El Salvador

About the Book

“A pervasive military presence has been a constant in Salvadoran society since the 1930s. The Salvadoran people cope with it. As journalists we had to find our own learning curve. Mine began in 1988”. The 1980s’ civil war in El Salvador was viewed by the US establishment as a critical challenge to its’ hegemony in the region during the Cold War era. For the Salvadorans it was a resistant struggle for survival. The personally lived experiences of the author and the photo journalism delivers a riveting and extraordinarily authentic account. The narrative focusses on the November 1989 FMLN guerrilla offensive on the capital, San Salvador and traces the trajectory of the politics and social movements of El Salvador after the peace accords to the present day. The future holds less promise than the past. But the relevance of the historic energy of this fifty year old struggle is a strident lesson for understanding contemporary conflicts.

About the Author

Warwick Fry attended a parochial High School in Bathurst, a country town from which he escaped with a scholarship to the Australian National University at the age of seventeen, majoring in Philosophy and English Literature. In 1979 he got the travel bug and set out on a journey in Latin America that never ended. Returning to Australia he worked happily with the Bureau of Flora and Fauna, less happily in other Australian government bureaucracies. In his spare time he translated and published an anthology of ‘Poetry of the Nicaraguan Revolution’. Its sale provided the seed money for one of the first Australian aid projects to post-revolutionary Nicaragua. In 1984 he returned to Central America as an aid worker and drifted in to journalism. He published a number of stories and reports on the situation in El Salvador. Returning to Australia in the 1990s he won a postgraduate award in media studies. He returned to El Salvador in 2009 as an observer of the elections that year, and again in 2014, when he met his future wife. For most of the next five years he lived in El Salvador. Warwick now lives in an alternative community in Northern New South Wales Australia with his Salvadoran wife.