Abstract

AT THE EDGES OF EMPIRE

The article reviews the author's experiences in El Salvador and his views on United States' involvement in El Savador. El Salvador is a series of issues as much as it is a country, and to the degree it is a country it is one where contradictions and extremes rule. As well as paradox. El Salvador today is an Exhibit A casualty of the American imperium. The country is like a friend very slowly recovering from a grave illness. The illness was not only the civil war but the way of the war -- death squads, dictatorial regimes, massacres of entire villages, widespread torture, the assassination of the revered Archbishop Oscar Romero, the murder of American nuns, a sinister aura throughout the small country. The grave illness of El Salvador, this national stroke, was also finely calibrated and to a major degree funded, if not caused, by the United States.