Monday, 21 November 2005
Benjamin Orestes Flores
by Juan Maciel
Origin: El Salvador
"I don’t know how much you want me to get into this subject; it is after all a subject without end."
My complete name is Benjamin Orestes Flores. The name Orestes is in reference to Greek literature (“La Oresta”). This is probably because my paternal grandfather was a priest and was very literate. My father, whose mother was an Indian of the Nualcos tribe, also liked to write. And although neither one of my parents had a university education, both finished high school. My father also went on to finish a correspondence training for radio broadcasting. I was born in Santana, El Salvador on June 14, 1960. However, I was raised in San Salvador where the family business was. As for my education, I was mostly sent to private schools. My family was not rich but did have the means to send me to private catholic schools. I think private schools are, for the most part, universally better than public schools.
My family had a wholesale distributing type of business. We also sold goods to the public but the bulk of our business was selling wholesale. That is pretty much how I was raised: always working at the family business. Most of the time we had one employee but, for the most part, it was the family that worked at the store. Most people who knew us considered us economically well-off or rich. We were not rich - we were simply hard working people, that’s all. I remember my dad working two jobs for many years: one was his job at the radio station, as a radio tech, and then he would work at the store with us. Back then, the radio tech was in charge of all of the equipment: today the DJ does everything. The work we did in the store was not easy: even as a child I would carry heavy sacks of sugar and flour. Some sacks weighed as much as a quintal which is about one hundred pounds. But the good aspect of this was that I always had money in my pocket. All my friends in school knew I had money and I would buy them candy. We never lacked anything.
Next door to my parent’s wholesale store, my mother’s dad had a molino, a mill for grinding cornmeal, which employed about thirty people. My mother’s family was from Chaltenango, El Salvador. Their family name was Nuñez, a very Spanish last name and a very Spanish family. My mother’s father was the town alcalde or mayor. This is how it was for me growing up in San Salvador.
It wasn’t until I turned fifteen that I developed a political awareness, perhaps as a result of what I witnessed one day. I can remember being tear-gassed by the police at my junior high school. The building was four stories tall and student protesters from the national university were marching past our school when the police began to suppress the protest. It quickly got violent. There were about 6,000 people taking part in the protest. Some say that the army and police killed about five hundred of them. Some of the protesters ran into our school and that is when we were hit with tear gas. What surprises me is that none of us who were in junior high were killed in all of this. Some of us, me included, ran to the roof to see what was going on. Soldiers went inside our school looking for the protesters.
This was the first protest that the government suppressed. That was when I saw the reality: that the government was assassinating innocent people. I can say that this was a life-transforming experience. This all took place on July 30 of 1975. It is one thing to kill armed people but to kill unarmed people is another thing. How many students were killed is not known. In these matters, one never knows but this is when I began to see that the government was killing unarmed citizens and this impacted me a lot. I clearly saw when soldiers were stabbing people with their bayonets. Tanks ran over people. I really hadn’t developed a political consciousness by this time - I was fifteen - and wasn’t a leftist or conservative.
The repressive forces consisted of members of the National Guard and the Hacienda police and whomever else the government had sent. The government accused Jesuit priests of promoting communism in private schools. Many people now say that this wasn’t true but the truth is that they were. I know because, in the school I was in, they did teach us communism in sociology class and it was taught by the Jesuits priests. I received four years of this and became very indoctrinated in communism. I was already a communist after having been instructed in it for only six months so, when I turned eighteen and enrolled at the university, I was a communist and an atheist. I don’t know how much you want me to get into this subject; it is, after all, a subject without an end. I learned about the theology of liberation which unites the theories of Marx with Christianity. Marx said that there would be a society of equality: a perfect society. But to achieve this perfect society we must first defeat the government because it only represents the interests of the rich. After having defeated the government and taking power we can establish the dictatorship of the proletariat: a socialist society. One thing is communism and another thing is socialism; however, most communist states such as China, Russia and Cuba started off as socialistic.
I now realize that communism does not eliminate poverty but rather it eliminates the rich. Once the rich are gone, there is equality because everybody is poor. I have come to realize that communism has accomplished very little. Communism is a Marxist dogma that some priests promoted. It is, in concept, a Utopian society that has never been achieved.
It is important to say that some priests were the ones encouraging the revolution. Not all priests were encouraging us to take arms; some were definitely conservative. The priests who were on the side of the guerrillas were some of the same ones who introduced me to the “Theology of Liberation” philosophy. This philosophy is a response to poverty and the lack of freedom brought on by military dictatorships. This new way of thinking is the result of the 1960 Bishop conference that took place in Medellin, Colombia. After the conference, some members of the clergy began spreading this theology. The conference was also important in that priests were now allowed by the Vatican to read the bible to the people. Prior to this, they were forbidden to read it to the people, especially in Spanish. Before this, masses were celebrated only in Latin.
One of the most well-known priests was Monsignor Romero. He was, in the beginning, very conservative and soon became archbishop. However, some of his friends were revolutionary priests and he eventually began speaking out against the government’s repression: that its army was killing university professors and priests. Although there existed different levels of radicalization, Father Romero became the benchmark.
Soon, the leaders of the revolution began establishing training centers. Ten of them were established and, as a result, ten thousand leaders were trained and sent all over the country to organize students and workers into revolutionary units. In time, these units were radicalized and took up arms. One method that the leaders used to radicalize the units was to employ a technique known as “developing the combativeness of the masses”. The leaders would, for example, organize a protest while knowing full well that some protesters were going to die. The leaders knew some would die but thought the deaths were necessary for the revolution to crystallize itself. People in large crowds are willing to confront armed soldiers knowing they might die. You lose fear when being a part of a mass of people. Then, the next time people organize a march, some will start bringing rocks to throw to the soldiers and police. Eventually, small arms will be introduced - and then you have a guerrilla-style war.
What also came of the Bishop’s conferences was a new mindset that insisted that the Church should be for the poor and not for the rich. This changed many things. Evidence of this can be seen in that, originally, there were only about 40 or 50 guerrilla fighters. Eventually, there were thousands. It is also important to point out that, in the beginning, ninety percent of the population supported the revolution and the guerrilla fighters. Toward the end, most of these people just wanted peace and for the war to end. Twelve years of war is very tiresome. A war is not supposed to last this long and be this prolonged.
As for my direct role in all of this, I can say that I was not the first to become politically conscious in my family. An older brother of mine, who attended a vocational school, was already organizing himself and his compañeros, his classmates, from school. While I was receiving theological instruction, he was receiving practical training in painting walls with anti-government slogans and hiding from the police. We were both urban fighters. I say this because, in the country side, the killings were more open and brutal. We slowly evolved into combative units. The university was the breeding ground for revolutionaries. The professor’s union had many years of organizing a union for better contracts. The university - there is only one in El Salvador as it is small country - often served as the headquarters for organizing protests.
Once all out war, broke out in 1980, we received support from Cuba and Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega was in power in Nicaragua. It had been building for several years. Five years earlier, the first massacre took place but it wasn’t until 1980 that war broke out. In the fighting before the war, a coup d’état took place but didn’t last. This was unfortunate because a progressive faction was behind it. After several years of war, El Salvador lost U.S support but, by then, it was a full-scale revolution with well-organized guerrilla fighters. It is hard to say how many guerrilla fighters there were: some say ten thousand, others say thirty thousand. I say it was about twenty thousand. Twelve thousand voluntarily disarmed after the peace accords. The war ended peacefully and a full pardon was given to both sides. I can’t say what my exact role was in all of this but I can say that we were able to infiltrate the government’s army but they were never able to infiltrate us, the guerrilla fighters. In order to infiltrate the army, our urban guerrilla fighters were formed into small units. Except for those few in your unit, you never knew who else was a guerrilla fighter. We were more or less the link between the guerrilla fighters and the military. We would identify sympathetic army officers and try to develop a trust that would allow communication. Sometimes they were relatives or wanted change, too. Some of the younger, progressive officers did not want war: they were the ones who launched the coup d’état against the old repressive regime. In one case, a certain Capt. Santanna defected along with all his men. Some guerrilla fighters were former soldiers who had been pressed into service. If these soldiers had somebody to vouch for them on the guerrilla side, they could defect. They brought with them their training and, in many cases, their government-issued weapons. Although it is hard to say how key our infiltration was, neither side ever prevailed. When the war ended, we were at a stalemate.
Personally I began changing when somebody gave me a New Testament bible, just like this one here in my pocket. See? I was only active in the fighting for about three years. Even so, I am lucky I was never killed. It was only by a fluke that I was able to leave and not be killed by either side because leaving the guerrilla usually meant death, too. In the end, the word of God changed me.
Stalin killed many people; Daniel Ortega, once in power, took to living in the rich people’s mansions he confiscated. There is no perfect society. I dedicated myself to serving poor people. I began working for World Vision and then immigrated to the U.S.
