In El Salvador

AHUACHAPAN--The vultures circle. The vultures circle. The vultures circle in the pale sky above the baked and beaten earth and the twistd limbs of the jocote trees and their meager harvest. The vultures circle over this narrow isthmus connecting two great continents. It is almost all mountains and canyons here, wrinkled and jagged as if broader flat plains were crushed together by the fist of some drunken god.
We stand on a steep hillside overlooking the Rio Paz, The River of Peace. On the other side of that river the mountains are called Guatemala instead of El Salvador. You can imagine midnight crossings, refugees going either way, trying to escape the war in their land by entering the war of another.
The vultures circle and you imagine they hope for the ´92 peace accords fail, for the hills and valleys to agin be strewn with the charnal feast of the dissapeared, for anarchy again to be loosed in a blood dimmed tide.