Steve's El Salvador page 8

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guitar

Rhythm of life


Mexican-style mariachi and marimba bands play in many public places, this guitaronista (left) was strumming his contrabajo at a local food festival in Juayua.

On night in San Salvador we accidentally ordered two mariachi bands for a leaving party, both teams turned up, 9 in red tunics with drums, trumpets and guitars, and 8 in green tunics with drums, trumpets and guitars.

We couldn't choose which group to keep so ended up with a kind of mini Battle-of-the-Mariachi-bands with each group trying to out-play each other in Dr Enric's tiny house and most of the team conga-ing around the garden. One neighbour came out of her house to yell that she hadn't heard such a ruckus since the guerrillas were shooting the windows out of a nearby bank building during the civil war.

San Salvador radio stations are mostly stuck in the 70s groove – Cat Stevens, Jefferson Starship, Eagles, Buggles, Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zep, Bob Seger, the Cars, Stylistics, Earth Wind and Fire, America, Air Supply. Sometimes they skip into early 80s tracks – Haircut 100, ABC, Simple Minds.
How and why they got bogged in this time warp is a mystery.
I don't mind because I like the old stuff, particularly the Hollies song He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, which is played almost daily.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother...

A few years ago I met an Irishman in a pub in North London (the Brownswood Tavern, Highbury) who claimed that he had written the famous Hollies song.
He was about 50, well-dressed in a Bohemian kind of way, and told us he had briefly been in the Hollies as bass player.
And the song? He wrote it after a day's fishing down by the canal. While waiting for the fish to bite, a boy came along the towpath pushing a younger lad in a wheelchair.
Now the canals in those parts have two towpaths – a low one for the tow horses, and a higher one for pedestrians. The lad needed a hand to lift the wheelchair, with its younger occupant, up on to the higher path.

He asked the Irish fisherman for a hand, telling him – in that disconnected way that kids have – "He ain't heavy, he's my brother." That became the song.
Well, I went home from the pub that night thinking "what blarny". But now every time I hear the song and listen to the words I think, hmmm, maybe not. Here are some of the words.

"The road is long, with many a winding turn.
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.
But I'm strong. Strong enough to carry him.
He ain't heavy. He's my brother.
So on we go, his welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear, we'll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain't heavy. He's my brother."

El Salvador's last running passenger train (right) is a rickety old affair which makes a daily there-and-back journey from Aguilares, a rural town north of San Salvador, to a railway crossing south of Texistepeque, an equally rural stop 55kms to the west.
It runs along through green tropical hills, along the banks of the Rio Lempa, brushing througn corn fields and making juddering halts at small villages.
If you're thinking of catching it, don't make the mistake I did and turn up in Texistepeque and ask for the railway station. There isn't one. Instead, jump off the Santa Ana - Texistepeque bus where the road crosses the railway line about 3 kms south of Texi. You'll usually see a group of folk waiting for the train. It leaves at 2pm. Sunday is best, the train is full and lots of fun. 		train
arms Please don't shoot

El Salvador's murder rate is worse than Colombia's, and much higher in numbers of motiveless or just plain clumsy killings; people shot dead on buses, security guards blown away like autumn leaves outside fast food joints, every week young children shot in drive-by shootings, or in bungled kidnappings.
In 1999 there were 1,900 gun killings and another 303 fatal stabbings.
Mara street gangs, often Los Angeles rejects, look fairly harmless but don't be fooled. Last week some mara stabbed a 9-year-old to death for his football boots. Others killed two with a hand grenade after one of them refused to hand over his bicycle.
Kidnap gangs seem equally laughable with names like 'The Millionaires' and 'The Fatties', but kill as many victims as they release. Business associations claim two or three people are kidnapped a day, but no-on knows the real figures because many families of victims don't go to the police, not surprising since the police are themselves often implicated in kidnapping, murder and robbery.
El Salvador is loaded up with arms, many left over from the civil war. Even university students often pack shotguns in their cars. No wonder bandits shoot first. We carry these "no arms" (left) stickers on our cars in the hope that attackers will just take our money and not our lives.

Trying to rekindle ancient ways, a Mayan harvest ceremony (right) played out in the main plaza of Juayua, a pretty town in the coffee zone.
Christians have been trying to crush indigenous way of life for 500 years. Whereas in North America protestant settlers genocided their natives, the Catholics arriving in Central and South America were more tolerant and only barbecued the odd million to find out where the gold was hidden.
El Salvador's dictators were more successful than most at wrenching their people away from their indigenous roots, persuading the army to shoot anyone in Indian dress in the 1930's.
During the 1980s, that old cowboy Ronald Reagan sent millions of $s of bombs to the right-wing Salvadorean government to drop on more rural villages. Meanwhile the CIA sponsored a wave of protestant evangelicals to preach US-style neo-liberal nuclear families and undermine the extended family ties which form the backbone of Latin American resistance to foreign exploitation.
If you want to read more about this, read the Noam Chomsky Archive, written by the US's most outspoken Latin America foreign policy critic. He is also the Nobel-prize winning scientist who invented lingusitics. 		maya