The Tiniest Place with a Big History

Luis Colato

Profesora Cynthia Tompkins

FMS 475

28 February 2018

The Tiniest Place’s Big History

I recently watched a documentary called The Tiniest Place also called El Lugar mas pequeno which is a documentary by expert filmmaker Tatiana Huezo. The director interviewed survivors of the war in El Salvador, who have rebuilt a small town in the forest. However, the film is not a montage of "talking heads." Instead, the interviews are layered on top of images of normal life in the village. These two elements of the film, interviews and images, fit together seamlessly. The incredible cinematography is very effective at deepening the emotion of the words. And the movie is filled with emotion. The fear that the people of this village felt is palpable. The images and interviews truly convey an understanding of what the townspeople went through. I could actually feel and understand why a young person would want to go face death and join the guerrillas. Yet fear is not the only emotion in the movie: there is also hope…

Initially going into the film I did not know what it was about so it was rather interesting when the voiceover began and I heard the woman’s voice. I couldn’t help but feel an incredible familiarity to it. Then as the movie went along I realized that this movie was about El Salvador! This was incredible due to the fact that I lived in El Salvador for several years in my early childhood. In total I lived there for a little over 5 years and spoke my first words in El Salvador but since most people speak Spanish, initially that’s the only language I knew how to speak. In El Salvador we have a very particular way of talking, and the salng and accent is usually very pronounced compared to other Latin/ Central American Countries. Now, back to the film. After watching The Tiniest Place I couldn’t help but be filled with an overwhelming sense of curiosity so as to why El Salvador went into civil war, what they were fighting about, and how it ended. Believe it or not, I didn’t really know much about this civil war, probably because of how little I was when I lived there. All I knew and had heard about it was something that my dad had told me he remembered in his early childhood. I remember him telling me that he remembered being at his house and in some cases he would hear constant gunfire all day and all night, going back and forth for several years. However, no one really told me why they fought or what had happened so this is what I wanted to learn more about. So, I am writing this now as sort of a prologue or backstory to this documentary, because I feel like people that watch this, and are unfamiliar with what happened in El Salvador would be confused and not really understand what all the fighting was about.

In the 1980s the small/”tiny” Central American country of El Salvador made world headlines as a key site of struggle in the cold war, and in consequence of its civil war (dated 1980–92) left some 70,000 dead and the economy and society ravaged. The long-term roots of the crisis have been traced to the country’s history of extreme poverty, economic inequality, and political oppression. Important events leading up to the civil war include the 1969 Soccer War with Honduras and the 1932 “Matanza” (Massacre), in which the military and paramilitaries killed upwards of 30,000 people, ushering in an era of military dictatorship that continued to the 1980s. By the mid-1970s numerous leftist revolutionary groups were offering a sustained challenge to military rule, groups that in April 1980 came together to form the revolutionary guerrilla organization Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) otherwise known as the FMLN.

Open civil war erupted soon after July 1979, when the leftist Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Fearing a similar outcome in El Salvador, the U.S. government increased its military aid to the Salvadoran regime, which launched an all-out assault against revolutionary and reformist organizations. From 1979 to 1981, approximately 30,000 people were killed by the military and associated rightwing paramilitaries and death squads. On March 24, 1980, a right-wing death squad assassinated the archbishop of El Salvador, Óscar Romero, after his numerous public denunciations of the military regime and its many human rights violations. After Ronald Reagan became U.S. president in January 1981, U.S. military and economic assistance to the Salvadoran regime skyrocketed. Framing the issue as a cold war battle, and despite much evidence to the contrary, the Reagan administration claimed that the FMLN and its political wing, the FDR (Frente Democrático Revolucionario), were clients of Cuba and the Soviet Union.