Abstract
Óscar Martínez’s Los muertos y el periodista (2021) is a chronicle of death foretold, albeit unlike García Márquez iconic novel, it is not fiction. A journalist, Martínez suspects that one of his teenage sources named Rudi—a scraggly gang member who has been actively dodging death for a long time—will die at the hands of the rural police or a gang. Either way, it seems to be only a matter of time, as Martínez wrote in a note to himself upon meeting the boy in June 2016. Through various conversations and brief meetings with Rudi, Martínez gets to know the boy and his siblings. The family lives in squalid conditions and constant fear. He wants to help, but it appears that little can be done because the State does not care. What Martínez does not know is that Rudi will not be the only victim in the house: his other two equally young and defenseless brothers will also be snatched from home by more than 10 men who arrive before dawn in a pickup truck in December 2017 (222). Heavily armed, dressed in police gear with their faces covered and no identifying insignias, they take away the three boys, only to abandon the victims’ viciously mutilated and barely recognizable bodies in nearby fields days later.
Known for his first-rate journalism on violence in Northern Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), Martínez in Los muertos y el periodista allows himself to be less objective or invisible than in the traditional journalistic sense. Instead, he shares with us his anguish and frustration while grappling with heart-wrenching questions about the real meaning of his work in the world, about the safety of his sources, and about the bonds journalists build with the people they talk to. The biggest concern is perhaps the question of whether his work makes his sources’ predicament even more serious because he draws attention to it. Is he infuriating the dark forces that oppress them? These are not abstract questions, as each quarry concerns a very vulnerable human being Martínez comes to know intimately.
Martínez’s self-reflection, amply weaved into the main and secondary cases depicted in the book, is a desperate indignation over the inescapable tragedy of underprivileged youth in El Salvador, as well as an indictment of the politicians who sentence them to death through their indifference and corruption, and the police who obliterate entire families in massacres explained away in official discourse as armed confrontations. Similarly, Martínez questions the entire journalistic profession, as many reporters do not bother to confirm the veracity of received versions of events, and sources who are always the disempowered, because the rich and powerful who lurk beneath many injustices simply refuse to talk.
Martínez retraces the history of El Salvador through the prism of its problems with gangs, starting with the 1990 deportation from the US of juvenile Salvadorans, themselves escapees of a civil war financed and exacerbated by the US. In a country with a weak economy and equally ineffective government, the gangs already hardened elsewhere multiplied fast, converting extorsion into the country’s daily reality. Homicide rates also skyrocketed, despite each president’s promises of an iron-fisted intervention that would resolve the gang infestation. Instead, each corrupt president stole and did little to nothing to address the nation’s pervasive social problems. By 2016, armed confrontations had become a daily feature of the news, with multiple fatalities on both sides reported each and every month.
Martínez bemoans a brutal police who make a habit of attacking and killing entire groups of unarmed teens, never bothering to check who they are. All are shot execution-style and then equipped with weapons that the police had confiscated from elsewhere and never had reported. This post-mortem scene rearrangement transforms a massacre on unarmed youth into a more digestible face-off between two equal forces. To a degree, it legitimizes police brutality, turning crooked cops into heroes. The media does not bother to investigate or question this version of events, helping instead to spread the lies and cover-ups by the rote repetition of heard falsehoods.
Of course, it is not that the gang members do not kill the police; the killings occur on both sides. But Rudi, who admits to having killed some alleged gang members, is a kid with little schooling and no chances for betterment. He had escaped death during a police massacre of his gang only because he happened to be in the bathroom when the attack was taking place. Rudi saw from his hideout how the cops executed his buddies with bullets to the back of the head, and then placed guns in their hands, because his group was attacked when unarmed. An inconvenient witness to their cover-up, Rudi was later identified and became their target; his siblings suffered subsequent threats and torture to reveal his wilderness hideout. Eventually placed in prison for his own safety, Rudi ate well and found God, but even there he almost died from the hands of Barrio 18 gang members who tried to infiltrate the prison to eliminate him.
The last section of the book resembles the final passages of Fernando Vallejo’s iconic The Virgin of the Sicarios, when the cultured narrator steps into the morgue to identify the body of his teenage sicario’s boyfriend, Alexis. The aged narrator’s despair over countless young corpses riddled with bullets, their lives cut short before they even began, is a lament over a Colombian nation torn apart by the violence of drug trafficking. Again, unfortunately, in Martínez’s account this very similar scene is no fiction, as he accompanies Rudi’s sister Jessica to reclaim the bodies of her three murdered brothers.
Entire sections of cemeteries the size of soccer fields are filled with graves, where unclaimed corpses are buried in groups of two, awaiting their family members to pick them up. The scene that would be harrowing for Jessica—collecting her brothers’ heavily disfigured bodies—becomes absurd and shocking, as there are more body bags in each grave, and unrelated corpses, brown liquid, or anonymous limbs are found instead. To this, the cemetery officials react with exasperation—this is nothing uncommon and thus nothing worthy of distress, they seem to think. Martínez’s book of the death foretold and then some is lamentation over truncated lives, kids who were dealt a bad hand and never even experienced a moment they could remember fondly. It is an outrage over massacres that no one investigates or protests, mere statistics in a country that continues to destroy itself. The vignettes of ordinary lives and intimate anecdotes counterbalance statistics in Los muertos y el periodista, making the narrative palpable, and readers equally frustrated over these everyday tragedies impacting regular people.