NONFICTION - Jan. 29, 1995

REBEL RADIO: The Story of El Salvador’s Radio Venceremos by Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil, translated by Mark Fried (Curbstone Press: $19.95; 240 pp.) Close your eyes and you can easily picture a younger, more liberal Mickey Rooney in the movie version of this book--”Hey kids, let’s put on a radio show and demoralize the government!” One picks up this volume expecting a dull, propagandistic account of noble peasant resistance--a Thomas Hart Benton mural come to life--but “Rebel Radio” is in fact casual and comical, with enough bravery to make it gripping and enough anger to make it credible. Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil, a radio journalist, went to El Salvador in the 1980s to give a course in radio production to the country’s guerrilla movement, but turned on his tape recorder after each lesson and captured some remarkable stories. It’s often hard to identify the narrators of the 60-odd soliloquies reproduced here (Lopez Vigil admits he “didn’t worry much about who was doing the talking, only what they were saying”), but one soon overlooks the confusion when caught up in these real-life campfire tales. Taken together they recount the history of El Salvador’s civil war, and indirectly explain why its government made peace with the rebels in 1992. A Valiant Viking transmitter, smuggled in from Mexico, allowed the rebels to go on the air in 1979, surreptitiously and for no more than 15 minutes, from the National University in San Salvador, but it soon became clear that the station would be more effective if broadcast from the field on a daily basis. Before long Radio Venceremos (“We Shall Win”) was set up as a collective in the rebel stronghold of Morazan and had become, thanks to its immediacy, elusiveness, humor and enthusiasm, the voice of the guerrilla movement. The narrow escapes in Rebel Radio--from mortar attacks, ground assaults, rocket fire from U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships--lend the book steady drama, but it is fascinating primarily for its depiction of everyday life among the guerrilla broadcasters. One of them curses at the bird song he hears in the middle of a gun-battle; the tape won’t seem authentic with all that tweeting in the background! Another records a woman explaining how she distinguished a compa (guerrilla comrade) from a cuilio (government soldier): Offered a tortilla, a cuilio would eat it right there, alone, while a compa would take it away to share with comrades. Yet another describes trapping and killing Lieutenant Colonel Monterrosa, mastermind of the infamous massacre at El Mozote, by radio-detonated explosives hidden in a false Venceremos transmitter. The history in “Rebel Radio” is no doubt slanted, but it provides unique and unparalleled insight into Salvador’s civil war, and furnishes hope for the future as well.