Tragedy Forms Salvadoran’s Sculptures

On the worst day of Juan Edgar Aparicio’s life, it rained. The Salvadoran artist remembers the weather of five winters ago because of someone he can’t forget.

“A lady came to my door crying,” begging for money, said Aparicio, then 28, and in the midst of his own grief and terror.

The dark and lanky mestizo said he had arrived in the capital of San Salavador that day for a much needed rest. He hid in a friend’s house, he said, because he believed his political activism had made him a death squad target.

Instead of rest, Aparicio explained in a recent interview, he met with a devastating blow--one that he looks back on as the starting point of a new life in Los Angeles as a carver of painted wood sculptures.

On that day, Aparicio learned that the body of his 11-year-old daughter, Carolina, had been found in a garbage heap with the corpses of his aunt and uncle. It was December of 1981 and El Salvador’s midnight executions and unexplained disappearances of citizens suspected of anti-government activities were in full force.

But the woman wrapped in a rain-soaked rebozo insisted: “They killed my 6-year-old son. (A bus) just ran over my son. I want to bury him, but I don’t have enough money” for a coffin.

“I gave her a colon (a Salvadoran unit of currency),” he said. “But my pain sharpened. It was the most terrible thing you can feel. I had seen many people cry. Many times I had felt their pain. But it was never as bad as what I felt with my daughter.”

In that instant, the woman in the rain and Carolina’s death magnified Aparicio’s other losses--a wife and brother, among other loved ones, who had joined El Salvador’s 60,000 victims of political terror a few years earlier.

“I felt it necessary to kill myself. . . .”

It was only the hunger for revenge, he added, that kept him from it. “To kill oneself would be cowardice. Life would someday allow me to take revenge for the people that had died.

“That is part of the duty I now have as an artist,” he continued. Indeed, his experiences are reflected in works such as “Hands of Gold,” a sculpture of Chilean folk-singer Victor Jara, who was shot and killed by soldiers in 1973 as he was forced to sing after they had broken his hands. Aparicio now lives in Los Angeles, and an exhibit of his work is on view through Jan. 24, at Self Help Graphics’ Galeria Otra Vez, 3802 Brooklyn Ave., in East L.A.

Aparicio first visited his parents that December morning when he returned to San Salvador. He had been given a week’s leave after working a year with the Catholic peasant communities in the countryside where he taught the campesinos to read and write.

But Carolina’s death shattered his expectations of a joyful reunion.

His parents told him the abductions were witnessed by his youngest daughter, Indira, 7 at the time, as well as neighbors in Usulatan, a city in southwestern El Salvador. According to their accounts, armed men wearing the uniforms of the Salvadoran army and National Guard arrived at his aunt’s house about 3 a.m. one day in early November.

“ ‘Don’t torture them!’ ” Carolina screamed when the men grabbed her aunt and uncle. “They took them (his aunt and uncle) out into the patio and beat them,” Aparicio explained, his voice sinking. “They came back a half-hour later and took” his daughter Carolina.

He’s certain the death squads were after his uncle, who belonged to ANDES (National Assn. of Salvadoran Educators), an organization of left-wing university and high school teachers. Its members were favored targets of the right-wing paramilitary and clandestine army and police units responsible at that time for most of El Salvador’s political terror.

Fatally Wounded

Earlier, in July of 1980, Aparicio’s wife, Elizabeth, was fatally wounded, along with four youths, at a bus stop in his native San Miguel. It was early evening, he said. Men in a passing jeep opened up with machine gun fire, witnesses at the scene later told him, killing all of them.

Eleven months later, Aparicio said his brother, Armando, a leader in ANDES, and his wife, were abducted by the death squads. Aparicio said he later found his brother “. . .in a public trash heap with his face mutilated, and with other cadavers.

“We never found my brother’s wife,” he added. “We went to all the security forces, but none of them gave us any explanations of her whereabouts.”

Violence on Both Sides

E. Bradford Burns, a UCLA history professor who has written a dozen books on South and Central America history, including a soon-to-be-released work on the Reagan Administration’s policy in Nicaragua, said the sort of claims made by Aparicio have been widely reported by human rights organizations.

“I’m sure of the violence on both sides,” Burns said. “But I know very few people would dispute that the military and the right have been responsible for much more of the violence than the left.”

A former university student, Aparicio had the kind of past many had already paid dearly for.

He had been expelled in 1975 from the National University in San Salvador for his political activities after government forces had occupied the university and, according to news reports, killed 37 students during street demonstrations in San Salvador. The campus, he said, had been one of the few places where he could publicly protest the government’s inability to control the economic crisis, and the worsening political violence.

His first brush with political repression only strengthened his idealism, he said. He next chose one of the few remaining avenues of nonviolent political struggle that had not been crushed: the radical Christian communities scattered throughout the countryside.

As early as 1965, even before the doctrine of Liberation Theology had swept through Latin America, Catholic priests, inspired by the Vatican’s new doctrine of social justice, instigated the creation of mutualist organizations among El Salvador’s landless campesinos. The church would spawn the radical peasant organizations that later evolved into key pillars of the guerrilla movement.

It was with church groups in Chalatenango in western El Salvador that Aparicio first came in contact with members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

“We were in the countryside,” he said, “so it was logical that we knew that many belonged to the guerrillas. That was the risk we took, that we were in a situation where we could be seen with the FMLN.”

Although he viewed himself as a collaborator, Aparicio said his strong Catholic upbringing ruled out violence. But even his pacifism was loaded with irreversible consequences.

The army had launched one of its sweeps of Chalatenango the day he decided to return to San Salvador. “They were killing cattle, torturing people suspected of helping the guerrillas,” he said. “I could not return.

“It was only a matter of time before the security forces would track me down,” he remembers thinking before he finally decided to leave the country. “It was strange. I slept with my clothes on so I could be ready to run at any moment.”

Two months later, Aparicio flew to Mexico City, where he washed cars until he raised enough money to pay a coyote --a smuggler--to sneak him across the border. After getting caught once by the U.S. Border Patrol, Aparicio said he made contact with members of the American sanctuary movement. In March, 1982, he walked across the Mexico-Arizona border.

Once in Los Angeles, Carecen, a refugee legal defense group, helped him land his first job. The organization also introduced Aparicio to the woman who would become his new wife, Madeline, at that time a volunteer teaching English to Central American refugees; today, the mother of their 4-month-old twin daughter and son. Madeline, who had helped Aparicio become a citizen, made a successful trip to El Salvador last year for Indira.

Aparicio’s life is much different now. The soft-spoken 33-year-old smiles a lot, gives the appearance of a man who has the world at his feet--which for him means a furniture refinishing business he runs with a partner during the day, a home studio where he carves wooden sculptures late at night.

If he has exacted revenge in his work, he has done so by not playing the victim.

His sculptures have the disarming charm of folk art in spite of their overtly political content.

This folk feeling comes across in “Detention Center,” a multimedia installation depicting what he claims are the prison camp conditions in the El Centro, Calif., detention center in which Central American refugees are held before being deported. An upright carved male figure grasps the rusting chain-link fence with a mangled right hand, a subtle reminder that some Central American refugees also have been tortured in their native countries.

Although Aparicio does not, in fact, make folk art, his allusions to it are deliberate.

“What I am trying to recover are the cultural roots of my people,” he said. “I’m trying to represent that (indigenous) culture that has been denied and trampled on.”

Personal Healing Process

He also admits his work has become part of a personal healing process: “Yes, it cannot be denied that what one does after a trauma has something to do with therapy. Because after (receiving) a blow, you massage yourself” where it hurts.

But the wounds Aparicio hopes to mend are far deeper than those caused by war and exile.

He said much of El Salvador’s indigenous folk arts were wiped out by the steady conversion of its subsistence farming economy to coffee and cotton plantations controlled by a handful of ruling families. Traditional villages were uprooted in the process, he said, destroying centuries-old craft producing industries.

New company towns that served as pools of reserve labor for the plantations replaced the traditional villages, he added, while El Salvador’s artistic institutions were further enfeebled by the landed oligarchy’s obsession with European and American culture.

“Our ancestors, the Indians, the mestizos , were able to sustain their cultures to a certain degree,” he said. But “pottery, bark painting, weaving, wood carving, all of this disappeared because everyone was made to cut coffee, cut sugar cane for the large monopolies.

“This was the destruction of El Salvador’s (cultural) continuity, a historical rupture” that stands in stark contrast to the cultural flowerings that other periods of Latin American revolutionary ferment have produced, he said.

“In El Salvador, on the other hand, there has been no continuity. That’s what we are looking for now.”