Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986): Revolution for the Unacquainted

Graden and Martin | Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986): Revolution for the Unacquainted Dale T. Graden University of Idaho James W. Martin Washington State University Oliver Stone's Salvador(1986): Revolution for the Unacquainted Maria (Elipdia Carrillo), Richard Boyle (James Woods), and Dr. Rock (James Belushi) experience repression. 18 I Film & History Oliver Stone as Cinematic Historian | Special In-Depth Section During the 1970s, Oliver Stone became acquainted with Richard Boyle, a photojournalist whose work had taken him to South East Asia, the Middle East, Ireland, and Latin America. Hearing about the personal experiences of this "renegade journalist" inspired Stone to produce a film about El Salvador. That both had seen and experienced the wars in South East Asia strengthened the bonds between the two men. In late 1984, Boyle provided Stone with unpublished writings that were to constitute the main body of Salvador. In the following year, Stone accompanied the author on a trip through Central America. The militarization and corruption Stone witnessed in El Salvador and Honduras reminded the filmmaker of Saigon in the mid-1960s. Stone's Vietnam experience influenced the production of Salvador. The impact of that war on his life and its legacy on U.S. policies in subsequent years deeply affected what he wanted to say about El Salvador in the early 1980s. Although in his youth an idealistic believer in the good intentions of the United States' fight against communism, his tour of duty in the Vietnam War (1967-68) led him to reexamine his convictions. "I thought about it for many years, read books, educated myself...and now I see the mistakes I made as a youth. For me the war had no moral integrity and that's why we lost." Fear of U.S. involvement in another war like Vietnam created a sense of urgency in his criticism of U.S. foreign policy. As the director became better acquainted with the history of El Salvador, the focus of the film began to change. "It was at that point that we really tried to tell more of the Salvador story than the Boyle story, and we tried to blend the two together." This increased awareness of Central American history inspired Stone to make Salvador the director's first strong political statement. The film was a critique of U.S. complicity in a war waged by El Salvador's security forces and reactionary right against the Salvadoran population. It carefully documented the extent to which the U.S. and its clients went to prevent the overthrow ofthe Salvadoran government by revolutionary forces. It mocked the U.S. government's justification for such policy that centered on the supposed threat of "communist subversion" ofthe western hemisphere. Stone supported this criticism with documentation. Salvador marked the director's break with the non-political work ofhis past and initiated a series offilms that raised difficult questions about motive and outcome ofU.S. involvement in the affairs of client states. In his decision to focus on events which occurred in 1980-81 in the film Salvador, Oliver Stone chose a major turning point in the recent history of the Americas. In El Salvador, five leftist groups joined together to form the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (known as the FMLN and named after a famous El Salvadoran revolutionary of the 1930s). The FMLN numbered some 5,000 soldiers. Its leadership declared imminent a "final offensive" against El Salvador's military-security state (which claimed itself to be a democratic government). Thousands of peasants , four priests, four North American churchwomen , the rector of the National University and the archbishop of El Salvador all died at the hands of the military during these months. The United States became directly involved in El Salvador's internal civil war at this time, an intervention that cost over six billion dollars during the decade of the 1980s. This critical juncture also witnessed the election of Ronald Reagan to his first term as president of the United States. As a politician who viewed the world in bi-polar terms, Reagan considered a decisive response to revolutionary upheaval in El Salvador as necessary for halting supposed communist expansion. Reagan was also determined to demonstrate U...