meadow lined with beautiful trees where now, ironically, Frisian cows are grazing. Marcos stops after some 50 metres and begins to cry behind his handkerchief: ”It is here that the army began to shoot, the Dutchmen held up their cameras and other equipment and shouted in vain: ‘We are journalists, we are journalists”'…

It takes a bit of asking to find the right turn-off from the Panamericano road but I finally get to Suchitoto, 50 kilometres north of San Salvador, and it is a nicely preserved colonial city - the ‘Salvadoran Granada’ so to speak - but then a lot smaller and sleepier. Suchitoto, across from Chalatenango on Lake Suchitlán, part of the Embalse Cerrón Grande, was almost deserted in the early 90s after 12 years of civil war, but as I look out over the Parque Centenario from the arcaded terrace of Posada Alta Vista it looks perfectly peaceful today.

As the crow flies Santa Rita is only some 15 kilometres from Suchitoto on the other side of the reservoir, and by road, circling the western side of the reservoir, it does not take me too long to get there. Veering off the main road for the last kilometres the terrain is more open than I had imagined, I am scanning the meadows and hills to see if there is anything that fits the description given by ‘Marcos‘. ARENA party posters are stuck on the lamposts, but his description was general and indeed no plaques or signs indicate what happened here 27 years ago or where it happened. On my way back, a few kilometres beyond Santa Rita in El Paraiso, I pass the garrison of the 4th infantry brigade, itself the scene of several FMLN attacks; if the ambush was laid by the army as Marcos‘ story goes, it is more than likely that this was their base at the time and even may be so today.

At the symposium for the 25th anniversary, there were debates on two topics: 1) what are the limits of ‘engaged’ journalism and 2) did the IKON team take too much risk at the time.

The conclusion on the first topic is: ‘complete identification (with one party’s goals) leads to propaganda and not to journalism’. That is a clear rebuke of Koos Koster’s role at the time and in that sense also an indication of how far we have moved away from embracing revolutionary ideology since the 80s, given that Koos Koster was by no means the only one.

The conclusion on the second topic is: ‘they did‘. The team had been arrested and interrogated a few days earlier by the Salvadoran secret police. Their picture, leaving the police station, had been published on the front page of ‘El Diario de Hoy’, which was then the government mouthpiece. Koos Koster was known to have been close to Oscar Romero and suspected of strong sympathies with the FMLN; people had been killed by death squads for a lot less; and Koos Koster was advised by several to leave the country as soon as possible. Still they went ahead. It is of course not known if they all agreed or not and there is even some doubt as to whether they were all fully aware of the danger they were in. Gert Kuiper, another of Jan's brothers (Harm unfortunately died of cancer in the early 90s) told the symposium that Jan had indicated shortly before, that he would not go on a mission with Koos Koster like this again, because he, Koos, kept security information to himself. Yet they continued, even when on their way to Santa Rita they were tailed by a Cherokee Jeep, a car often used by the Salvadoran secret police. Was Koos too obsessed in promoting the FMLN cause? Did he risk too much and not divulge all security information in order to get his way? We will never know for sure of course, but many feel he was, and he did, and so was personally responsible for risking the lives of three colleagues.

On June 1st this year, just over two months ago, Mauricio Funes, a well known TV journalist himself as it happens, was inaugurated as the first FMLN president of El Salvador since the end of the civil war in 1992, beating the ARENA candidate 51%-49%. It will be interesting to see if solving that cold case from 1982 and bringing the (army) men responsible for the murders to justice is on his list of priorities somewhere, but I would not hold my breath if I were you, an estimated 100,000 people were killed during those 12 years.