Wall of Names Honors Fallen in El Salvador

Inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, a wall of 10,000 names was unveiled Thursday in Exposition Park as a tribute to the men, women and children who lost their lives in El Salvador’s ongoing civil war.

For one Salvadoran immigrant, the wall offered a chance to remember the deep personal tragedy he suffered on a November day six years ago.

Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which has names of U.S. casualties chiseled into black marble, the Salvadoran memorial consists of names painted on wooden panels. With a thin brush and a bottle of black paint, 38-year-old Jose Casco of Los Angeles painted in the name of his wife, Candida, who was killed, he said, by Salvadoran army troops in 1983.

Beneath Candida’s name, he painted the names of their four children--Maria Yanira, Santos Inocente, Maira and Jose Salvador--who also were killed that day. The names of his brother, sister and five nieces and nephews followed. In all, Jose Casco painted 12 names on the panels that make up the wall.

Casco said the killings took place when soldiers surrounded his village near the Guazapa Volcano, a leftist guerrilla stronghold in Northern El Salvador.

“I am the survivor of a holocaust,” Casco said in Spanish.

Opponents of U.S. policy in El Salvador, Salvadoran immigrants, along with a group of Vietnam veterans, constructed the wall this month with the support of Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell.

The wall will remain on a lawn next to the Museum of Natural History until September. The groups that built the wall said they hope to establish it as a permanent memorial at a still undetermined site in the Pico-Union district, the heart of Southern California’s 350,000-strong Salvadoran community.

Susan Kandel of El Rescate, a support agency for Central American immigrants, said the wall also has a political motive--to stop U.S. military aid to the government of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani and to push for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.

The long list of names chronicles many of the violent episodes in El Salvador’s recent history. Poets, university students, trade unionists and human rights activists make up the list of the dead or “disappeared,” including Herbert Anaya, the president of the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. Anaya was shot to death in a San Salvador parking lot in October, 1987.

Many of the names were of peasants who suffered the brunt of the rural guerrilla war. One entry read only: “Familia Nieto, 3 muertos.” (Nieto family, three dead. )

Not all of the names were of Salvadorans, however. Also included were three American nuns and a church lay worker who were raped and shot to death in December, 1980. The killings of the nuns, along with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero a few months earlier, created an international outcry.

Among those present at Thursday’s unveiling were Ross Yosnow, 42, a former platoon sergeant in Vietnam and now a member of Veterans for Peace, a group opposed to U.S. policy in Central America. Yosnow compared the wall to the Vietnam Memorial.

“If the U.S. government had learned their lessons from Vietnam, there wouldn’t be any need for us to be here today dedicating a wall to El Salvador,” Yosnow said. “Much like the names on the Vietnam Memorial, we need to ensure that these people haven’t died in vain.”

Joaquin, a 33-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, spent a few minutes circling the wall, looking for the name of a cousin, Humberto Rodezno. He had painted the name several days earlier but couldn’t find it among the thousands of names.

“We spent our childhood together. He wasn’t just a cousin, he was like a brother to me,” said Joaquin, who asked that his last name not be published.