Isabel Allende’s latest novel “The wind knows my name”
This novel is about Anita, a girl child from El Salvador and Samuel, a Jewish boy from Austria who are orphaned because of the violence perpetrated by Mara gangs and Nazi thugs. The Salvadorean kid suffers further physical and emotional trauma in the American border security system of separating the children from their parents who try to enter US illegally.
This novel is about Anita, a girl child from El Salvador and Samuel, a Jewish boy from Austria who are orphaned because of the violence perpetrated by Mara gangs and Nazi thugs. The Salvadorean kid suffers further physical and emotional trauma in the American border security system of separating the children from their parents who try to enter US illegally.
Anita’s family has a precarious and dangerous life in a slum in El Salvador where rival criminal gangs fight and cause misery to the residents. Anita’s mother is harassed by a security guard involved in human trafficking. She escapes taking Anita with her. She tries to enter US through the Mexican border. The US authorities catch her and separate the mother and daughter. They put the daughter in a detention centre and deport the mother to Mexico. The mother is eventually killed by the security guard. Anita suffers abuse and ill-treatment by the guards and the private contractors who run the detention centres. She is rescued by Selena, a volunteer working with such separated kids. Anita gets asylum to stay in US.
Anita is sent to her aunt Leticia, working as house keeper in a large mansion in San Francisco. Leticia was born in a remote Salvadorian village called as El Mozote. When she falls sick in the village, her father takes her to the hospital in the city. When he returns, his family and the other villagers have been massacred brutally by the military which wanted to teach a lesson to the indigenous people for their alleged sympathies to the leftist guerilla fighters. He then decides to leave the country and tries to enter US illegally carrying his daughter on his back. He is caught and deported to Mexico while Leticia is lucky to get asylum. She finds work as a house keeper in the San Francisco mansion.
Samuel’s parents in Austria are sent to their death in concentration camps by the Nazis. However, they let the boy go to England, arranged by a charity organization along with other kids separated from their parents. The boy goes through series of foster homes and ultimately ends up with a caring family. He studies music and goes to US to join the San Francisco orchestra. The hippie daughter of a rich family marries him but later she divorces and dies leaving a large house for Samuel. His house keeper Leticia is the aunt of Anita. Samuel who has suffered as an orphan is moved by the story of Anita, lets her stay in his house and teaches her music.
Isabel Allende, the author has fictionalized the real life tragedies suffered by Jews under Nazis and the sufferings of the indigenous people in El Salvador during the civil war in the eighties during the Reagan era. El Mozote massacre happened actually in December 1981. Allende rightly blames the US which supported the military dictatorship in El Salvador and trained their security forces to fight ruthlessly against leftists.
The US is responsible, to a large extent, for the civil wars in Central America. To protect and promote the commercial interests of the American corporations in the region, the US administration had converted the Central American countries as ‘banana republics’ by undermining democracies and encouraging and installing right wing military dictatorships. In 1954, CIA overthrew the democratically elected leftist government of Arbenz in Guatemala and installed pro-US military dictatorship. The immediate reason for the coup was the Guatemalan government’s land reforms which affected the interests of United Fruit Company, the single largest land owner in Guatemala and which had over three million acres of land in Central America. Incidentally, Che Guavara got his anti-imperialistic revolutionary inspiration after seeing personally the destruction of the Guatemalan democracy by the US. Using the pretext of anticommunism, the US had forced the governments and security agencies of Central America to persecute leftist parties and liberals. When Sandinistas came to power in 1979 after defeating the US-supported Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration turned its guns against Nicaragua and involved the other Central American countries too in the dirty and illegal “ Contra War” against the Sandinista government. The US sent arms, trained local militias and paramilitary death squads and waged an all-out war to hurt Nicaragua and tried to bring about regime change. These atrocities of US destabilized Central America causing deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
During the civil war, over a million people had fled to US to escape the violence. Many of them went to Los Angeles. Unable to fit in the social milieu, the poor and marginalised illegal immigrant youth joined the criminal gangs in LA. The Reagan administration denied refugee status to these Central American immigrants, who were forced into clandestine lives. In the nineties, the US authorities cracked down on the gangs and deported thousands of the gang members to Central America. But many of the deported, who were born or brought up in US, found it difficult to adjust in Central America and continued with their LA gang culture. They regrouped themselves locally with guns smuggled from US and scaled up their crimes, taking advantage of the weak law enforcement and justice system of these countries.
El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in Central America have the highest homicide rates in the world caused by gangs such as Maras and Barrio-18, who originated from Los Angeles. The rivalry between these two became so violent at one stage in 2012, the government of El Salvador intervened and brokered a ceasefire between the rival gangs. In order to bring the two sides to the negotiating table, the government relaxed conditions in the prisons in which the members of the two gangs were held. Following this peace deal, the murder rate had dropped immediately. But this truce broke down in 2014 and crime has gone up again. Earlier this month about 50 women prisoners were killed in the fight between female gangsters in a prison in Honduras.
The Central American gangsters and Mexican cartels use guns illegally trafficked from the US. But the US, which complains about trafficking of drugs from Latin America, does not do anything to stop the trafficking of weapons to Mexico and Central America. There are about 7000 gun shops in the US side of the 2000 mile border with Mexico. These are the sources of guns which kill hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans every year.
The flood of illegal immigrants from El Salvador as well as Guatemala and Honduras is the harvest US is reaping for sowing the seeds of destabilization and violence.
