For Two Remote Salvadorian Villages, the Iraq War Hits Close to Home

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When United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited El Salvador on November 11 of last year to thank this tiny country for its assistance in Iraq, he mentioned Tivito's death, but he did not visit Herminia. That would have entailed flying to the air base near Ahuachapan and then jolting down a series of unpaved dirt roads to face a poverty that few soldiers in the coalition of the willing would recognize.

Amistad con los Estados Unidos

The first thing one notices walking into the office of Tacuba Mayor Joel Ernesto Acosta are the American and Salvadorian flags proudly displayed side by side on his desk. The man dresses in conservative western attire -- in a pressed blue collared shirt with pens protruding from his breast pocket, wire-rimmed glasses, and a finely combed part in his dark hair. Acosta could be an accountant in any town in the U.S.

He shakes the American journalist's hand with eagerness and points with pride to the framed pictures of him attending various mayor conferences in Florida. During the subsequent interview, he uses the word "orgulloso," which means proud in Spanish, no less than seven times.

"Tacuba is tiny, but the people here, their valor is great," he beams. "We are proud to help the American army because we practically owe our freedom to them. We don't look at ourselves as independent or separate from the United States, but as a country that stands together with them. That's why our flags fly together."

In this country there are two distinctly different ways of interpreting the U.S. role in El Salvador's bloody, 13-year civil war that ended in 1992 under United Nations-brokered peace accords. To the revolutionaries, students, workers and priests in the Catholic Church who preached liberation theology to the masses, and sometimes paid with their lives, the United States under Reagan, armed and funded the military death squads who used a scorched earth campaign and killed tens of thousands to quell the uprising.

Weeks before he was assassinated in March of 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote a candid letter to Washington asking the U.S. to stop funding the Salvadorian military because it was "killing our children."

But to Mayor Acosta, a member of the traditionally right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, which triumphed over the Faribundo Martí National Liberation (FMLN) rebels in the civil war, the Americans were the only reason El Salvador didn't fall to Communism; the elephant to the north stopped the bloodshed and helped the country regain its dignity.

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