THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
STRANGE STATESMEN The General in his labyrinth
In the last of three pieces about strange Latin American leaders, SD TUCKER remembers the reclusive Theosophical ‘warlock of the blue waters’, whose authoritarian rule over El Salvador was as bizarre as it was bloodthirsty – unless you were lucky enough to have been born an ant.
Over the last two articles, we have been recalling a speech given by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez after winning 1982’s Nobel Prize for Literature in which he talked of the power held by the omnipotent military dictator, or caudillo, over the life and legends of Latin America. Undoubtedly, Márquez left the weirdest such dictator until last, sketching General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1882-1966) as being “the Theosophical despot of El Salvador, who had 30,000 peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarletfever.” 1
PEASANT-SHOOTING SEASON
Given such a build-up, you would expect General Martínez to be better known. However, when news broke that he had been stabbed to death by his driver, Cipriano Morales, while living in exile in Honduras on 15 May 1966, most non-Salvadorans had never even heard of him. The assassin had a rather clearer memory: Morales’s own father had been one of the former President’s many victims. The specific trigger for the attack was that Martínez, ever the martinet, had apparently refused to pay Morales his wages that week on account of the driver being drunk, but the murder still stood as a kind of belated revenge against the retired 84-year-old dictator on behalf of an entire, traumatised nation.
Martínez came to power in 1931 as a result of a coup by El Salvador’s armed forces. He already held office as VicePresident in the government of President Arturo Araujo, who had demonstrated an inept handling of the tiny nation’s economy, leading to soldiers and officers not being paid. Problems had begun in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash, which led to a drop in US demand for El Salvador’s main export of coffee, a crop then accounting for 90 per cent of foreign income. Wages among coffee workers collapsed, as did revenue for landowners. With Communists busy agitating among the downtrodden proletariat on the coffee farms, who toiled for but a few cents per day, the army thought they had better get their own revolution in first, and installed General Martínez as the region’s latest caudillo.
Naturally, Martínez gave the military their back-pay, but he also needed support from the influential landowning classes, whose workers were restless. When in January 1932 a major peasant rebellion finally broke out, Martínez wasted no time in consolidating his position by ordering an immediate policy of mass-murder. Anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 “Communists” were summarily shot and dumped in mass graves during what came to be known as La Matanza (‘The Great Slaughter’); most of them had never even heard of Karl Marx, but all of them were only too familiar with the horrors of hunger and poverty. The peasants, armed with machetes, were no match for Martínez’s machine guns and rifles, and the General took full advantage of the situation to more or less wipe out the country’s troublesome native Pipil Indian population, who had joined the coffee-workers’ revolt, and their supposedly ‘backward’ culture. Essentially this was genocide, with perhaps 2.5 per cent of El Salvador’s entire population being killed in one fell swoop. Overnight, El Salvador’s main industry had changed from coffee to coffins, with even women and children being shot to ensure the Indian race could never rise again. Worse, the General seemed proud of what he had done. When one Pipil rebel leader, Feliciano Ama, was taken away to be hanged, local schoolchildren were given a free outing to the lynching as a special treat on the President’s orders, while photographers
captured the event for all eternity – images of the execution even later featured on the country’s postage stamps.
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MADMAN AND THE ANTS
A strict teetotal vegetarian, the Theosophist General was often accused of caring more about the lives of animals than humans, but to him this was a totally logical stance. The often paradoxical influence of Martínez’s beliefs over his conduct is summed up in the following pithy but callous maxim given out in one of the many weekly radio speeches he delivered to the nation: “It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, because a man who dies is reincarnated, while an ant dies forever. By this logic, General Martínez would never hurt a fly – and he really did value the lives of his beloved ants. Prior to politics, Martínez had dabbled in farming, but ants kept eating his crops. Instead of eliminating the insects, he had the idea of planting his seeds several feet underground, well below the ants’ usual domain… and also well below the level at which crops can actually grow, thus ruining the harvest.
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His public assertions about the rights of ants were, in a twisted way, somewhat in line with Theosophical belief – the religion does preach a doctrine of reincarnation
– but sceptical listeners might also have discerned certain practical political benefits to Martínez’s statements. While acting as a warning to all potential non-insect opponents that he stood ready to kill them without delay, they also simultaneously made the man behind La Matanza seem kinder than he really was; for was it not likely that when all those dead Indians were reborn, it would be into a better world? “Democracy,” Martínez once said, “is love” – and, as a committed democrat, the General’s love for his people was literally boundless. In 1935, he helped spread this love further by ensuring that he was the only candidate on the ballot, thus winning 100 per cent of the vote; in 1939, he simply announced that, for no apparent reason, that year’s upcoming election had unexpectedly already taken place, and that he had won by a landslide. The fact that nobody could remember voting in it was a mystery not worth exploring.
Consider also the time that El Presidente
airily declined an offer from a well-off local American landowner to provide free
“HAVE SNAKES, SPIDERS AND HORSES A SENSE OF BEAUTY?”
sandals to the many ill-shod children in the country’s underfunded schools. “It is good that children go barefoot,” he lectured the disappointed donor. “That way they can better receive the beneficial effluvia of the planet, the vibrations of the Earth. Plants and animals don’t use shoes.” Looked at this way, the poverty which prevailed across the land was really doing Martínez‘s shoeless subjects a favour by boosting their health and wellbeing. “Why does a man smile to himself when he is walking down the street? Because of the power of spirit over matter,” he sermonised via the radio-waves. Other unlikely claims made by General Martínez that “the Invisible Legions follow me”, whispering word of all plots into his ear, and that he enjoyed telepathic contact with the US President, served the happy function of making his feared secret police apparatus sound even more terrifyingly efficient than it really was. On the other
A Pipil man marches to the Salvadoran Congress in 2013 to demand recognition of the existence of ethnic groups in El Salvador.
hand, some of his speeches (relating to topics as diverse as “democracy, intestinal parasites, Theosophy, black magic, sport, fruit-trees, body-hygiene, World War, kidney-problems [and the] inner peace of man”, according to one account)
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were so odd you suspect he meant every word of them. What, for example, could have been his ulterior motive in broadcasting his many astonishing new breakthroughs in the field of science to the world? In one such radio address, the General proudly announced his discovery of something called ‘super-vapour’, though he was quite vague about what precisely this substance was. “If water is heated, vapour results,” he explained. “What, then, would super-vapour be like? Even though you have not seen it, in reality it exists.” Sometimes, he set weird, unanswerable questions, which he then proceeded to try and respond to himself, on account of his superior genius. “Have snakes, spiders, and horses a sense of beauty?” he once asked the nation, gnomically. “Biologists have only discovered five senses,” he told his listeners on another occasion, “but in reality, there are 10. Hunger, thirst, procreation, urination and bowel-movements are the senses not included in the list.”
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Perhaps this was because the General, again in line with Theosophist thinking, believed in the continuing evolution of the human race. In a rare interview with the travel writer John Gunther, the reclusive Martínez once explained that he was indeed an “evolutionist”, something he used to justify the fact that, in practice, he ruled El Salvador as a dictator, rather than the ‘democrat’ he posed as. He was, he insisted, “a democratic idealist”, but pointed out sadly that the majority of his own people had not yet evolved spiritually, morally or mentally enough for them to be entrusted with the freedom of real voting rights, only fake ones. “Democracy imposes obligations on citizens as well as giving them privileges,” he explained; privileges which the shoeless Mestizos (the mixed-race, half-Spanish, half-Indian folk who made up most of the working-class), who had
evidently not yet absorbed enough positive Earth-energies through their bare feet, would not be granted. Actually a Mestizo
6 himself, you might be forgiven for thinking that the highly evolved General had a little bit of racial self-loathing hidden away somewhere within his psyche, like one of those excessively committed Nazis who later turned out to have been part-Jewish.
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BLUE-SKY THINKER
Due to its tropical blue skies, El Salvador turned out to be a rather propitious place for further human evolution to occur, given all the positive vibes beamed down to Earth every day from above. So devoted was Martínez to sun-worshipping that he began every day by going outside and staring directly at the fiery, retina-shredding ball for several minutes at a time without blinking. Rather than making him blind, he claimed this distinctly dangerous method had helped cure his short-sightedness. In photos, the
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General is rarely seen wearing glasses, so perhaps the cure worked. If so, then he had to thank the “invisible doctors” he was in contact with via the regular séances held at his Presidential Palace in San Salvador, who had given him the tip in the first place. I am unsure if these sages were meant to be the ghosts of dead medics, as in the Brazilian tradition of psychic-surgery, or else some kind of Mahatma-like ‘Hidden Master’-type beings of the kind that Theosophy’s founder, Madame Blavatsky ( FT302:32-37), claimed to have been in regular psychic contact with; but whatever they were, they had a very loose attitude towards medical ethics.
Most infamously, the invisible doctors had advised El Maestro, as he liked to be known, upon the use of so-called aguas azules, or ‘blue waters’. This was ordinary water, sealed up within special bottles made of blue glass, and then left around the courtyard of the Presidential Palace to soak up the rays of the life-giving South American sun. When filtered through the blue glass, these beneficial radiations would supposedly cause the very molecular structure of the water itself to alter in some way, lending it amazing curative qualities. No matter what ailments his acquaintances were suffering from – including cancer – Martínez would offer them bottles of his famed blue waters instead of actual medicine, a panacea he also promoted on his radio show. If any underlings wanted to stay in favour, they had to swallow the Master’s home-made pills and potions, no matter how bitter. Some people were only too happy to do so; in 2009, Martínez’s 96-year-old sister-in-law gave an interview in which she credited her long life to drinking fluids from magic blue receptacles. Because of such follies, the socalled Maestro actually became known to his people as el brujo de las aguas azules, or ‘the warlock of the blue waters’. Martínez himself was totally sincere in his belief that blue really was the colour. When his youngest son was dying from appendicitis, he refused point-blank to let surgeons anywhere near him, instead following the ghost-doctors’ advice to give the boy plenty to drink and let nature take its course. When the poor lad later died screaming in agony, his father refused to admit the foolishness of his actions. Mere humans “must not intervene in the impenetrable designs of nature,” he shrugged, an assessment with which his furious wife did not necessarily agree. Very soon, the sound of smashing blue glass could be heard echoing all across the Presidential Palace.
Martínez’s attitude towards major public health crises was equally colourful. When a smallpox (or scarlet-fever or measles, in some accounts) epidemic broke out across San Salvador, his idea of a ‘cure’ was to set up the strangest Red Light Zone of all time. Rejecting all offers of medical aid, and scorning proven modern methods of preventing further spread of the disease, Martínez ordered that all the street-lamps in the city be covered with sheets of red cellophane, in order to “purify the environment” and kill off all the lurking germs – an insane measure that cannot have improved the General’s standing with his public, no matter what rose-tinted explanations he later offered.
9 The ultimate source of Martínez’s beliefs would have been books by quack ‘doctors’ like General Augustus J Pleasonton’s 1876 The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and the Blue Color of the Sky (published on
blue paper for extra therapeutic effect) and Dr Seth Pancoast’s imitative Blue and Red Light: Or, Light and Its Rays as Medicine (printed in blue ink with a red page-border in 1877). Pancoast himself was a notable early Theosophist, directly acquainted with Madame Blavatsky herself.
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THE PENDULUM SWINGS
There can be no doubt that such deadly lunacy on their leader’s part helped turn the people of El Salvador against the socalled ‘Machine-Gun Theosophist’. As time passed, Martínez began taking the concept of limited government to its limits, spending days locked away inside the labyrinthine Presidential Palace and messing about with a supposed ‘magic’ pendulum. Before each meal, he would dangle his device over his food and observe its movements, thus evaluating its natural vitamin content and testing it for poison. At other times, he would swing it over maps, hunting out the locations of buried treasure and soon-to-beburied political opponents.
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Martínez’s earlier rule did feature some achievements, of sorts. He got the public finances on a sound footing. He eliminated the national debt, slashed inflation, established El Salvador’s first Central Bank, ran a surplus, and made the currency strong again… all while underfunding publicservices and letting the poor go hang. Even these financial feats were sullied by rumours of sorcery, with a Macbeth- like legend arising that the Mestizo woman formerly depicted on the country’s 5 colónes banknote was, in fact, a witch whom Martínez had once consulted to see if his coup would really succeed. She said it would, giving him the courage to proceed. Years later, he was meant to have returned to the Weird Sister and asked her to name her reward; inexplicably, she decided what she wanted above all else was to be depicted on a banknote. The note in question shows a generic smiling peasantwoman carrying a basket of fruit on her head, so I doubt the tale is true.
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What is true is that by 1944, when Martínez announced that he felt like staying in power for another term unopposed, his people were furious. He put down one attempted revolt by violent means, so the population tried a different tack and everyone from dentists to theatre technicians simply stayed at home in what became known as ‘The Strike of Fallen Arms’. With nobody out on the streets to actually shoot or arrest, Martínez’s forces – just about the only employees who had turned up for work – were unsure what to do. One daring newspaper began printing ridiculously untrue but undeniably positive headlines about Martínez’s rule, such as “WATER SO PLENTIFUL IN VILLAGES THAT IT FLOWS IN VERITABLE CASCADES”, which the censors felt unable to criticise even though everyone was laughing at them, making El Maestro seem even more ridiculous. The editor was shot and wounded as a warning, but it did no good. Eventually, a humiliated Martínez agreed to step down and sought refuge in neighbouring Guatemala, whose own dictator, Jorge Ubico, had attended military college with the General. However,
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Ubico was also soon overthrown by popular demand, and Martínez had to flee first to the USA, and then to Honduras, where he died a deserved death in 1966, after sustaining a series of knife-wounds not even his remaining supplies of mystical blue water could salve – a case of ‘Magician, heal thyself!’
My main source was the chapter ‘Sharpshooting Theosophist’ in William Krehm, Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean in the 1940s, Lugus Libros, 1999, pp.3-17. Any unreferenced details or quotes taken from here.
1 Speech at www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/ laureates /1982/ marque z-lecture. html; General Martínez was one of the models for the ageing composite caudillo- figure depicted by Márquez in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. 2 Krehm, 1999, pp.7-8; Roy Boland, Culture and Customs of El Salvador, Greenwood Press, 2001, pp .26-27; https://perezia. wordpress. com/2016/05/09/teosofia-genocidio-y-aguasazules/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_ Salvadoran_ peas ant_ massacre. Such violent excesses led to Martínez’s memory being resurrected during the Salvadoran Civil War of 1979-1992 by a far-right paramilitary death-squad calling themselves the ‘General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Brigade’.
3 Krehm, 1999, p.7
4 https://perezia.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/ teosofia-genocidio-y-aguas-azules/
5 Quotes taken from Robert Armstrong & Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution, South End Press, 1982, p.26; Eduardo Galleano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Monthly Review Press, 1997, p.111; Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Kristofer Ching & Rafael Lara Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, University of New Mexico Press, 2007, p.283; Krehm, 1999, pp.3-17.
6 John Gunther, Inside Latin America, Harper &
Bros, 1941, pp.126-7.
7 Martínez has sometimes been labelled a fascist, but this is not quite accurate. He certainly admired Hitler et al, but once it became clear that the US under Roosevelt would adopt an antifascist line, Martínez wasted no time in cosying up to Uncle Sam, expelling the German and Italian ambassadors and issuing a declaration of war against the Axis nations, resulting in valuable US loans. See Boland, 2001, p.27.
8 Gunther, 1941, p.126; the original source of this belief was American quack-optometrist WH Bates, author of 1920’s Perfect Sight Without Glasses.
9 Lindo-Fuentes, Ching & Martínez, 2007, p.283; Raul Ernesto Moreno Campos, Reframing Salvadoran Modernity, 2015 UCLA thesis, pp.161-2, online at http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/45n3k5n 0# page -172; This last source has much material relating to how membership of the local Theosophist ‘Teotl Lodge’ was more or less an obligatory condition for being accepted into El Salvador’s political class at the time. It appears Martínez took the esoteric teachings of this networking club more seriously than most members, seeing his dictatorship as a “cosmically ordained” means of maintaining holy order and protecting the land from Communism, thereby allowing his people to evolve into a higher state of being (see pp.158-189).
10 Martin Gardner, Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover Books, 1957, p.212; http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.21862/full; www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/curedcolour; http://theosophy.wiki/en/Seth_Pancoast
11 Krehm, 1999, p.9.
12 Krehm, 1999, pp.10-11; Boland, 2001, pp .27-8; http :// pearl sin the eternity. blog spot. co.uk/2008/10/war-in-el-salvador-1980-1992-wasone.html; http://www.banknotes.com/sv82.htm
13 Krehm, 1999, pp.12-17; http://nvdatabase. swarthmore.edu/content/el-salvadoransbring-down-dictator-1944; http://archive.is/ Cuta#selection-1081.0-1425.1