Reclaiming Voices: Notes on a New Female Practice in Journalism

Abstract

I'd been in El Salvador two weeks and I was walking home one day when I heard shots. There were tanks all along the block, and some fifty soldiers and police. They had mortars, machine guns, and they were attacking one house in particular. It was incredible, because they had all this trained on just one house, and the only thing you could hear coming from inside the house were the shots of a small caliber pistol. Then the shots from inside were heard no more. Everything grew quiet. The smoke cleared and the first group of policemen and journalists entered the house. There was a young man dead in the bathroom. And there was a woman, maybe forty or forty-five, wearing an apron and with a kerchief around her head. She was lying in a pool of blood.... I was the only woman in the group, and the only journalist from the U.S. who had stayed in El Salvador for more than a couple of days that month. And I just couldn't believe what happened next: the Chief of Police went into another room and got a machine gun. He knelt beside the older woman and placed it in her hand. "This was the weapon, this was the machine gun she used against us," he said. He got a box of bullets, unused bullets still wrapped in paper, and he threw them on the floor on top of her blood. "Those were her bullets," he said. And the international press took photos and they said, "Right, right," and they took notes: " ... she had a machine gun, she was shooting at the Government Forces, terrorist, guerrilla" and so on (Ann Nelson, quoted in Randall, 1985: 56).