Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303140256
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAITLIN BIRD FRANCKE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
POWER TO CARRY WEAPON NOT POWER TO MAKE CHOICES
Driving north on a pothole-ridden road in eastern El Salvador, I pass a sign announcing "Warning, FMLN zone of control."Five kilometers later, a black and white flag with the initials of the National Democratic Army, END, hanging over an opening cut into the jungle signals my destination.
An 18-year-old in camouflage carrying an AK-47 emerges to ask my business and then vanishes back into the jungle.
Ten minutes later he returns to lead me down a rocky path into the guerrilla camp where the jungle-green tents and the guerrilla's fatigues blend with the surrounding foliage.
He motions for me to sit on a makeshift bench and wait.
I have come to see a woman known as Alta Gracia, one of the few female officers in the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation), the Salvadoran guerrilla army.
She is 33 years old, 10 years older than I. When Alta Gracia was 18, in 1978, the command of one of the five factions of the FMLN selected her for military training in Cuba.
From there they sent her to fight with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Armed with a rocket launcher, Alta Gracia led her troops across the border from Costa Rica and successfully defended her area of operations in southern Nicaragua against Somoza's National Guard.
On her return to El Salvador, the FMLN put Alta Gracia, whose nom de guerre means "high grace," in command of one of the largest combat battalions in FMLN history.
A strict disciplinarian, Alta Gracia often told her troops, "More sweat in training, less blood on the battlefield."
El Salvador's bitter 12-year civil war Without the revolution my life would have been a failure. I would have just created children and nothing else. I feel proud to have participated in the war, rather than living a passive life. Alta Gracia Officer in the Salvadoran guerrilla army officially ended last December, after nearly two years of United Nations-mediated peace accords.
The FMLN now exists officially as a political party and its soldiers have been completely demobilized. Alta Gracia and her 2,500 sisters at arms are facing the return to civilian life.
Having spent the past 18 months working in Central America, I have witnessed how war has deepened the plight of women here.
Salvadoran women's groups report that 55 percent of all women are single mothers, widowed or abandoned. More than 50 percent are beaten regularly by their partners, and many women are living in extreme poverty. All are victims of the powerful machismo attitude that shapes their society.
As a feminist and daughter of a feminist brought up believing that women had to fight for their independence and selfhood, I have come to see Alta Gracia and the other female guerrillas in El Salvador as heroines.
Dressed in their camouflage uniforms, toting their automatic weapons, they stride through the camps with a marked confidence and sense of power that their civilian sisters lack.
I imagine that after the war they will hit the fast track and aspire to be doctors and lawyers or even presidents, turning women's traditional role on its head.
As Alta Gracia approached my bench I quickly realized that this transition was not going to turn out as I had expected.
Alta Gracia was seven months pregnant. From war to peace and from major to mother, Alta Gracia had traded her fatigues for a maternity dress and her combat boots for Wallabees and baby-blue socks.
My image of the tenacious Alta Gracia running for political office faltered when she said, "The first thing I have to do is get a roof over my head." Looking at her swollen belly, she mused, "I guess I have to be a housewife for a while."
Housewife. Ama de casa. Unmarried. Bringing up children on her own. Planting beans and corn. Sweeping a mud-floor house. Making tortillas three times daily. Piecing together some kind of life.
"I would like to combine it with something else," she said, "but I don't know what that will be."
Still clinging to my idealistic vision, I sought out a younger guerrilla woman whose perspective on the future might be different.
At the Guillermo Ungo guerrilla camp on the Guazapa volcano just outside the capital city of San Salvador, I found 17-year-old Beatriz, one of the only two women assigned to the elite special forces of the guerrilla faction known as the FAL and whose duties included patrolling the mined perimeters of the volcano.
Unlike Alta, Beatriz looked the part of the woman warrior. She was dressed in full camouflage with massive, mud-covered combat boots; her long dark hair was pulled back from her face.
As she sat down, she placed her semiautomatic weapon against a post behind us and proudly told me how yesterday she had climbed a wall faster than all the men.
I was sure Beatriz and her contemporaries would be the pioneers of change and put Salvadoran women on a new track. She smiled eagerly when I asked her future plans. "I've always wanted to be a beautician," she replied.
I was disappointed in my heroines. Frustrated, I found myself blaming the women for not being ambitious enough.
But as I drove toward San Salvador, I noticed, as if for the first time, the ubiquitous line of women and children along the side of the road carrying firewood and water jugs on their heads.
And I began to understand finally that the women did not join the guerrillas because of their belief in Marx or Lenin. Nor did they fight to become doctors or lawyers.
Some women fought to avenge the deaths of their loved ones; others armed themselves for their own protection. Most fought in hopes of a better life for their families.
In fact, there was precious little the war-trained women could aspire to, beyond their traditional place in the house.
How many radio operators and mortar launchers possibly could be absorbed into a civilian work force in which unemployment is more than 50 percent?
With little more than a third-grade education, Alta Gracia could not even join the new police force, much less suddenly become a doctor or a lawyer.
I had confused the power to carry a weapon with the power to make choices. My feminism and my criteria were born of a completely different socioeconomic reality.
What mattered to the former combatants was not gender politics but the chance to make up lost time with their families after so many years of war.
I remembered Carolina, a guerrilla who wanted nothing more than to live in her father's village with the daughter she had left behind in a juvenile home and her four adopted sons.
Now living in Segundo Montes, a community for Salvadoran refugees who had repatriated from Honduras, she said: "I can't wait until we are all together. After so long, we will be a family again."
The women are still my heroines. Their succession as doctors and lawyers in El Salvador may be a long time coming, but they have planted the seeds of change.
"Without the revolution my life would have been a failure," Alta Gracia said. "I would have just created children and nothing else. I feel proud to have participated in the war, rather than living a passive life."
For Alta Gracia and others like her, the first triumph is that they survived the war. In peace, the garden will grow at its own pace, not mine.
Caitlin Bird Francke is a free-lance journalist and researcher who lives in Guatemala.