And No Angels Sang: Liberation Theology In El Salvador
Bob Ostertag and I are wandering through secret underground tunnels in the mountains of El Salvador, near the border of Honduras. Some of them stretch for miles, so guerrillas can make fake campfires far away from their actual camps to distract the approaching death squads. Bob invited me to join him and former leaders of El Salvador’s clandestine guerrilla army (the FMLN) in one of the remotest parts of El Salvador — the tiny mountain town of Perquín — which hosts an annual arts festival organized by former guerrillas and their children. This is Bob's first return to El Salvador since the ‘80s, when he spent ten years living here as an organizer, writer, and spokesperson for the guerrillas while the war was in full swing, infiltrating the death squads as well, recording intimate details about both sides of the conflict. He sometimes had to hike alone through jungles filled with landmines and risk ambush by both sides of the war to do so.
Emerging from one of the tunnels, I find myself in the remains of Radio Venceremos, the underground guerrilla radio station, which moved around with a portable generator and often broadcast from waterlogged caves. A woman I'm traveling with was once a leader in the resistance and had her own show on the radio. The radio itself was booby trapped and exploded on a helicopter mid-flight, killing death squad commander Lt Col Domingo Monterrosa and many of his top men, after he captured the radio as a trophy. The twisted remains of his helicopter are kept on public display not far from here.
Underground Tunnels, Remains Of A Clandestine Radio Station And Curtain Of Bullet Shells Leading To A Secret Guerrilla Camp (El Salvador)
Making "The Reach Of Resonance" has led me into many places and circumstances around the world that may seem to have little to do with the film's ostensible topic: music. But that is precisely one of the central points I'm exploring: how one's relationship to music (or a musical instrument) can transform a person's relationship with the world.
Bob expresses this so beautifully in his book Creative Life : Music, Politics, People, and Machines: “[There is a] fundamental motivation behind artistic endeavor: to provide a door through which we can become unstuck from our unique little point on the web in which our lives are entangled…Insurgent politics is necessarily experimental, unruly, and disruptive. It examines, tests, expands, breaks, and restructures the strands between the nodes in the web. It always centers on struggle. This is so close to my artistic aesthetic that in this light it is hard for me to even discern the line demarcating art and politics at all...[But] politics, in the end, is about winning, a concept that is meaningless to art…I don’t see myself as swerving back and forth between art and politics but engaging in a creative endeavor of struggle against the constraints of the web of social and physical relations in which we live. Farther downstream, this endeavor forks into politics (which seeks to win) and art (which seeks to illuminate), but upstream it is just the creative impulse that ultimately gives life meaning.
Munitions In The Jungle (Perquín, El Salvador)
"This is what I think of when I think of a creative life," Bob continues, "a life whose center of gravity lies upstream, where everything - profession and livelihood, location, even gender and identity - is up for grabs and we ride the tiger even when it takes blind turns and detours to destinations unknown. This is the realm where the impulse to create leads people to reinvent themselves: where John Cage’s musical curiosity led him to reinvent himself as a Zen Buddhist, where Jim Magee of New York became Annabel Livermore of the desert, where Anthony Braxton reinvents himself as reed genius, composer, chess master, and philosopher, and where [drag diva] Justin Bond reinvents himself as Justin Bond. It is the realm in which the best of the Central American revolutionaries reinvented their revolutions in small ways every day, reinventing themselves to the task at hand in ways that created masterpieces of politics equal in every way to masterpieces of art. This is the life to which I aspire, and it is why I do what I do.”
For more on Jim Magee (mentioned above): https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Art/James-Magee/
Historical Artifacts From The Conflict In Perquín, El Salvador
The degree to which the Salvadoran revolutionaries had to reinvent themselves is awe-inspiring. Just imagine teaching the most impoverished, illiterate peasants in villages with no electricity or running water how to evade the surveillance of American high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft equipped with long-range infrared night-vision devices...all while cultivating a highly nuanced understanding of the global nexus of economic, religious and political forces generating the brutal circumstances of their lives.
As Phillip Berryman, a former priest who lived through the conflict in El Salvador recalls: "The seeds for Liberation Theology were sown at the Second Vatican Council (1959), when Third World bishops insisted that the church should deal with the issue of development in the modern world. Latin American theologians were concluding that all their development - from conquest to the present - had been written around successive exports (gold and silver dyes, hides, rubber, coffee, and so forth) exploited by the centers of world production. As they realized that their theology was emerging out of that particular context, they began to see that the same thing was true of any theology. What they had once taken to be simply theology - seemingly 'universal' - they now began to see as a 'North Atlantic' theology, a theology of the rich world. The council led Latin American Catholics to take a much more critical look at their own church and their own society. Not only did they seek to adopt the council to Latin America - they began to ask Latin American questions."
Many leaders in the guerrilla movement were women. Bob tells me about his friend Reina, a political prisoner in the Ilopango prison for women. Despite being only 19 years old, 5 feet tall, skinny as a toothpick and raped on capture, she led her fellow prisoners in an extended uprising against their male guards and occupied the central prison office, taking four kitchen staff hostage. Surrounded by sharpshooters with their sights on her tiny frame, she negotiated for the lives of her comrades with none other than the minister of justice. Miraculously, she survived the next several years in the prison, and acted like it was her private estate from then on, insisting on wearing a black beret and tight jeans, receiving visitors with the same air as an army commander.
Or consider Bob's two close friends who are hosting us in El Salvador. One was raised to believe her mother had been dead, until she was a teenager. The other is her mother who was alive all along, but could not reveal this to her daughter due to the threat it would cause to their safety. One day they took us to a mountain peak high in the clouds overlooking a volcano, where the mother told us she had once arranged for her daughter to ascend to this exact spot, in secret, to meet her for the first time during the war. Here, her daughter discovered that she was not only alive, but one of the top people in charge of logistics for the rebel army; responsible for smuggling arms and supplies throughout the country, organizing poor farmers into resistance against the death squads that were funded and often trained by the U.S. She also fought on the ground herself.
The Secret Site Overlooking A Volcano Where Mother And Daughter Met
Once she was in a platoon of 150 soldiers that were ambushed. Two people survived. She was one of them. Abandoned by the other survivor, she crawled for four days without food and water to Costa Rica. Later her own army captured and tried to execute her. Her Sandinista friends in Nicaragua helped arrange an escape by plane to Sweden, where she lived in exile for decades. Our journey through El Salvador together was one of her first times back in the country since her escape. One day, she told me about the time she received a rose from Fidel Castro, who was once in love with her.
For decades, many children in El Salvador were raised believing their parents were dead, because they had to go underground. If parents ever hoped to return to their children one day, it was necessary to keep their identities a secret even from their own kids. In Perquín, I met Alba Gladis Villalobos Amaya, age 84, who ran a day care center for the children of revolutionary fighters during the war, an undertaking for which she could have been executed at any moment. Almost all the children in Perquín were raised to believe she was their actual grandmother, to keep the actual reason for her caretaking a secret. To this day, everyone still calls her "grandmother." And that's the reason the small shop she now runs just off the main plaza in Perquín is called “Abuela’s” (“Grandmother’s”), which is where I took a photo of her with Bob (below).
Alba Gladis Villalobos Amaya ("Grandmother") With Bob Ostertag + Remains Of Lt Col Domingo Monterrosa's Booby Trapped Helicopter In Perquín
"I have tried to take with me the kernel of what these extraordinary people taught me," Bob has said, "to stick to one's path — not a particular direction, or mode of travel, or speed or style, but the path itself. To always question what you have just done and remain open to the possibility that the future might surprise you...The range of possible 'next steps' in life paths is, I believe, determined by the creativity one has applied to the last step."
Retracing Bob's own creative path for "The Reach Of Resonance" was like riding a shotgun blast from the very first moment. The morning we first met at his home in December 2004, he had just caused a major corporation to lose billions of dollars in stocks due to a prank he helped orchestrate on BBC World News a couple hours before I arrived. It turns out Bob was a central behind-the-scenes member of the notorious culture jammers known as The Yes Men, who pose as representatives of prominent corporations on national television and at business conferences, confessing their crimes against humanity in the same language they typically use to conceal them. Announcing massive plans for reparations, they present the world as it could be rather than passively accepting its cruelties, to create situations in which those in power have to either admit to their atrocities, change, or embarrass themselves with an about-face.
The full broadcast of their prank on BBC World News the morning I met Bob can be seen in the video below.
(WATCH): The Yes Men Pretending To Represent DOW Chemical On BBC World News
I later interviewed Bob about his role in The Yes Men here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Punking-The-Media/The-Mantle-Of-Authority/
Though I was not previously aware of Bob's role in The Yes Men, I should not have been surprised. His creative guerrilla activities are what led me to his doorstep in the first place. Bob's infiltration the war-torn Balkans for a clandestine concert tour (after its borders were closed to the outside world in the late 1990s) was made possible in part by teaming up with Marko Košnik from the Slovenian avant-garde hardcore band Laibach, who — like The Yes Men — used guerrilla tactics to bait their own government into showing their true face. Laibach eventually expanded themselves from a musical collective into a micronation. Though still unrecognized as a sovereign state by the powers that be, Laibach nevertheless maintains consulates in several cities (including Umag, Croatia), and issues their own passports and postage stamps.
Laibach Poster, Album And Micronation Passport
Bob's harrowing experiences on this tour (including being assaulted by audience members, detained by police, and working with an underground hacker collective in Novi Sad) is worthy of its own documentary. For anyone interested in going further down that rabbit hole, my interview with Bob's tour partner Richard Board can be read here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Punking-The-Media/These-Hands/
This Yugoslavia tour highlights yet another central theme in "The Reach Of Resonance": the increasingly tense relationship between human bodies and technology. I mentioned earlier that the film explores the idea that one's relationship to a musical instrument can parallel or transform one's evolving relationship with the world. In this case, Bob's tense relationship to his electronic musical instruments became a nothing less than a microcosm of his tense relationship to the complex political and technological forces of our time.
Bob Ostertag And NATO-Bombed Bridge (Novi Sad, Serbia)
In Bob's own words: "Technology in my own work paralleled a similar long-term shift in my understanding of the role of technology in the broader culture. The idea that new musical relationships between musicians can be created through technology is analogous to the idea that new social and political relationships between people can be forged with technology, which is the central claim of the “information technology” industry...What changes is not so much our relationships with each other but our relationship with technology and, by extension, our relationship with the natural world...
"We see it everywhere, from the smallest scale where we struggle to not be overwhelmed by our cell phones, iPods, and laptops, to a larger scale where we struggle to contain the unprecedented power of transnational corporations whose vast holdings and operations are made possible only by equally vast arrays of networked computers…If art that makes intensive use of the latest technology is to be relevant in such a time, it must begin from here: how the tense and difficult confrontation of humans and their machines is reshaping and threatening our world…to be meaningful, it must involve the human body.”
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag's "Sooner Or Later" (Live In El Salvador)
This brings us back to El Salvador and one of the reasons Bob and I are here. We are looking for a boy...well, he was once a boy whose voice was the source for Bob's piece "Sooner Or Later." Bob wrote it — in part — to process his experiences at the end of the war. "Sooner Or Later" is music made entirely from three sounds: the tears of this boy as he buries his father in El Salvador, a shovel digging the grave, and a fly buzzing around the body.
As Bob explains it, "The choice of sound source comes from my experiences during the 1980s, most of which I spent working in or around El Salvador. During that time I saw a lot of death. And in that culture, which is both Catholic and highly politicized, death gets surrounded with all kinds of trappings that are intended to make it heroic and purposeful. Death is explained as God's will, or as irrelevant since the dead 'live on in struggle.’ But most of the 70,000 who died were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't want to die. There was no plan, no glory. Of course, there are many Salvadorans who did die heroically fighting a brutal regime against overwhelming odds. But even for the heroes, there is a starker, more immediate side to their death. Sooner or Later is about that side. There is a boy and his father is dead. And no angels sang and no one was better because of it and all that is left is this kid and the shovel digging the hole in the ground and the fly. If we want to find beauty here, we must find it in what is really there: the boy, the shovel, the fly. If we look closely, despite the unbearable sadness, we will discover it."
[Note on the photo, above]: The "White Hand" signature was left behind by U.S. trained death squads on the door of a slain peasant organizer in El Salvador. "What we did was help the peasants come to an awareness of their own dignity and worth, and that’s what the powerful can’t forgive,” a moderate priest in San Salvador said.
Sangre de Guerra, A Rock Band Formed Entirely Of Children Of Former Guerrilla Fighters (Perquín, El Salvador)
Bob invited me to document his performance of "Sooner Or Later" at an annual arts festival organized by former guerrillas and their children in Perquín, El Salvador (it can be heard above). The festival began in 1992 to celebrate the end of the war, when the area around Perquin was still full of revolutionary fighters waiting to go through the official demobilizing process supervised by UN officials. Many former revolutionaries still live in Perquin in little houses they were given after the war. Nearby is a community of several thousand people who fled in refugee camps across the border in Honduras and only returned at the end of the war. These people are still dirt poor, and still deeply affected by the war. This festival was, and is, their festival. We had reason to believe that the boy, if he was alive, would have maintained close contact with the people of Perquín and would almost definitely attend the festival. We hoped it would trigger a reunion between him and Bob for the first time since the war.
But if he was there, he did not reveal himself. Perhaps this is not surprising in a land where people and history can so easily disappear. It was the first and last time "Sooner Or Later" was ever performed in El Salvador, sandwiched between political street theater from local campesino teenagers about the privatization of water in their drought-ridden county, and a set by Sangre de Guerra, a rock band formed entirely of children of former guerrilla fighters. Bob wrote a moving article on the revolutionary songs of the people of El Salvador here: http://bobostertag.com/uncategorized/charlie-haden-pepe-guerra-el-salvador-and-my-mistake/
As I write this, El Salvador is currently the homicide capital of the world (more dangerous than visiting Iraq or Afghanistan), but one of the things I remember most is seeing a little Salvadoran girl at the festival watching teenagers from different villages making small steps toward peace by breakdancing with each other.
“We may be separated by race, class, gender, religion, geography, and time," Bob has written, "but our bodies are a shared experience from which we cannot escape...We struggle to make them do the things we want them to do. We have aches and pains...we know the extraordinary things the body is capable of, and the insurmountable limits it imposes...the uneasiness of the meeting of machine and body throughout culture today...can be seen in every human activity: war, work, play, reproduction, and so on. How machines and bodies will coexist is thus not a problem to be 'solved,' but the central tension of our time in human history...If forays into this terrain are going to go farther than mere advertising for technology, the tensions and difficulties of the body-machine relationship must not be ignored, swept under the rug, glossed over, or hidden by tricks and gadgets, but brought to front and center, highlighted, magnified, and investigated."
For more on Bob Ostertag's exploration of these themes through music: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music/Bob-Ostertag/