Link to Adam Kufeld's photos of election day in El Salvador

[roody]

Caravana de la Esperanza, March 2009, photo by Adam Kufeld
"The El Salvador Elections 2009 Project is the latest of my social movement photojournalism projects. Its origins go back to San Francisco’s predominantly Latino Mission district in 1978.

Every weekend tables would be set up in the plaza at 24th and Mission Streets where every imaginable political cause would be promoted. I chanced to stop at one of the tables on a Saturday. The ensuing conversation would alter the next 15 years of my life.

I was shown a set of photographs, photographs that were frankly unimaginable. Heads lying amid boulders, heads without bodies. Not one, but many, and other images of torture so inhuman to be almost indescribable. Scores of dead. Images that to this day live in my mind. The reverse side of these photographs bore the stamp of the Archdiocese of San Salvador’s Human Rights Commission. I was told the photographs were of victim’s of the country’s U.S. backed military and right wing death squads. It was really at that moment that this project was born.

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One night we dodged, or rather took cover from unseen, but quite clearly heard mortars, our tax dollars at work. We ate beans and tortillas and little else. The military regularly destroyed any stores of food as part of the same counterinsurgency strategy. We took showers in waterfalls and walked, and walked some more. There were no vehicles, nor electricity or running water.

Once back in the Bay Area, apparently the photographs were good enough and interesting enough to be published not only by the solidarity movement but also by the San Francisco Chronicle and others. Somewhere along the line, someone, possible myself, came up with the idea of a book of photographs. A book that might try and show the complexity of what was happening there. It seemed like a long shot but I had nothing to lose, I showed the photographs to the New York publishing house, W.W. Norton and to my amazement, they said yes, they were very interested and I should just go do it. I got a small advance and I was off.

I returned to the same mountainous area of Chalatenango Province, after all I had been invited back by the leaders of the “Poder Popular Local” or “Local Popular” government and by the residents of our sister city. This trip would be the second of what would be seven more trips. It was the hardest, these “zones of popular control” as they were called, were really only partially controlled by the guerrillas of the FMLN, the army had the advantage of helicopters, C-130 aircraft, troop carriers and more. Again we ate beans and tortillas, and more beans and tortillas, or the occasional iguana. On one occasion we spent 10 days fleeing the army, sleeping in bombed out homes, in much too small hammocks, getting soaked by tropical down pours.

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http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_conte...