March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Missionary seeks to share truth about 10-year war in El Salvador

Sam Hawkins met Eric in a San Salvador orphanage when Eric was only a few months old. Malnutrition, parasites and infection already had wreaked havoc on his tiny body.

“The skin just hung on his frame like leather,” Hawkins remembers. Like thousands of other victims of El Salvador’s 10-year war, Eric was dying.

Hawkins, a self-styled missionary along with his wife, Julie, took Eric to their San Salvador home. The couple fed the boy. Following the instructions of a doctor, they gave him 40 injections of antibiotics “in a leg no bigger than my thumb,” according to Hawkins. It took two months to nurse Eric back to health.

Today Eric is a healthy 3-year-old, living with his adopted parents — Dave and Sigrid Marden — and siblings in Bangor. The Mardens flew Hawkins to Maine last week to visit Eric.

“He’s a beautiful child,” said Hawkins. “Those big brown eyes.”

For the Hawkinses, Eric also marked the beginning of a new career. After three years of building houses and offering other kinds of help to churches in El Salvador, the Hawkinses began to take in children from orphanages, nurse them to health and connect them with adoption agencies that would place the children in homes around the world. In the last three years, they have cared for 35 children, as many as nine at a time.

Like many Americans who have spent time in El Salvador, Hawkins has seen the suffering that the country’s protracted civil war has brought. He has seen the destruction. He has seen the killed and the maimed. He has seen, over and over, the children who are victims.

“They are abandoned. They are deserted,” he said. “I call them the throwaway babies.”

Like many Americans returning from El Salvador, Hawkins comes to Bangor bearing a political message.

But unlike many, Hawkins is determined to show his countrymen that the villains in El Salvador are not the government and the army, but the rebels.

“The truth has been twisted, and it has given the guerrillas a Robin Hood image,” Hawkins said. “The Ed Asners, the Hollywood actors that march around, have no idea what’s going on.”

Most of all, Hawkins said, the media have got it wrong. In some cases intentionally, in some cases unwittingly, reporters promote the leftist point of view, according to Hawkins. “I read a story like that, and if it didn’t say `El Salvador,’ I wouldn’t know it was the same country I live in.”

He said the rebels are nothing more than terrorists, who do most of their damage to private property, and hurt innocent civilians more than anybody.

“They plant mines in the cotton fields and the coffee fields,” Hawkins said. “Some worker steps out there and blows off a foot or a leg. That’s insidious; it’s like a cancer on the country.”

“The army is very well-liked down there,” Hawkins said. “People support the army.”

That message comes at a time when American public support for the Salvadoran government has ebbed to an all-time low, when many U.S. churches and other non-profit organizations have denounced El Salvador’s official institutions for human-rights violations.

For years, U.S. media have reported Salvadoran governmental abuses. A Washington Post investigation in 1988 alleged that government-supported death squads have kidnapped, tortured and murdered thousands of civilians.

More recently, media outlets ranging from the New Yorker magazine to “60 Minutes” have suggested that the Salvadoran government is trying to cover up its involvement in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

Even Congress, which has spent an estimated $1 billion on military aid to El Salvador over the last decade, balked this fall, tying future aid to progress in negotiating with the rebels. Hawkins, however, says that strong U.S. support is now more crucial than ever to El Salvador.

Hawkins acknowledged the presence of death squads, but said the blame should be shared. “There are death squads on both sides,” he said.

He recognized that the killing of the Jesuit priests has swayed American opinion against the Salvadoran army, but he blamed it instead on renegade soldiers acting outside of their orders.

“Murder is murder and I don’t care if the good guys did it or the bad guys did it — it is wrong,” Hawkins said.

“It will be taken care of,” he said. “You can’t expect a president to go in there and clean up this mess overnight. It needs a change of heart, and changes of the heart take time.”

Hawkins said he has met with current El Salvador President Alfredo Cristiani, and he believes Cristiani is a good man. More importantly, he said, he lives with the destruction the guerrilla forces cause every day, and it makes him angry.

Before he moved to El Salvador, Hawkins worked in real estate in Texas. Then in 1985, he became an evangelical Christian and decided to open his mission in El Salvador. He said he went to El Salvador with little idea where it was, much less what politics were involved.

But he added that once he began to see utility poles knocked down, bridges blown up and peasants killed by the rebels, his political view began to form.

Hawkins acknowledged that for Americans thousands of miles away from El Salvador, it is difficult to assess what is actually happening, and who is at fault.

“I would like to say, don’t believe a word I’m saying,” he added. “I’m saying, come down to El Salvador and see for yourself.”

For Hawkins, it is time to return to El Salvador himself. He wants to buy a larger building for his work with children, and train more Salvadorans in the care of malnourished children. Ultimately, he would like his mission to be self-sustaining so that when he and his wife return to the United States, the work goes on.

The children, he said, are still the most important task — Alberta, who weighed 3.5 pounds at 2 months of age; Moses, who weighed only 12 pounds after a year and a half of life; Martha, who survived tuberculosis and now lives comfortably in Maryland.

But he added that he cannot resist trying to tell the story of El Salvador’s war as he sees it.

“Isn’t that the American way?” he asked. “If your neighbor is hurting, don’t you take up for them?”


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like