Latin America
Related: About this forumMother Jones - El Salvador's Children of War
Photographer Donna De Cesare spent decades amid brutal conflict, refugees, and violent gangs. Photographs by Donna De Cesare. Text by Jeremy Lybarger
Part of what made the war so complicated, at least for US interests, was the ultimatum it seemed to present: Defeat the guerillas at any cost or lose the country to communism. In the twilight of the Cold War, any threat of a domino effect in the regionNicaragua had already fallen to the Sandinistaswas too ominous for Washington to bear. By backing El Salvador's right-wing junta and, by extension, its paramilitary death squads, the United States created a conundrum for journalists: how to document a war whose maneuvers and motivations were kept deliberately murky?
Photographer Donna De Cesare traveled to El Salvador in 1987 to "witness and report on war, with all the earnest idealism and naïvete of youth," as she puts it in her new photo book Unsettled/Desasosiego. What she couldn't have known at the time was how the experience would shape the next 20 years of her life. She visited refugee camps in Honduras, Jesuit killings on the campus of Central American University, a morgue in Guatemala City. Her worklike that of Larry Towell and Susan Meiselasis essential to understanding a chapter in Central America's history that is too often whitewashed or denied.
De Cesare's work is essential to understanding a chapter in Central America's history that is too often whitewashed or denied.
Full photo essay: http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2013/04/donna-decesare-el-salvador/death-squads
Vinnie From Indy
(10,820 posts)Thanks!
Judi Lynn
(160,542 posts)what's behind the events, situations they don't understand.
This book would be a good introduction which just might move some people to start opening their eyes, and awakening to the far deeper reality which has been all around them all this time without their knowledge, kept from them, disguised, whitewashed, or downright misrepresented by their own corporate "news" media, and the history taught to them in public schools.
Who could resist such an enormous, overwhelming experience which could open for them, for their spirits, and minds through careful reflection in studying a book like this one.
Time for people to slow down, realize the goals many pursue are empty ones, and the bigger picture is the one which counts.
Thank you, Polly. Rec.