This book is the fruit of an extraordinary coming together of two very different people. One was a burgeoning poet living in Southern California, the other a coffee-growing entrepreneur turned political activist from El Salvador. Wanting more people to know about the disaster that was beginning to befall his country in the turbulent late 1970s, Leonel Gómez Vides turns up at the home of Carolyn Forché, who is a friend of a relative of his, to persuade her to visit and learn about El Salvador, a country of which she knows almost nothing.

As extraordinary as the meeting is, perhaps, her apparently reckless decision to accede to Leonel’s request. She travels to San Salvador, and then begins a kind of wild learning experience, in which she sees the extremes of poverty and wealth, and the extremes of comfort and horrific violence, that characterised El Salvador (and indeed, much of Central America) at the time. She takes notes of her experiences, collects them, makes friends, escapes danger and near death (twice), loses friends and neighbours to the pervading violence, and survives to tell the tale, much later.

Forché, aged 27, with a Puebla indian in New Mexico (from the New York Times)

It is difficult to say that Forché’s book had the impact that Gómez Vides hoped for – after all, the US continued to finance the horrific repression in the region for the whole of the 1980s. As well as Forché’s account, which in any case was published much later, there were news stories of horrors like the appalling massacre at El Mozote, even if they were delayed and incomplete.

But the book is nevertheless very valuable and eminently readable, although the reader needs a strong stomach to handle the scenes of violence (one can only imagine how they affected the author, not to mention the victims and their families, of course). Here is an innocent bystander, with practically no prior knowledge or experience, deliberately being plunged into what quickly becomes a nightmare. We do not, perhaps, find out overmuch about her feelings in response to this, but we do accompany her as she learns more and more, begins to speak more Spanish, becomes more aware and more cautious of her surroundings and how to stay safe, while never, it seems, holding back from seeing and documenting some of the worst horrors of what would soon become a civil war. As she puts it, she is forced to move from “one constellation of understanding and perception to another”.

Inevitably, we hear about US indifference to and active engagement in the violence, even when it involves the killing of US citizens. Forché handles this subtly, though, letting us experience her growing awareness after her initial assumptions that US officials will be interested in protecting human rights, are proved to be false. One telling example, if not one of the extreme ones, is the female official who declaims enthusiastically the projects they are financing in the countryside, only for Forche to be told that it is very unlikely that this official ever leaves the city.

Equally telling are the attitudes of the Salvadoran officials who believe that Forché must have some influence with Washington, just because she is a respectable-looking gringa whose visits to the US embassy suggest she has important connections. Clearly they expect Washington’s help in dealing with insurgents, and are confused by the US’s apparent insistence that they must observe the human rights of their victims. In time, of course, they realise that this concern is a charade.

Leonel Gómez Vides (from the New York Times)

Leonel Gómez Vides remains a mysterious, enigmatic figure, throughout the story, his roles unclear as he appears to move seamlessly between high society and the military high command on the one hand, and the desperate campesinos trying to make ends meet and avoid being killed, on the other. The reader is left wishing there had been more about him in an epilogue, especially as he died years before the book was published. However, perhaps he remained an enigma to Forché too: clearly their relationship was complex, paternalistic on his part at first, but evolving as Forché learned to “become her own person”.

Her description of this personal evolution speaks to the experience of all of us who have become politically involved in the struggles of Central America. Whether our role changes anything is debateable, but what is not debateable is the way that Central America has changed us.

A final note on the book is that, as it happens, I have been reading it while the current century’s most horrific act of collective violence has been in progress – the US-assisted genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. A comment from Gómez, remembered by Forché, is just as pertinent now as it was then: “I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here,” he tells her. “For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”