I’m back in El Salvador for the first time in thirty years, and I don’t recognize a thing. There are smooth highways from the airport up to San Salvador, the capital, and even at this late hour, along the stretch of dunes dividing the road from the Pacific Ocean, there are cheerful stands at which customers have parked to buy coconuts and típico foods. But I remember a pitted two-lane road, a merciless sun that picked out every detail on the taut skin of corpses, a hole in the sandy ground, the glaring news that four women from the United States, three of them nuns, had just been unearthed from that shallow pit.
The neighborhood and the road are both called Montreal, and they are notorious. Last year a Montreal public transport bus making the trip to the center of Mejicanos was set on fire as it reached the Mejicanos market. Seventeen people burned to death.
-NYbooks
