Blogging from El Salvador #6

We met with Maria Serrano who is now the Minister of the Interior of El Salvador. She is definitely not a prototypical politician.

Minister Serrano is the subject of the film: Maria’s Story: A Documentary Portrait Of Love And Survival In El Salvador’s Civil War, first released some 20 years ago, telling her story. She was an activist and mother engaged in the armed struggle of the period on the side of the FMLN. Serrano, a onetime campesino organizer pushed into the revolution by government repression of the citizenry, gives a very personal account of El Salvador’s fight for resources for the poor. If you told her years ago she would be carrying a gun and leading military operations for the FMLN, Serrano says, she might have thought you crazy. But as the government became more intolerant and violent, hundreds of Salvadorenas and Salvadorenos linked up with revolutionaries in hopes of a better life and an end of measures that strangled with country’s underclass.

Credit is due to the filmmakers for avoiding the dewy romanticism that oftentimes accompanies stories of women, particularly mothers, in political movements. Life is hard in El Salvador’s jungles as seen in Maria’s Story. Serrano sardonically talks about the boots she must wear in spite of holes simply because they cost so much. And she and her children, who are with her in the forests out of necessity based on fears of death squads, treat their lives not as a hero’s journey, but a measure of seeking freedom. As Serrano tells the story, El Salvador’s civil war is not about the government versus socialist insurgents, but about economically disadvantaged people who have nothing fighting because they have everything to gain. Even if the fight means giving every child and every drop of blood, Serrano says, the guerrillas of this moment believe they have no choice but to take up weapons and force a change for the Central American nation’s desperately hungry and destitute people. Serrano warmth and devotion to the cause, in spite of the very real military threats guerillas faced in these days, is nothing less than stunning. However, Maria’s Story avoids making this a tale of a woman humanizing the revolution through her gender, but of a fighter humanizing the revolution by seeing what poverty and suffering have wrought upon her people. This approach has a variety of effects, but most notably in Maria’s Story, viewers get a glimpse into a movement where gender is a consideration, but clearly so many women are actively involved in the revolution that relegated roles or gendered assumptions are tossed aside, at least in the film. Serrano effectively articulates the objectives of the revolution of the time, and reminds viewers that the guerrillas’ world is hardly glamorous. That larger purpose, she indicates, pushes them forward despite the miseries they face.

Today, as the Minister of Interior, Serrano is striving to push for meaningful educational reform. She believes that education is a basic human right, and she wants her administration to provide books, food, and supplies for all children to attend school in the country, because the “biggest slavery is to be ignorant.” She tries to work with the governors of all the states across the country to coordinate these efforts. She understands that things are not perfect in El Salvador, but progress is being made. The global recession, storms, dengue fever, and other natural catastophies have made reform difficult. But the government is trying to engage in more community economic development in trying times.

In order for lasting change to occur, she reminds us that it is not “the state that is at the center of change. The person is.”

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