PORTRAITS FROM EL SALVADOR

...A campesino was harvesting a small amount of cotton, cutting it off the plants with his machete...

...Some street vendors, also surprised that I would want such photographs, began to snicker as I clicked away...

...Portraits from [I Salvador PiiotosandtextbyMicliaelKiEiiiti The plane from Miami to El Salvador touched down just as the sun dipped behind a screen of palm trees and the March sky began to grow dark...

...The driver, visibly nervous, kept the interior lights shining for the thirty-mile drive so that any curious government troops or guerrillas might see who we were...

...In San Juan Buena Vista, a tiny village with a single dusty road, the people seemed to have been touched less directly by the war...

...light from the open door glinted off the glitter glued onto its wooden frame...

...I spent three days in La Li-bertad, a sleepy coastal oasis...

...Their home was a cluster of buildings at the edge of a dump, with roofs made of discarded cardboard boxes...

...A Dutch journalist with whom I had gone to the Policia Hacienda headquarters asked whether I would like to see what he called El Salvador's "Coca-Cola culture...

...About forty miles outside the capital, I came to a plantation where the cotton crop was thriving because, the owner proudly told me, he had used five to six times the recommended amount of pesticide...

...Most of the wounded seemed to be in their teens, and they looked frightened...

...With few graffiti (a good indication of a town's level of revolutionary activity) and a low military presence, the town almost seemed covered by an unofficial truce...

...From the roof, the countryside was utterly peaceful as far as the eye could see...

...I walked through the building, past a lounge where a television set was playing an American soap opera, and into an open courtyard where a Pepsi lunch wagon had been set up...

...No civilians were left in the town...

...others said they were no worse than the others...

...I couldn't believe what 1 was photographing...

...Vultures wheeled in the sky above leafless trees...

...In front of me, a woman held up a picture of Christ as a kind of talisman...

...For months, they had been trying in vain to rid the hill country of guerrillas...

...The press monitors each night's activities by checking dumps and cemeteries for bodies the next morning, going out early because within a few hours the corpses have usually been claimed and removed by the victims' relatives...

...The soldiers would pause to ask me where I was from and why I had so many cameras...

...Afterward, I talked with another photographer, who told me that while it was not unusual to see eight bodies, the decapitations were not typical...

...rhe war delayed this year's cotton harvest...

...I was sure of two things when I returned to the United States: First, that the revolution in Nicaragua would not be the last instance of a small Central American country forcing its way out of the shadow of the United States, and second, that if I ever went back, I would photograph not just the fighting of a revolution, but also the conditions that make revolution necessary...

...The charter flight south to the capital city was full, so I headed toward the airport bus for an overland trip into San Salvador...

...But the small villages were different...

...I tried to focus, had to walk outside to keep from vomiting, tried again to take a picture, and again began gagging and had to go outside...

...In spite of the carnage, their faces were impassive...

...When one person brushed against me, I jumped in surprise, and they began to laugh...

...The town was lively when I was there with hundreds of soldiers about to launch a campaign in the nearby mountains...

...She seemed astonished at first, but then she unwrapped the towel and placed it over her arm and waited while I began to shoot...

...Their uniform—knee-high boots and machetes in addition to the usual guns—certainly created a most violent image...

...all of them were happy to have their pictures taken, except the commander, who sat in a chair and stared into the distance through a pair of binoculars...

...She came over to where I stood and spoke with me about the beauty of the children, and I asked whether I could take her picture, too...

...Now, I was told, the people had been given their own patches of land under the government's land reform program, and they were trying to improve their dwellings...

...I found their headquarters in the center of San Salvador, surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall of cement blocks splotched with green, black, and yellow paint...

...Before the civil war, the owners of one large hacienda had controlled the village, appearing just once a year to supervise the harvesting of corn and coffee...

...Just two years earlier, I had been in Nicaragua, photographing the fighting between the Sandinista rebels and the forces of Anastasio Somoza...

...In the cities, women predominated...

...As soon as I arrived, I felt the first pangs of uneasiness that would haunt me throughout my two-week stay in El Salvador...

...Nearby, an elderly woman who had been sweeping the area in front of her small home looked up...

...The death squads kept to certain patterns, he said, switching from one method of killing to another after each short spree...

...Older men tended to be suspicious of the young American with a shoulder-load of cameras—but there weren't many older men...

...Around me, people of all ages filed past, some of them curiosity seekers, others the relatives of missing persons...

...Some called the Policia Hacienda the most violent of the government forces...

...Their mother responded with pride when I began to photograph them...

...One of the children, naked and covered with dust, was playing in the dump...

...Outside, the soldiers searched the handbags of women on their way to mass...

...There were other castings, made and sold, he explained, by a large extended family living nearby...

...At the gatehouse, where one officer stood outside and another watched from behind a barred window, the guards kept their fingers on the triggers of their rifles as I photographed them...

...Still, it was my impression that all the people of the village sympathized not with the government, but with the guerrillas...

...People came from miles inland to vacation in La Libertad and to surf in the waters off its shoreline of black volcanic sand...

...inside, a priest napped in a confessional...

...She wore several layers of tattered clothing and had wrapped a white towel around her head...

...When I asked whether I could take his picture, he put down the soft drink and picked up his gun, assuming a tough military stance...

...The front windshield had already been pierced by two bullets...

...But the woman's strong, quiet face reflected the honesty and perseverance I had felt everywhere in the country...

...I saw some signs of the changes: On the road, I met a man with an oxcart who was unloading tiles to repair his roof...

...I asked the soldiers about their weapons, and was told, "We like the German-made G3 because the bullets have a higher velocity than the U.S.-made M16...

...The city was once a major seaport, but business had moved away, leaving the broad streets quiet and peaceful—except on the weekends, when they would become clogged with streams of traffic inching into the town...

...My nose told me the same thing...

...Nurses were eating their lunches nearby, and at the wagon, an armed guard stood drinking a Pepsi...

...We passed a few campesinos in soiled work clothes, returning from a day's work in the fields, but otherwise the wide highway seemed virtually deserted...

...He refused to be photographed...

...Down the road, I came upon the massive old hacienda, now deserted...

...most males over the age of twelve had been killed, had gone with the army, or had become guerrillas...

...I military hospital I visited in mm San Salvador had a capa-mW city of seventy-five but was crowded with more than 200 patients, many of them stretched out on cots in the hallways beneath towering stacks of boxed medicines...

...Three of the dead had been decapitated, and the heads were lined up against a white cement wall...

...Early one morning, I went on what foreign journalists in El Salvador call a "body run...

...Everyone with whom I discussed the killings mentioned the Policia Hacienda, a rural force often used to guard those plantations whose wealthy owners had fled the country...

...His grandmother called him into the house for a drink of water, and I followed, photographing him as he stared at me over the rim of the cup...

...The airport bus was traveling over one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in the land—the road where four American religious workers were killed last year...

...Heading into a narrow alley, I saw two children playing next to a newly placed wooden cross...

...On the anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, I attended mass at the national cathedral in San Salvador...

...All the homes had been destroyed, the church had been converted to a fort, and the remaining buildings were bright with graffiti...

...With a group of reporters seeking the combat footage they called "bang-bang-boom-boom," I traveled to the small town of Aquacayo, about fifty miles north of San Salvador, which had been the scene of heavy fighting for months...

...The lines of her face revealed years of hard work...

...I went to a district cemetery in San Salvador, where eight bodies were awaiting identification, six of them men and two women...

...We went to the edge of the city, where he pointed out a five-foot-tall cement casting of the Walt Disney character Scrooge McDuck...