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\" ADIÓS A SANDINO\" by Armando Morales, 1989
When my father was 14, he still lived in El Salvador. At the time the economy was a mess, inflation was through the roof and jobs were nowhere to be found. Employers didn’t have money to pay wages or salaries. My grandfather and father did what they had to do provide for the family. My father at this age already dropped out of school. Schooling in El Salvador is useless. School was public up until the 8th grade and passed that there was no point going to high school if one wasn’t planning to head to university, in our capital of San Salvador. My father quit school earlier, at the age of 10 to work with my grandfather, to provide. My father first worked with my grandfather when he was 4, old enough to be of some use. Everyday at dawn, my father ventured with my grandfather into the beautiful mountains, where they did odd jobs for instant cash or spent the day collecting wild fruits and vegetables to sell at the village market or take home for dinner. They did what they had to do to survive. I’ve seen the country firsthand, there are no jobs.
In fact, one of the complaints of Salvadoran immigrants by other Salvadoran immigrants is that they all have issues adjusting to the American economy when they get here. They’re so used to being on edge and scraping for every penny, that many forget that in the United States, you can actually get a job. Many people, in fact, do come here for work, but these 10 dollars/hr jobs are unheard of back in the motherland. They are like a dream come true to immigrants, so much so that the main issue is simply getting migrant workers to stick to one job, something they’re not used to. My father fell into this trap: when he arrived at the states he was 20. He worked in an aquarium, a mechanic shop, construction, you name it. It took my dad 6 years (when I was born) to finally settle down with his wife and newborn son and realize that having just ONE job was the correct order of things in the American job marketplace. He does landscaping now, and has so for the past 20 years, and is now specialized to drive trucks and heavy machinery. Not bad for someone for spent his childhood picking mangoes off of mountain cliffs.
Something else that burns deeply in my father’s memory was the war. My father barely understands it himself. He’s too scared to even talk about it at times. When he was 14 he was sent to the far side of the mountains by the grandpa to collect some tools they left the previous day. My dad couldn’t find the tools at first, and so he accidentally stumbled upon a cave. Inside the cave there was a lightbulb, and so my dad walked down into the cave, and next thing he knew he was being held at gun point. My father stumbled upon a secret rebel radio station. The guerrillas made him swear that he had no allegiance to the government and was not sent as a spy, but after a minute or two all they saw was a scared boy. So they took pity and let him go. They then packed their equipment and moved elsewhere down the mountain.
When my father returned to the village later that day, he was met at gunpoint again, but this time by the National Military Police, holding an assault rifle and demanding that he tells them why he was in the mountains for so long and if he had any affiliation with the guerrillas. My dad pleaded that he saw nothing, too scared that saying the truth would mean death for him. The soldier let him go, not knowing that earlier that morning, my father did, in fact, find the men they were looking for.
There are other stories too that my dad tells me: like the time his friend went into the mountains and accidentally triggered a land mine left by the military. He had a closed casket funeral that next Sunday. News would break out about how the Salvadoran government ordered the massacre of an entire village on the other side of the country, suspected of working with the rebels (they weren’t), and yet my fathers village was one of the most strategic holdings for the rebels for the entirety of the war. My father knew that at any moment, the government could decide to kill everyone he knew around him.
Empires are a fickle thing. They’re hard to look for and hard to imagine that one lives in one. No Jew or Gentile gave a second thought that they lived under the Roman Empire, just so long as they pay taxes to Caesar and their city wasn’t destroyed. But empires in the modern era are deceptive, almost evil.
I know personally how empires work. I live in the United States of America, where I can go to school, get a good job, probably afford health insurance, and buy whatever the f*ck I want at the Walmart, because it’s my money and I worked for it.
But
I am Salvadoran. My home country has more or less been involved in American politics since Teddy Roosevelt. Before him it was the British, and before them our colonizers of the Spanish. The Spanish were brutal: forcing everyone in these countries into peasantry, debt, and in some cases straight up slavery, all for the benefit of Spaniards from the mainland. They had all the money, bought every piece of land that once belonged to great empires of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya, and then forced everyone to work these lands, but to own none of it. What the Spanish did to us still explains conditions in Latin America to this day. The British never did this to Americans, who came to this continent looking specifically for land, and establishing settlements that would become the thirteen colonies. Meanwhile the Spanish put everyone to work and for nothing in return. Generation after generation: father dies but leaves nothing in his will to his sons, because he never had anything. It was all taken from his family in 1492.
All my family has to their name is a single concrete family house in El Salvador. It’s my great grandfather’s house. He built it himself as a young man and then raised my grandfather in it, so then raised my father in it, and then it ends there, because my father moved to the States. It’s actually the only asset my family has to their name in El Salvador. My family is one of the lucky ones to even have a house to our names. Most people rent land and build shacks to sleep in because shelter and roof overheard wasn’t included in the rent for the month.
When the Spanish were overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte, this sent shockwaves to Latin America, who had no loyalty to their new French emperor. One by one, the Spanish colonies of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica declare their independence, without a single exchange of gunfire, for the Spanish at this point were squashed by Napoleon. An independent El Salvador saw the same society that it had under the Spanish: rich noble land owning elites paying low wages to the millions of hungry workers below them. I’d argue that it has always been somewhat like this. Our economy was based monoculture (meaning “one crop”). At times it was añil, which is like cotton and used for textiles, other times it was coffee, a growing commodity in the Modern Age. The landowners needed to sell their products somewhere, and with Spain gone, they looked to the empire that defeated the Spanish Armada: the British Empire. The British Empire militarily occupied parts of Nicaragua and Honduras, even making their own permanent colony of Belize. What did this mean for the people? It meant that the landowners kept the old ways for it was still profitable.
There is a common argument here in the United States that a certain point slavery stopped being profitable, which is why the Northern states industrialized and outlawed slavery, for they preferred wage workers to slaves, less costs overall. Well in El Salvador, this peasantry, this slavery, never stopped being profitable. From empire to the other, from the Spanish to the British, this backwards system of exploiting people by stealing land and then putting them into debt and forcing them to work for you still paid off as long as the British were willing to pay the pretty penny for that coffee. Sometimes empires are self inflicted, but let us remember that the peasants and poor people never had a say in any of these politics. No one voted to sell goods to the British, that was a discussion for only the elites who decided in a plan that would hurt poor people even more. It’s no surprise that these elites still had ties to Spain and not to El Salvador. There we see their true loyalty: to money, and at the costs of everyone’s livelihood. Sometimes these third world countries put themselves into the empires but if you dig deeper, you can see who really made that decision. And then it all makes sense. Shortly after the First World War, the United States became more involved in international politics, and especially those in Latin America. American business moved into Central America where they bought land for the rich elites and essentially used the same system the elites had for many centuries: paying the people low wages and not providing them any social mobility or education or benefits. Sometimes the US government itself intervened, by lending money to the individual nations who then used it to perpetuate the status quo. We lovingly call these nations "banana republics." In El Salvador our exports was coffee: a "coffee republic."
In my country, the working men were getting tired of this backwards economic system. So in the 1930s, they revolted. Half of the country revolt and protested the government, who was at the time led by a military dictatorship who only got into office by force. The response from the government? The government killed 40,000 people to put down an insurrection. This was 1932. We called it “La Matanza,” Spanish for “the slaughter.” The government claimed that the force was necessary to put down what seemed to be a communist revolution, but in fact of those 40,000 dead people, I can bet you that many if not all, never heard about a “Karl Marx” ever in their life. What they wanted was food for their family and for the government and elites to STOP GETTING IN THE WAY OF IT.
The next 50 years were of suppression. People were silenced immediately and everyone continued working m. By this time the country had somewhat industrialized so they old peasants became poor manufacturing workers, if they were lucky. In places like my dads village, although they now had their freedom, they had no jobs around them.
Slowly a second revolt was brewing. The government shut down protests to the war with Honduras, violently, which signaled every leftist guerrilla in the countryside to decide that now was the time to finally overthrow the government.
I can’t tell you if El Salvador would have been better if the communists won. What I can tell you is that things were bad already, and then the government made it worse. The United States at this time was involved in the Cold War, and suspecting that these new guerrillas may have ties to the Soviets, D.C. flooded millions of dollars to the Salvadoran dictatorship to suppress and put down the communist insurrection. The United States military personally trained some of the battalions in the Salvadoran army, with new counter guerrilla warfare strategies and tactics that the Americans learned from Vietnam. These battalions would then go on to become death squads. We had many names for the death squads, and they were feared. Guerrilla or not, they weren’t afraid to shoot anyone in the back of the head in the name of law and order. In reality, the death squads created anarchy, and made the people more sympathetic to the communists. Here was a simple fact: the communist guerrillas, although they lived amongst the people and were printed in the news as being terrorists, never executed a civilian. The Salvadoran government on the other hand though, every week there would stories of death squads breaking into peoples home and murdering them in front of their children. These children then took shelter in the orphanages that the communists ran. The communists had shelter for refugees and orphans, people who had to escape war or lost everything in it. They provided schooling and taught many for the first time how to read and write. The guerrillas were on volunteer basis, if you didn’t want to join the ranks, you didn’t have to, but you were always welcomed to stay as long as you wanted. Many of these people eventually found their way into Honduras to escape the war, and some even made the daring and perilous journey to the USA. It wasn’t hard for the Salvadoran people to pick a side: one side wanted the best for you and the other side had no issue murdering you and your entire family for political gain.
When I read about the war, I see a culmination of centuries of oppression onto a people. And when those people had enough, they were murdered. Around 80,000 people were killed. 5,000 people went missing and still are. Half of the country was displaced and had to move homes. And finally, 500,000 Salvadorans decided that they had enough, and left the country.
I see an empire in the work, and just like how the Romans had to put down peasant revolts regularly, the Salvadoran government, under direction and aid of the American Empire, did what empires always do in history; they oppress and kill. We’ve all see Star Wars. And before the Americans, it was the British, and before them, the Spanish, and before them the Aztecs, and before then we don’t know but I must assume that this sh*t never ends. Not until the people revolt, and revolt successful.
I mean, that’s how the Americans did it. They were being oppressed by the British Empire so they revolted and forcefully removed themselves from the equation. And look at how America is now. It’s only ironic at the Americans would then go around and used it’s wealth and influence to dominate other smaller countries, kind of like how the British treated them before 1776.
This is imperialism: a system in which a more developed nation either directly or indirectly controls an underdeveloped nation who cannot defend itself or have any sway in the argument, and to the benefit of a small elite in the nation. This is usually through military force, but sometimes it’s economic and is more akin to a trade empire. Indian princes swore allegiance to the Crown to establish the British Raj, all without a vote or election, no voice at all for the people, who then had to take matters into their own hands. African warlords supported the slave trade and sacrificed their morals for a quick buck. Look at how imperialism turns brother against brother, a nation onto itself. And the only people who suffer are the starving masses of the underdeveloped nation, who have two choices: fight or flee.
My country chose fight.

College friend of mine found this in a pawn shop for under $200. It's an unbranded 6-string unlined fretless with two soapbar humbuckers, but controls & jack work just inconsistently enough to not gig with it.
Probably someone's garage project from budget eBay parts. Its shapes remind me of Yamaha basses.
More strings, less assistance. Everything about this says "high bar of entry." I can see why it wasn't played much.
He gave it to me recently after it sat around under-used for years. Said he'd love to see how I'd hotrod it.
Now it's finally time for Dr. Frankenstein to make a monster.
I don't want to waste effort chasing boutique hand-crafted standards. I know this bass'll never play like those. So I wanna aim for unique, unconventional, even ugly but usable, attention grabbing, & hopefully versatile.
What're the weirdest things I could do?
I've been looking at unconventional pickup choices, chaos pads, built in effects, & nothing seems weird enough.